Sea of love: ’Time’ and ’My Octopus Teacher’

PG Wodehouse famously said there were two ways to write a novel, as “a sort of musical comedy without music” or “going deep down into life and not caring a damn”. Of the five films nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars, Garrett Bradley’s Time goes deep into life and James Reed and Pippa Ehrlich’s My Octopus Teacher shows us wonders. “Time is what you make of it,” Sibil’s son Freedom says. My Octopus Teacher is a visually breathtaking nature documentary with a personal hook, a film that audiences found organically and loved when it premiered on Netflix in 2020. Yet it’s also true that My Octopus Teacher provides the kind of cinematic rush that Time cannot.