Amy in her own words: Through home videos, rare footage and even answerphone messages, this controversial film shows Winehouse as we’ve never seen her before

The voice is dark, raw honey, powerful from the first blurry home movie where a chubby, happy, young Amy Winehouse sings Happy Birthday to her friend.

Her songs then track freeform emotion through the bluesy teen years; when love goes sour in the on-off affair with Blake Fielder-Civil, the dark-angel voice is the same but harsher feeling beats through with closer, snappier rhymes: ‘I tread a troubled track, my odds are stacked, I go back to black . . .’

Asif Kapadia’s documentary Amy is sad, gripping, brilliantly executed. It also seems remarkably level-headed, considering the greatness of Amy’s talent and the public catastrophe of her decline into drink, drugs and disastrous love.

Like Diana’s, her death in 2011 was, for many, a scarring moment and legends grew, which the film creditably refuses to exploit. It merely draws from interviews, performances, intimate private phone footage, answering-machine messages, scrawls on paper as black and fierce as her brows.

Kapadia gives little ground to the parasitical fashion and celebrity industry, nor does he endorse either of the too-simple narratives: romantic fate, or furious blame.

It was not inevitable, nor was it any individual’s sole ‘fault’ that her frail, long-tormented body gave up at 27 from alcohol poisoning.

It just tells the story, through her voice and through those who knew her and loved her.

Nick Shymansky, her first manager, always concerned, wished her to slow down; her mother Janis admitted that she was always hard to handle; old friends Juliet and Lauren show unfakeable warmth and an anxious effort to help; from the very end of her life we hear the big, gentle, calm bodyguard who sat with her in her last efforts at normality, and Tony Bennett who sang with her and later said sadly that she would have been among the greats, but ‘life only teaches you how to live if you get long enough’.

There are those who do not come out well. Her father, Mitch, who ran out on the family when she was nine and told her not to go to rehab that first time (when she sang the famous ‘no, no no, I won’t go, go, go’).

Later, he gives the impression he has smugly exploited her, bringing a camera crew to her drug-free bolthole on St Lucia, ordering his cringing, damaged, desperate daughter to pose with tourists to make him look good.

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The film also seems remarkably level-headed, considering the greatness of Amy’s talent and the public catastrophe of her decline into drink, drugs and disastrous love. Above, Amy wearing a Disney T-shirt as a teenager

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There are those who do not come out well in the film, such as her father, Mitch (above, with Amy)

As for Blake Fielder-Civil, with his stupid hipster hat and his enabling of her drug habit, we even warm to him early, in sweet, credible shots of their courtship, but it is hard not to hate his whining disloyalties later.

The Press also emerges as pretty loathsome, though not as bad as comedians such as Frankie Boyle, jeering at her later appearance with the wretched stoned smile, darker and blurrier eyeliner and high, mad hair, saying it was ‘like a campaign poster for abandoned horses’.

No wonder the young Amy, still bouncingly healthy, is seen saying that she didn’t want fame: ‘All I’m good for is making tunes, so just leave me to do the music.’

It was too much, however: bulimia, weed, the missing father, the drink, the bad luck to love an addict, and the blessed, beautiful curse of her talent and fame which gave her lethal power to deny the dangers.

The most wrenching thing you come away with is not dislike of those who exploited her but pity and affection for those who tried to rein her in, reassure and soothe her.

It is edited with immense clarity, subtitles making blurred words clear: a model of intimate documentary for an age when lives are recorded in casual, jerky fragments as well as formal interviews.

At the other end of the scale, David Nicholas Wilkinson falls into a dozen documentary traps. His independent The First Film tells a story that would have fascinatingly filled 40 minutes, but drags and repeats itself to screaming point.

Wilkinson, an earnest, bearded Yorkshireman, puts himself in endless shots, walking moodily around starting sentences with ‘I’ to support the fact that the first breakthrough in moving pictures was made in Leeds by the French artist and inventor Louis LePrince.

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The First Film tells a story that would have fascinatingly filled 40 minutes, but drags and repeats itself to screaming point

Six months before Edison, he shot a few seconds of horse-trams crossing a bridge and shadowy Victorians walking backwards, then mysteriously disappeared off a train to Dijon.

Killed by Edison hitmen? Suicide? Bankrupt flight? No one knows, but it takes a long time to say so. Great pictures of old film gadgets, though.

First-rate stars but vile rape deserved boos in Guillaume Tell

Guillaume Tell (Royal Opera House)

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By TULLY POTTER

Goodness knows, the Swiss are a dull enough bunch at the best of times, but this farrago, sung in (mostly bad) French, manages to make even their great hero William Tell seem boring.

Rossini wrote a picturesque grand Parisian opera with ballets. At Covent Garden it starts like a staged episode of The Archers, with everyone in drab 1950s austerity costumes from some thrift shop. You half expect Linda Snell to come on, selling tickets for the village summer show.

When the production team, headed by Damiano Michieletto, are not being Shambolic, they fall back on trying to be Symbolic.

Goodness knows, the Swiss are a dull enough bunch at the best of times, but this farrago, sung in (mostly bad) French, manages to make even their great hero William Tell seem boring. Above, Gerald Finley as Tell

The opening night of the new production of William Tell at the Royal Opera House was booed because of the extreme nature of some of the scenes, including a gratuitous rape

There is a lot of putting-on and taking-off of coats and shirts and baring of manly torsos. At one point the Swiss rebels smear themselves with blood which they have thoughtfully brought with them.

Blow me down, we even have a Symbolic Archer, who wanders around doing Symbolic things with arrows. I began to be quite comforted by his regular appearances – at least he was dressed in the right period.

The two sets of ballet music are played, but the first one is taken up with embarrassingly amateur mime and the other is given over to a gratuitous rape scene by Nazi types which had much of the audience booing on the first night.

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It is a depressing thought that there are colleges all over Europe, encouraging young producers to perpetrate this kind of tripe

I quickly ceased to care about the characters but noticed that Antonio Pappano was conducting well and much of the singing was first rate.

Gerald Finley as Tell, Malin Bystrom as Mathilde and John Osborn as Arnold took part in Pappano’s 2010 recording.

Alexander Vinogradov and Enkelejda Shkosa make their marks and Nicolas Courjal would be a superb villain in a less Monty Pythonesque setting.

The principal cellist played flat at the start of the Overture but was better in Tell’s arioso; otherwise the orchestra acquitted itself well amid the wreckage, as did the chorus.

It is a depressing thought that there are colleges all over Europe, encouraging young producers to perpetrate this kind of tripe.