mickjongold

To make a biographical study of your own mother is a challenge to any documentary maker; it is even more formidable when your mother is a famous artist. Yet Nick Willing's portrait of Paula Rego succeeds beautifully as this film recounts the unlikely story of Rego's career. From her bourgeois background in Salazar's Portugal, she arrives at the Slade School of Art in the randy 1950s, where her future husband Victor Willing greets her at a party with the command, "Take down your knickers." A tumultuous marriage to Willing and three children never impede Rego's exploration of her own imagery, memories and fantasies. A life split between Portugal and London culminates in critical acclaim for Rego's paintings, patronage from Charles Saatchi and stellar price tags attached to her work by the Marlborough Gallery. Rego's compelling imagery and her unflinching honesty make the film a visual and psychological treasure trove.

Intoxicating meditation on mortality by legendary axe man Wilko Johnson. Served a death sentence by pancreatic cancer, Johnson vows to live in the moment. And Temple's overflowing visual cocktail serves up Bunuel, Tarkovsky, Cocteau and Michael Powell as fellow travellers on this death trip, with literary contributions from Shakespeare and Thomas Traherne ("And all the world was mine and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it"), while the terminally articulate Wilko happily quotes Blake and Milton straight to camera. It's a moving account of a man looking at death without an ounce of self-pity or false piety, while the verbal and visual richness provide a bouncy metaphysical trampoline of ideas. Despite the cinematic leitmotiv, from Bergman's The Seventh Seal, of Death playing chess with Wilko on the shore of Canvey Island, it's Johnson's rock'n'roll stoicism, and his love of life that live on in the viewer's mind, and make you feel you've had a glimpse of both death and resurrection, pulsating with R&B urgency.

This marvellously subtle profile of photographer Jane Bown conveys how she combined a self-effacing presence (the opposite of what you expect a Fleet Street photographer to be) with what Bown describes as "a sharp pair of elbows". The film allows you to enjoy Bown's greatest images in silence while situating her in her social context: a now-vanished world of print journalism, where the editors and owners were from the officer class, and the journalists and photographers were often regarded as NCOs or lower ranks. There is also a sub-text about a talented woman, never quite sure who her parents were and passed around "like a parcel", who adopted The Observer as her family. And the film conveys poignantly how encroaching Alzheimer's can render childhood memories more vivid than this weeks's events. Bown looks back on sixty years of photo-journalism and celebrities - from The Beatles to Sam Beckett to the Queen - still looking for the light.