Streaming: High & Low: John Galliano and the best fashion films | Documentary films

For for those bleating about the inequities of so-called cancel culture, the career of British fashion designer John Galliano is a useful counterpoint. Fired in 2011 from his post as creative director of Christian Dior after an appalling incident of anti-Semitic abuse on his part, he spent two years in the wilderness before being hired by Oscar de la Renta and then by Maison Margiela, where he has been working for a decade. Stars always wear her dresses on red carpets. Life goes on. Documentary by Kevin Macdonald Top and bottom: John Galliano (broadcast on Mubi from April 26) chronicles the rise, fall and rise of Galliano with a more distanced critical eye than one might expect from a film co-produced by Vogue publisher Cond Nast. There is appreciation due to his distinctive design sensibility, but scrutiny of his personal flaws enabled by an undisciplined and permissive industry.

With its shady side and capacity for bad behavior, the rag trade has always made a great movie subject: the clothes provide the visual dazzle while the volatile trade of it all provides the drama. The Macdonalds film is the latest in a recent series of good fashion documentaries: Ian Bonhte and Peter Ettedguis delightful McQueen tells the decidedly more tragic story of Alexander McQueen, the industry's ill-fated enfant terrible, with a formal flamboyance well suited to his extravagant aesthetic and a humane consideration of his demons. Frédéric Tchengs Dior and me isn't as laden with pathos in its dramatic overview of designer Raf Simons' first season for the venerable French fashion house, but is compelling in its details of the creative process. The same filmmaker also directed Halstonan astute but compulsive portrait of the disco-era American designer, who went from ubiquitous trendsetter to sellout by the time of his AIDS-related death in 1990.

The French have a curious habit of making biopics of their most famous fashion icons in near-simultaneous pairs: in 2009 we had two Coco Chanel dramas, with the businessman directed by Audrey Tautou. Coco before Chanel focused more on the work of the subject than on fanciful and sumptuously romantic imagination Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky, starring a smoldering Mads Mikkelsen as Chanel's equally famous alleged lover. Five years later, it happened again. With a César-winning lead performance by Pierre Niney, Yves Saint Laurent gave a competent overview of the careers of queer innovators and their key relationships, but a few months later it was Bertrand Bonello who was brighter, more in-depth. Saint Laurent which captured her wild sensual energy. So it's strange that it's not available to stream in the UK, although it's worth buying a DVD. In all four films, there is a respect for the clothes themselves that one would expect from French filmmakers. Certainly, Ridley Scott didn't seem to care much about the couture aspect of his rather grizzled biopic. Gucci House; it’s the murderous melodrama behind the label that the film revels in.

It's a difficult industry to satirize. A lasting pleasure for the public, The devil wears Prada does not exaggerate the cruelties of the fashion magazine world, but astutely denounces its noble heroine on her contempt above all for the industry as a whole, at least before she sentimentally tries to have it both ways. Despite a stunning all-star cast, Robert Altman is frantically busy but surprisingly leaden. Prt--To carry couldn't beat the company at its own wacky game, but the removal of Ben Stiller's adorably awkward male model Zoolander I found the right balance between willful stupidity and recognizable truth. In contrast, the brightly colored musical comedy composed by Gershwin Funny head offers pure, delicious wish-fulfillment fantasy in its portrait of high-fashion modeling, beginning with Audrey Hepburn's scandalous initial positioning as a bookish scoundrel.

Nicolas Winding Refns underrated The neon demon cleverly took the extremes of modeling and its physical demands as the premise for some truly grotesque body horror. A very different horror film, Olivier Assayass Personal buyer used the cool, aloof nature of the celebrity styling industry as the perfect backdrop for a chillingly chic ghost story, clothes allowing Kristen Stewart's haunted heroine an occasional out-of-body escape. Meanwhile, Disney's prequel Cruel gave the evil skin poacher a relevant backstory by making her an expert in vampy fashion: it's not dark enough, but the dresses are fabulous.

For pure divadom, she can hardly outdo Daniel Day-Lewiss, a hilarious and sought-after mid-century London fashion designer, in Paul Thomas Anderson's offbeat romantic drama. Ghost wire, one of the great films about the muse-artist battle. Diana Ross's private vehicle from 1975 Mahoganymeanwhile, proves just how difficult it is to make a fashion designer a purely likeable protagonist: Ross's eponymous heroine struts, prances, and cries her way to the top, but we don't have to eyes only for her incredible caftans.

All titles are widely available for rental or purchase unless otherwise noted.

Also new in streaming and DVD this week

Last summer
(BFI reader)
Strangely bypassing cinemas and being released exclusively on BFI Player, the first film in a decade from veteran French provocateur Catherine Breillat was one of the truly wicked pleasures of last year's Cannes festival. Remake and improve the 2019 Danish film queen of hearts, it stars a superb La Drucker as a well-off middle-aged lawyer jeopardizing her family and social status for a reckless affair with her teenage stepson. What seems sinister tabloid comes across as a tangy, ragged and very funny examination of female sexuality and the social norms that bind it.

The Three Musketeers: Milady
(Apple TV+)
This French revival of the old Dumas saga continues to be in its second part an absolutely overflowing adventure in old-fashioned swashbuckler mode, untainted by sly postmodern irony. Sumptuously mounted and perfectly cast, it almost makes you hope for a continued franchise.

Akira Kurosawa's dreams
(Criteria collection)
A typically brilliant Blu-ray release from Criterion for this 1990 work by Kurosawa, an eccentric but sometimes seductive patchwork of eight vignettes drawn from his then-aged subconscious, including an encounter with Vincent van Gogh, played out, in a sort of flourish of a cinematic dream, by Martin Scorsese.