Billie (15)
Verdict: Hits all the right notes
The Three Kings (PG)
Verdict: A real crowd-pleaser
Rating: 
Lennox: The Untold Story (15)
Verdict: Not a knockout
Rating: 
Of a trio of new documentaries, the pick is Billie, a truly riveting film about the great blues artist Billie Holiday, whose teenage ambition, growing up in Baltimore and then Harlem, with jazz all around, was to sing just like Louis Armstrong played.
Holiday’s tragic story has been picked over on screen many times before. But British film-maker James Erskine has found an enlightening fresh perspective on the life of an entertainer whose death in 1959, at the age of 44, was a shock…except to just about everyone who knew her.
When documentarists talk about finding ‘treasure troves’ of new material, someone is usually blowing the hyperbole trumpet. But this time it’s a justifiable claim.
The film starts with a reference to a woman’s body being discovered in 1978. This was Linda Lipnack Kuehl, a journalist who had made an obsessive project of writing Holiday’s definitive biography, to which end she recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with just about everyone who was still alive in the Seventies and had been in the singer’s orbit.
It is those tapes, heard here for the first time, that Erskine uses as the backbone of his fascinating film, playing them over irresistible clips of Holiday performing.
Of a trio of new documentaries, the pick is Billie (pictured), a truly riveting film about the great blues artist Billie Holiday, whose teenage ambition, growing up in Baltimore and then Harlem, with jazz all around, was to sing just like Louis Armstrong played
We also hear audio archive of Holiday herself, suggesting that so many jazz singers die young because they try to live 100 days in one. She certainly lived fast and loose; for a while, her drug dependency was even serviced by her boxer dog, which would trot down the street to her New York hotel with an ounce of powder discreetly attached to its collar by her supplier.
There won’t be that many revelations for anyone who already knows Holiday’s story well — how she was raped as a child, worked as a prostitute, was abused and exploited by men all her life. But it’s still extraordinary to hear anecdotes directly from the likes of band leader Count Basie.
We also hear Basie flirting with his much younger interviewer, feeding the implication that he and Kuehl had a sexual relationship. Indeed, Erskine weaves a compelling sub-plot from Kuehl’s own life and mysterious death. She was thought to have committed suicide by jumping from a high window but it seems at least as likely that she was pushed. It is certainly clear that her preoccupation with Holiday was not good for her health.
Holiday’s tragic story has been picked over on screen many times before. Pictured: Billie Holiday around 1970
From the queen of the blues to the kings of the reds, legendary Manchester United and Liverpool managers Matt Busby and Bill Shankly are the subjects of The Three Kings, along with the mighty Celtic boss Jock Stein.
Connecting this hat-trick of remarkable football men, all born within 30 miles of each other in the coalfields south of Glasgow, and all miners by the age of 16, is not an original idea. The late sportswriter Hugh McIlvanney got there first, years ago, with a top-notch TV documentary.
But Jonny Owen’s film does not suffer from the lack of McIlvanney’s gruff authorial voice.
With the help of carefully chosen (and happily, unseen) talking heads, plus loads of fantastic, rarely viewed archive material, he shows how the three managers were deeply influenced by their working-class Scottish backgrounds and how they shaped their clubs in their own images.
Moreover, the title is disingenuous, though I can see why the film-makers didn’t choose the more accurate Lennox: The Already Widely Told Story. Pictured: Lennox Lewis
Ironies abound. Stein, lionised by Celtic’s Catholic fans, was a Protestant. Busby was a player for United’s great rivals, Manchester City and Liverpool. And he it was who advised Liverpool to hire his old Scotland teammate Shankly, hardly expecting the pugnacious little so-and-so, who deliberately modelled himself on James Cagney, to build a dynasty that would rival his own.
You don’t need to be a supporter of any of these clubs — and I’m very much not — to value this fine, warm-hearted film, nor to be moved by the poignancy of hearing one of the original Busby Babes, Bobby Charlton, now felled by dementia, remembering his beloved mentor.
It’s not always a good idea for a documentary to be enraptured by its subject. The Three Kings gets away with it, but Lennox: The Untold Story, about the former world heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis, does not. Lewis has always seemed like a decent fellow and was by any measure a terrific fighter, but this is still an exercise in hagiography, not helped by a narration from the rapper Dr Dre that verges on the florid…
‘How did he make it here, to the doorstep of history?’
Moreover, the title is disingenuous, though I can see why the film-makers didn’t choose the more accurate Lennox: The Already Widely Told Story.
Billie is in selected UK cinemas from today, and available on Amazon Prime Video from Monday.
The Three Kings and Lennox: The Untold Story are on all major digital platforms from Monday.
Merry shake-up of the ghosts of Christmas past
Jingle Jangle (PG, Netflix)
Verdict: Enchanting
Rating:
The Life Ahead (15, Netflix)
Verdict: Tender and touching
Rating:
Here’s a pair of Netflix films really worth seeing — though perhaps not yet, in the case of Jingle Jangle, if like me you disapprove of Christmas movies coming out before November is even halfway done.
It’s a real song-and-dance charmer, though, and with a mostly black cast against the backdrop of Dickensian England, neatly topical. Folk can rail all they like about historical truths, but I can see why it must rankle with black audiences that Christmas on screen is overwhelmingly white. Jingle Jangle is a well-timed subversion of that tradition.
Conceived as a stage musical by writer-director David E. Talbert, it has distinct echoes of The Greatest Showman and even classics such as Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Through the familiar device of a modern-day grandparent (Phylicia Rashad) telling her grandchildren a story, it plunges back into Victorian times where the great toymaker Jeronicus Jangle is robbed of all his inventions by his own apprentice.
Jingle Jangle (pictured) is a real song-and-dance charmer, though, and with a mostly black cast against the backdrop of Dickensian England, neatly topical
Thirty years later, Jangle (a really lovely performance by Forest Whitaker) is a sweet, sad old man in hock to his stern but kindly banker (a bewhiskered Hugh Bonneville). He needs a world-shattering new invention to pay off his debts and outsmart his dishonest former protege (Keegan-Michael Key), which he may or may not achieve — no spoilers here! — with the help of Journey (Madalen Mills), the lively granddaughter he has never met.
The Life Ahead, a touching Italian-language film, tells a very different story of an inter-generational alliance, in this case between Madame Rosa, a Holocaust survivor and former prostitute superbly played by 86-year-old Sophia Loren, and Momo, a feisty 12-year-old orphan from Senegal (Ibrahima Gueye, also wonderful), who scrapes a living peddling drugs on the streets of Bari.
Directed and co-written by Loren’s son, Eduardo Ponti, and loosely adapted from a 1975 novel by Romain Gary, it’s a love story, in a way, all but guaran- teed to make your heart melt.