Taking refuge from the coronavirus pandemic, wildlife filmmaker Martin Dohrn set out to record all the bees he could find in his tiny urban garden in Bristol, England, filming them with one-of-a kind lenses he forged on his kitchen table. Eventually, he gets so close to the bees, he can identify individuals just by looking at them.

Through exclusive interviews with Sacks’s friends, colleagues and peers (including Jonathan Miller), as well as archive footage, the film is an eye-opening celebration of the life and work of this extraordinary scientist and man.

The genius of neurologist Oliver Sacks was founded on his huge empathy for his patients. Yet, for years, he struggled to come to terms with himself.
 

There are no remarkable innovations in this documentary on a much-missed literary and scientific original. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist who gained wider fame with books such as Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, talks fluently and hilariously some months before his death in 2015.

The late British neurologist and writer gets a positively glowing bio-documentary, chronicling his troubled childhood, his struggles with his homosexuality and drug addiction, and his pioneering research into autism and neurodiversity. That’s a lot to tackle, and the film just skims the surface of its subject, but it’s brightened by Sacks’s own irresistible presence.

This documentary about the famed neurologist and author is one of the loveliest and most thought-provoking films of 2021.

Yet one of the indelible lessons of Ric Burns’s remarkable new documentary, shot in the final months of Sacks’s life, was just how tempestuous his inner life had been. He let slip some of his secrets in his autobiography, On the Move, which was published soon after his death, but Burns’s film, full of humour and pathos, provides further insights.