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Opening with the fall of the Low Countries and the Occupation of Paris, the film emphasises the pluck of the civilian population, as it prepared the defences for the aerial onslaught that Goering had promised would make Operation Sealion a formality. Initial attacks concentrated on airfields and munition factories and the RAF and Coastal Command barely managed to withstand the waves of Messerchmitts, Heinkels and Stukas. But the Few held out and, although London endured 76 consecutive nights of air raids from 7 September to 10 May, the rearguard allowed shadow factories to spring up across the country to sustain the supply of Hurricanes and Spitfires, as well as anti-aircraft guns, that kept the Luftwaffe at bay.

Booth shows the damage wrought on Coventry, Manchester and London landmarks from Oxford Street to Buckingham Palace. But it's the footage of ordinary people toiling in factories, building Anderson shelters, huddling in Underground stations and picking through the rubble in the hope of finding a pet cat or a treasured possession that makes this such a valuable piece of popular history. Clips from Churchill speeches reinforce the bulldog mood, along with shots of fire crews tackling blazes, operations units monitoring the skies and Home Guards training to resist with cutlasses and anything else that came to hand.

More than a million houses were destroyed in London alone and towns and cities not mentioned here took their share of incendiaries, too. Yet, somehow, the Blitz failed. The mistakes made by the Nazi commanders clearly aided the British cause. But the indomitable spirit of an embattled nation more than played its part and this is an eloquent and expertly constructed memorial to those who contributed to this country's finest hour.

Glamour was one of the great palliatives to the rubble and rationing of the postwar world and, in Riviera Cocktail, Heinz Bütler reveals how Irish photographer Edward Quinn became the toast of the Côte d'Azur in the 1950s and 60s for his ability to capture the world's biggest movie stars at their most relaxed and alluring. Notwithstanding the infuriating device of showing the accompanying jazz band discussing the images on a soundstage, this is an affectionate portrait of a raffish charmer, who had the shutterbug's happiest knack of frequently being in the right place at the right time.

Switching between extracts from an interview that Quinn did three years before his death with shots of his wife Gret rifling through his meticulously maintained archive, this is a gentle memoir that delights in the fact that Quinn was something of a mystery man, who let little slip about his either his youth in Dublin and Belfast or his careers as a musician and aerial navigator. Instead, the focus falls on his crash course in photography, his early success as a cheesecake snapper and the fact that he chose to base himself in Cannes, so that he could always be in situ whenever pin-ups like Brigitte Bardot, Jayne Mansfield, Sophia Loren and Diana Dors just happened to be around.

Quinn's shoot with Audrey Hepburn did much to raise the still-unknown Dutch hopeful's profile and his shots of Kim Novak caught her vulnerability, as well as her sensuality. He even managed to be the only photographer present when Grace Kelly first met Prince Rainier. But Quinn was just as perceptive when snapping Cary Grant, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Gary Cooper and Frank Sinatra, and his discretion enabled him to become a confidante of artists Pablo Picasso and Georg Baselitz, who became his favourite subjects after access to Tinseltown's finest became increasingly restricted by publicists and personal assistants.

Bütler offers few insights into Quinn's methods or his standing as a portraitist. He also allows Franco Ambrosetti and European Legacy far too much screen time and their awed recognition of the famous faces proves a major irritant. Their score isn't that great, either. But, as a memoir of a lost age of celebrity innocence, this is often fascinating. Moreover, it's a sincere tribute to a masterly amateur.

The contrast between the sophistication of Quinn's deft craftsmanship and the crudity of Italian television couldn't be more marked, as Erik Gandini explains in Videocracy. Harking back three decades to the game show that introduced a softcore element to small-screen entertainment, this sets out to be a treatise on the extent to which Silvio Berlusconi - the Prime Minister who owns the powerful Mediaset empire and has responsibility for the state broadcaster RAI - uses such dumbed down sensationalism as the modern-day equivalent of the bread and circuses beloved of his ancient Roman forebears to establish his own cult of personality. However, having established his thesis, Gandini suddenly changes tack and, by focusing on three wannabes desperate to become tele-celebrities, he begins to exploit the very crass tactics that he so despises in the country's venal programmers.

