"'Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes' could have been called 'Elizabeth Taylor: A Lost Era'," said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. The Sky documentary features excerpts from 40 hours of tapes that were recently found in the archive of the late journalist Richard Meryman, who interviewed the film star extensively as part of research for a book.
The audio is interwoven with archive footage from the time: so we see clips from her films, footage of 1940s and 1950s Hollywood, and watch Taylor at publicity events.
The resulting film is "partial" and "inescapably hagiographic" – Meryman "lets Taylor speak with barely any pushback" – but it remains a "heady treat. Because it is about Elizabeth Taylor. They don't make them like they used to – and they probably never will again."
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The film "takes us through Taylor's life, from child stardom in 'Lassie Come Home' to her fundraising for Aids research", said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Along the way, she is remarkably candid, discussing her struggle to be taken seriously as an actress, and her frustrations with fame ("I became a public utility"). She also talks about her marriages: her and Richard Burton's rows, she recalls, were "like an atom bomb going off".
For the "Taylor enthusiast", there isn't much that's new here, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. "But that's not really the point." As she talks about her interior life, the film serves as a reminder of the disjunction "between what we think we know about stars — who they are, how they feel — and what's actually going on inside".
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