The Brink

Following her debut documentary about dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (Never Sorry), director Alison Klayman employs a fly-on-the-wall approach to her probing profile of alt-right figurehead and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon. Checking in with the fixer after his sacking from the White House in 2017, Klayman then shadows the ever-smirking but garrulous Bannon for a year, as he travels the world in order to promote his populist agenda with right-leaning European politicians (including Nigel Farage). It's cleverly directed by Klayman, who eschews the invasive Michael Moore/Nick Broomfield method, as she quietly records Bannon's meetings, machinations and musings - an often-infuriating experience as he spouts on about "economic nationalism" without question, regularly repeating the same hokey lines about "foreign money" and "being a rose between two thorns". Thankfully, when Bannon's amiable demeanour is shaken up by GMTV's Susanna Reid ("she's tough") and Guardian journalist Paul Lewis, as well as personal reversals from the Roy Moore affair and the 2018 American mid-term elections, you realise all is not lost. Illuminating it may be, but this astute documentary is also a valuable if unsettling wake-up call to what is happening to our politics - if one is still needed.