He is particularly cruel to Ricky Canevali, a lathe operator who lives with his mother and hopes that his unique blend of Ricky Martin music and Jean-Claude Van Damme karate moves will propel him to the top. The girls who parade themselves for talent scouts in shopping malls in pathetic bids to become a veline (or glamorous assistant to a game or chat show host) are depicted with similar disdain. Yet their desire to escape their humdrum lives is no less valid than that of paparazzo Fabrizio Corona, who takes compromising pictures of A listers and offers them the first chance to buy them for exorbitant sums, or super-agent Lele Mora, who boasts that he is so powerful that he can take any loser and transform them into a star.

The fact that Corona gets jailed for extortion and then uses his incarceration to increase his profile says much about the contemporary media scene. But Gandini ignores the loftier aspects of Italian culture, along with the complexities of a political system that enabled Berlusconi to be elected for a third term in 2008. He could also have made much more of the potential dangers of so much control over the hearts and minds of the populace being in the hands of one man. But Gandini, who is now primarily based in Sweden, seems more interested in his trio of absurd aspirants and their desperate delusions.

Another misfit who keeps the world at a dealable distance by viewing it through a camera lens is the subject of Richard Parry's documentary, Shooting Robert King. This is an arresting work that follows the Tennessean's odyssey from being a cocksure, but callow novice in the streets of Sarajevo in 1993 to becoming one of the most acclaimed war photographers of his generation. However, the structuring of the footage isn't always convincing and King proves much more elusive than Parry had initially bargained for.

The son of a Memphis record producer, King arrived in Bosnia fresh from art school and bent on winning the Pulitzer Prize before he was 30. However, he was quickly taught by war zone veterans never to wear combat trousers and white jackets on the frontline, while his sacking by a reputed US photo-agency for submitting fuzzy, underexposed snaps prompts him to buy some auto-focus cameras. King still couldn't name any of the major players in the conflict, as he demonstrated during an amusing car quiz with Parry and fellow photojournalist, Vaughan Smith. But, by the time he left, he had not only become battle-hardened, but he had also developed an eye for images that leapt off the page, while also encapsulating the nature of the story they were accompanying.

Consequently, by the time Parry encounters King again in Chechnya, he has learned when to be reckless in pursuit of the telling shot. But he remains an irrepressible maverick, whose hedonistic off-duty habits owe more to Hunter S. Thompson than Robert Capa. Yet, by opting to remain in Grozny after the bulk of the press corps has left, King becomes principal Western chronicler of an increasingly dirty war. Moreover, he also met his future wife and Parry finds King a much changed husband and father by the time he becomes an embedded correspondent with US forces during Operation Desert Storm.

A mid-section montage of King's pictures from Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Rwanda, Albania, Afghanistan and Iraq testifies to his growing prowess as a war photographer. But the interspersed 2007 footage of him struggling to erect a camouflaged hide and inexpertly hunting deer in the Tennessee backwoods feels forced, as it serves only to provide a clumsy symbol of King as a stalker of death and destruction, while padding out the archive material.

Moreover, Parry fails to present any in-depth insights into King's personality or motivations. While he's clearly wiser for his experiences, King remains a bullet-headed shutterbug, driven as much by adrenaline and his demons as by any obvious political, humanitarian or artistic passion. Consequently, while this profile has many harrowing moments - such as King loading his cameras while waiting to run the gamut of some shattered suburb snipers and his pausing in the middle of downtown crossfire to photograph a man who has just had the lower half of his left leg blown off - it occasionally feels slightly superficial and smug. But, given what King, Parry and Smith have been through, a little macho backslapping is eminently pardonable.

Another tough world is exposed in Nicolás Entel's My Father, Pablo Escobar, which examines how much Juan Pablo Escobar has changed in the 16 years since he vowed vengeance on the killers of his Colombian drug lord father. Now determined to reach out to those who fell victim to the pitiless Escobar cocaine cartel, the newly renamed Sebastián Marroquín seems keen to atone. But he also has to come to terms with his own conflicted image of a man who is still regarded as a Robin Hood-style hero by many in the drug capital of Medellín.

Marroquín was 16 years old when his father lingered long enough on the phone for the police to trace his call and shoot him down in a hail of bullets in December 1993. Subsequently, he spent a peripatetic year with his mother, Victoria Henao Vallejo (now Maria Isabel Santos Caballero), constantly fearing for his life while living briefly in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, South Africa and Mozambique, before he finally settled in Buenos Aires. But the family problems didn't end there. Maria Isabel attempted to start up her own real estate business and was held for 18 months on money laundering charges when she revealed her connection to Escobar in reporting an attempted extortion by her accountant. Marroquín also spent 45 days behind bars, while his sister's schooldays were blighted by parents demanding that she was expelled.

