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.

Take your pick of extraordinary moments in this excellent documentary about the neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. In 2015, aged 82, knowing he had months to live, Sacks sat down at home in New York and talked to the camera with great honesty.

It’s well worth tracking down one of the September 29 special cinema screenings of Ric Burns' lovingly made documentary portrait of the writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks, or seeking it out online.