The Creeping Garden

 How about... a ninety minute documentary about slime moulds?
 Why not? They're fascinating beings, situated somewhere adjacent to fungi, but different enough to make scientists a little uncomfortable around them. Until relatively recently they were classified as half fungus, half animal.

 The directors (Tim Grabham and Jasper Sharp) chose to style it after retro sci-fi films, and tapped Jim o'Rourke from Sonic Youth to provide an unobtrusive electronic score; The whole thing is very well put together. And thanks to tons of time-lapse footage of growing, hypnotically pulsing slime moulds, it's got no lack of eye candy.

 It's all spliced together from interviews with people who study slime moulds in one capacity or another. An amateur who likes to wander around the woods looking for them waxes philosophical, various scientists geek out on their obscure subject of study, and a historian provides some excellent digressions on Victorian entertainment before a lively presentation on a British documentarian who was doing time-lapse photography on moulds back in the early twentieth century.

 Most of the interviewees are candid, engaging and interesting. The movie does lose its way a little when it focuses on artists using the movement of slime moulds; a live-action 'game' where people get tied together and asked to act following the rules the smaller organisms follow is kind of amusing, as are the experiments of people making them run simulate road networks and whatnot. But others - people building robots that take their input queues from slime mould colonies, or a pianist that likes to jam to background music generated by the mycetozoa have a distinct whiff of bullshit.
 The movie itself has no editorial voice and is content to follow up on anything to do with its subject, and does not judge at all; I'd really have liked more detail on, for example, how these people get any sort of dynamic response from something that moves a couple centimeters an hour.

 Another problem with the documentary is that it would have been nice to have a primer on these weird organisms - we get a lot of punctual information about them, but the broad strokes (such as that they have very distinct phases of development) are left for viewers to look up on Wikipedia afterwards.

 But the talking head approach really pays off when, for example, a specialised scientist admits that the subjects of his chosen field of study don't seem to have much of an ecological role ("They could pretty much disappear completely, and very little would change..." or when an archivist at a repository for fungus samples is kind of thrilled when someone comes looking for the slime mould section ("We never come back here").

 It's an interesting, entertaining look at a pretty obscure subject. Shame about the lack of depth.