However, not a successful architect in Argentina, Marroquín decided to seek closure by meeting with the sons of justice minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla and presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán, who were both murdered by Escobar's gang. He insists to Rodrigo Lara, Jr. that nobody can be blamed for their parents and Carlos Fernando Galán (the youngest of three brothers who have followed their father into politics) not only seems ready to accept his contrition, but also his shared status as a victim.

Yet while these encounters are highly charged affairs, the stiff civility makes feel more staged than useful, especially as the curious surveillance style that Entel employs to eavesdrop upon conversations quickly becomes irksome. Moreover, they are nowhere near as revealing as Marroquín's solo soul-searching or either the rapid recap of Escobar's rise and fall or the previously unseen images of the most powerful and violent drug baron of his day (his organisation controlled 80% of the world's cocaine trade) as an ordinary family man at the Hacienda Napoles and at Disney World.

A very different father-son relationship is charted in Kurt Kuenne's Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. This could be accused of trying a little too hard to make an emotional impact. But Kuenne's motives are never anything less than pure and, if he does manipulate audience responses in a shamelessly melodramatic manner that occasionally comes close to losing him their sympathy, he can just about be excused, as he somehow manages to keep a lid on the pain and fury that must have afflicted everybody involved in the making of this shattering account of how a decent man's error of judgement ruined so many lives.

Twenty-eight year-old doctor, Andrew Bagby, was popular with everyone he met, from his schooldays through to his spell at the hospital in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. However, fellow medic Shirley Turner (who was 12 years his senior) couldn't forgive him for breaking up with her and she drove 1600 miles from Council Bluffs, Iowa to gun him down in cold blood. After the authorities allowed her to slip across the border to St John's, Newfoundland, Turner announced she was pregnant with Bagby's child and his parents, Kate and David, quit their jobs in order to relocate to Canada to fight for both Turner's extradition to face justice and for custody of their grandson.

Kuenne started out making the film to tell Zachary something about the father he would never know. But events kept changing his tack and this winds up being a testament to the courage of David and Kate in the face of demented wickedness, bureaucratic incompetence and legal intransigence. The film works best if the full facts aren't known. But the viewer's greatest challenge is to resist irritation at Kuenne's TV-movie approach to a story that that still would have distressed without the cine-histrionics, most notably during a breathless climactic montage in which he indicts those directly responsible for Zachary's fate.

Making the most of your opportunities is the theme of Andrew Lang's Sons of Cuba, in which he profiles Yosvani Bonachea Morgan and three of the hopefuls he coaches at the Havana Boxing Academy. Modest, focused and discreetly made, this is a gem of a picture, as it melds the glorious unpredictability of sport with the element of socio-political uncertainty that followed the announcement that Fidel Castro would be handing over the reins to his younger brother, Raúl. Where else would tweenagers discuss the fate of their beloved leader over lunch with such touching sincerity?

However, the vacuum at the centre of power is only a sideshow as Morgan's protégés compete for places in the team for the national Under 12s championships in Pinar del Rey. Nicknamed `The Old Man', Cristian Martínez Noriega is easily the most talented fighter at the school and he is desperate to avenge his undeserved defeat the previous year, when Havana lost the grand prize to their bitterest rivals, Matanzes. Expectations are also high, however, as Cristian's estranged father is Olympic gold medallist Luis Felipe Martínez (not that you'd know it from his threadbare shack) and the thrill he feels at witnessing his son's achievement, after he manages to hitch a lift across the island for his bout, is genuinely poignant.

As is Santos Urgelliso Diaz's tearful realisation that his inability to stick to a strict diet might cost him his place in the squad. Known as `The Singer', he is doted on by his grandmother because his father Santos is so wrapped up with new wife Madelyn. However, her tendency to mollycoddle him takes away the edge that never leaves Junior Menédez Lemar (aka `The Dalmatian' because of two white spots on his scalp), as he keeps needing to prove himself after converting from ballet training to devote himself to pugilism and make his hard-working mother Yvón proud.

