Having a bit of a shitty day? Then have I got the film for you – documentary I AM BIG BIRD: THE CAROLL SPINNEY STORY, which is as light, happy and lovable as its subject. The work of Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker, it is a beautifully made documentary about the man who has been making Sesame Street’s Big Bird walk, talk, sing and be generally goddamn adorable for some 45 years. There is a reason Big Bird is so universally liked and has been for many a year, and that is the clearly wonderful human being beneath the suit.

Tonight’s documentary SALINGER gives us all an unprecedented look inside the private world of J.D. Salinger, the reclusive author of the modern literary legend that is ‘The Catcher in the Rye’. To say the book has made a major impact on the lives of many of its readers would be a vast understatement, and Salinger himself has been often held up as a reluctant god.

For the last 40 years, internationally renowned photographer Sebastião Salgado has been travelling in the footsteps of what has been called “an ever-changing humanity”. He has witnessed some of the most dramatic, major events of our recent history such as mass starvation and exodus, and his lens was there to chronicle what unfolded, every step of the way. To call his work from that time arresting would be an understatement, its beauty is brutal.

When tonight’s documentary, THE SALT OF THE EARTH kicks off he is instead focusing on the good in the world, embarking on the discovery of pristine territories and wild fauna and flora as part of a huge photographic project which is a tribute to the planet's beauty and resilience. It is in sharp relief to the despair of his earlier images and is a great place to start.

When I was eight years old my parents and I were living in Yugoslavia, and one of my mum’s goals in life at the time was to teach a young Helene about “the real world”. This included all manner of trips to other European countries to visit places like the catacombs and famous sewers of Paris, as well as Dachau concentration camp. Dachau was the first of the Nazi concentration camps opened in Germany and was intended to hold political prisoners, and I vividly remember that our trip there was via a bus that left from a busy Munich bus station with no number or destination displayed on its front. The camp is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km northwest of Munich, and it was interesting to me even then that the local people were fully willing to acknowledge its existence to visiting tourists, but literally dared not speak its name. Opened in 1933 by Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labour and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, ordinary German and Austrian criminals, as well as foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded further down the track. I was hugely affected by the trip as a kid, especially as the day was grey and we were amongst just a handful of people there. The gravity of its history weighed heavily on my mind even at eight years old – it was my first knowledge of The Holocaust, and a very vivid one at that.

The world famous National Gallery in London is one of the great museums of the world, with an incredible 2400 paintings from the 13th to the 19th century housed within its ‘must visit’ walls. Showing tonight on Rialto Channel is NATIONAL GALLERY the film, a fly-on-the-wall documentary that takes the lucky viewer behind the scenes of a true London institution, a destination that is amongst the top five places to visit for tourists visiting the city and those that live there. The film has been called more than just a documentary but a “portrait of a place”, its way of working and relations with the world, its staff and public, and, of course, its exceptional collection of paintings.

“The doctor is in, but he’s neither motivated, competent nor altogether sober…” says The Hollywood Reporter of this clever little flick, which is definitely no visit to Shortland Street on a Monday evening in May.

HIPPOCRATES: THE DIARY OF A FRENCH DOCTOR is a rather darkly comic, at times sad and most definitely socially potent portrait of a Paris hospital, as seen through the eyes of a young intern making his very first rounds. But what’s fascinating about its treatment is the way director Thomas Lilti has Benjamin deliver the lines directly to the camera, almost docu-fiction style. It’s as if Benjamin is talking directly to us, the audience, trying to convince us that he has what it takes to make it in this high stakes profession, saving lives all along the way.

If you’re into online personal security and the likes (or in fact, buying illegal weaponry), you may have heard terms bandied about like “Deep Web” and “Dark Web”. The internet is like an iceberg with just 10 per cent floating above water. This is the 'surface web' like Google and Facebook, whilst the other 90 per cent is the deep web and it requires special servers to access it.

The terms can be confusing, so I fell back on the words of Daniel Miessler - an information security professional and writer based out of San Francisco, California – to help me out with a little summary of the basics:

The Internet: This is the easy one. It’s the user-friendly internet we all use to read news, visit Facebook, get angry about politicians and shop. Just consider this the “regular” Internet. It’s the bits you can access and see easily, and although some of it looks wildly offensive and gives a platform to utter bell ends, it’s all pretty much transparent.

The seemingly never ending – and escalating - drug war in Mexico seems to have been all over screens both big and small during the past few years, as well as in the tabloids thanks to the likes of douchebag Sean Penn, who made headlines after supposedly “reporting” for Rolling Stone onhis trip to Mexico to meet notorious drug lord Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman.

Tonight sees one of the better representations of the issue making its New Zealand debut on Rialto Channel in the form of CARTEL LAND, an Oscar and BAFTA-nominated documentary about two vigilante groups tackling the murderous Mexican cartels.

CARTEL LAND director Matthew Heineman has said: “it was always incredibly important to me that the film reach audiences throughout Latin America, especially Mexico. I made CARTEL LAND to give voice to those trapped by senseless cycles of violence, suffering and corruption,” and it’s for this reason that I love both its authenticity and sensitivity to the victims of its subject.

The documentary follows a physician in Michoacán, Mexico who leads a citizen uprising against the drug cartel that has wreaked havoc on the region for years. Across the U.S. border, it focuses on a veteran who heads a paramilitary group working to prevent Mexico's drug wars from entering U.S. territory. By focusing on responses to the cartels by factions on both sides of the border Heineman has created a fiercely gripping tale that isn’t an easy watch, but a rewarding one.

With CARTEL LAND in mind, I bring you my pick of on screen cartel tales, which in no particular order are…

I count myself as extremely lucky filing my weekly missive for Rialto Channel for a huge number of reasons. These include being in the position of having a platform to rant about one of my favourite subjects, as well as being in awe of the sheer volume of killer docos constantly being produced globally and the fact that I get to watch and talk about them! I am spoilt when it comes to kick ass new discoveries every week, and have become pretty bloody fussy when it comes to what I do – and don’t – like.

The winner of four awards including a BAFTA for best documentary, tonight’s THE MURDER TRIAL was one very ambitious project from the get-go.

For the first time, remotely operated cameras were placed inside a British criminal court to capture a murder trial in its entirety. After three years of negotiation, the Scottish High Court gave the filmmakers permission for this extraordinary and unique access - to film the case of a man accused of murdering his wife. Her body has never been found, there is no weapon, no crime scene and her husband appears to have a cast iron alibi. It has all the makings of a killer mini series, but is firmly grounded in real life.