The presence of the camera is often explicitly acknowledged by the characters, to give it an authentic "documentary" feel.
El Mechri's skilled direction — which lends humor to the shifting time frames and different points of view — has a slick documentary feel to it, and the biographical approach to the star (touching on Van Damme's past flops, his custody battle, drug use, womanizing, etc).
Shooting without permits, using no real script (dialogue was post-dubbed), and liberated by the same new lightweight cameras that powered the 60s documentary boom, Godard achieved an off-the-cuff, free-form documentary feel that felt totally new and invigorating in 1960.
The documentary feel no doubt leaves some viewers with the impression that everything on the show is real and that most repossessions devolve into mayhem.
Fortunately, Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori, the directors of this frankly admiring documentary, felt the same way.
The high-class nature documentary feels a bit less special when you're accustomed to seeing football games and episodes of "Supernatural" that look just as sharp.
Cole Pruitt, the co-founder of the American Collegiate Go Association and a co-director (with Lockhart's brother) of a forthcoming Go documentary, felt similarly.
No one in this complex and haunting documentary feels fully explained, least of all the younger Mr. Holiff, who narrates and appears on screen sifting through clues of his past.
For a while the documentary feels flat and somewhat chaotic, as the camera moves uncertainly from a teacher facing fidgety ninth graders in a "cultural awareness" class to an earnest kindergarten teacher doing stretching exercises with his charges.
Available from Thursday Hillsborough This gruelling, brilliant documentary feels like the definitive TV take on the 1989 tragedy that turned into a source of national shame, thanks to 27 years of political inaction, police cover- ups and media lies.