Complete with telling peaks into Morgan's home life (his neglected wife wishes that he was half the father to his own kids that he is to his boxers), this is a fascinating insight into the significance that Cuba attaches to sporting success and the transient rewards it permits its heroes. However, it also says much about parents the world over, who invest so heavily in the talents of their children in the hope that they can reap any benefits that might accrue.

Life is even harsher for the youths profiled in Mai Iskander's Garbage Dreams.

Numbering some 60,000, the Zaballeen have long been responsible for rubbish collection in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. Yet, despite recycling 80% of all waste, this Coptic Christian underclass is now under threat from the Spanish and Italian companies who have muscled on to their patch and persuaded the city council that they can collect garbage more cost-effectively - if less ecologically. Chronicling the efforts of three youths to fight back, Iskander's heartfelt documentary exposes the greed of the capitalist interlopers and the short-termism of the civic authorities, while also revealing the operational difficulties and social prejudice that the Zaballeen will have to conquer if they are to preserve an age-old way of life.

Adham is 17 years old and dreams of opening a can-cutting factory that uses state-of-the-art technology rather than a pair of giant scissors. However, his immediate concern lies in keeping his family together, as his father was jailed for building a marriage apartment on the roof of their ramshackle property without planning permission and now his teenage sisters are rebelling against his authority. Nabil, Adham's neighbour in the bustling enclave of Mokattam, is a year older and wishes to marry his fiancée as soon as possible. But, with trash levels dropping, he has been forced to take a second job teaching art at the Recycling School that was established by Laila, an activist-cum-community nurse who arranges for the boys to travel to Wales to study modern collection and recycling methods.

The trip proves a revelation. But the elders are sceptical about the efficacy of source separation and not all the Zaballeen's customers are willing to sort their rubbish. Worse still, 15 year-old Osama, who is constantly teased by Nabil and Adham for his failure to hang on to a job, has thrown in his lot with a European contractor and is actually making a fist of it.

Although packed with disturbing images of young children living, playing and working in squalor, this is an entirely sympathetic portrait of the Zaballeen that lauds their eco credentials and challenges both the wisdom of the Cairo council in opting for a landfill strategy and the complacency of Western societies that acquiesce in 20-30% recycling rates. Laced with bleak humour and moments of touching human interest, this is a damning indictment of the socio-commercial self-interest that too often hinders the green agenda.

The eco documentary is in dire need of finding new ways to boost its message, as bombarding audiences with data and hectoring them into changing their ways or face the consequences is beginning to feel like a very hackneyed tactic. Leslie Iwerks proves less bombastic than most in Dirty Oil. But even this cogent dissertation on the ruination of Canada's boreal forests in order to satisfy the USA's need for a reliable supply of affordable petroleum loses its focus and winds up becoming an advertorial for recycling, hybrid motoring and wind power.

Packed with dramatic helicopter images to show how an area the size of Florida has been decimated by folly and greed, this is not a picture to pull its punches. Despite the odd disputable claim and an occasional tendency to sentimentalise, it's is a trenchant exposé of the damage being done to the landscape (and the people who occupy it) by the strip-mining of the Alberta tar sands, which is little more than an act of corporate vandalism that has turned tracts of breathtaking beauty into a post-apocalyptic wilderness.

However, as narrator Neve Campbell and a number of experts reveal, it's the processing techniques that are the most environmentally harmful, as they release more greenhouse gases than conventional extraction and leak a toxic cocktail of chemicals into Lake Athabasca and surrounding settlements like Fort McMurray, Fort McKay and Fort Chipewyan, whose traditional way of life is fast being eroded. Yet, as Dr John O'Connor and ecologist Kevin Timoney demonstrate, the bitumen business is also beginning to have serious health implications and it's difficult not to share the triumphalism of activists like Andrew Nikiforuk and Lester Brown when the citizens of Whiting, Indiana block BP's application to increase its waste deposits into Lake Michigan.

The doom-laden pronouncements and statistics are grimly overwhelming. But Iwerks - who is the Oscar-nominated granddaughter of pioneering Disney animator, Ub Iwerks - also wisely lets the views of scarring devastation speak for themselves. Sadly, however, such is the might of the multinationals attempting to meet the world's craving for energy, that it's hard to see how even a film of this passion and power can stop the wanton pillage.