New to DocPlay in May

Ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup, DocPlay scores five exclusives in May, including Kenny Dalglish, the new documentary from Oscar-winner Asif Kapadia (Amy).

“Kapadia’s film draws an absorbing portrait of the Liverpool legend whose career was blighted by the Heysel stadium and Hillsborough disasters,” said The Guardian.

“If you don’t follow football, your mileage may vary,” Empire said, “but Kapadia’s film is marked by nifty touches — the title sequence presents Dalglish’s life as a Roy of the Rovers comic strip played out to the Fab Four’s ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’, with the changes in Dalglish’s life highlighted by Panini stickers — and moves along at a fair lick.”

It streams from May 14.

Chernobyl: Utopia in Flames (May 4) is a four-part German series about the 1986 nuclear disaster that’s apparently “even more complex, more human, and more shocking than we could ever have imagined” while Antidote (May 21) explores the cost of speaking truth to power in Putin’s Russia.

It follows in real time a whistleblower from inside Russia’s poison programme, a prominent political activist, and a Russian journalist forced to go into hiding.

The Hollywood Reporter praised it  as “yet another disturbing reminder of the evils of the current Russian regime” while the Wall Street Journal quipped: “James Bond it is not. It’s far more nerve-racking.”

Streaming from the same day is another exclusive, Men of War, about the ragtag American-led insurrectionists who tried to overthrow the regime of Venezuela’d Nicolas Maduro in May 2020.

Variety dubbed it both “a condemnation of American masculinity and bluster” and “a blistering critique of U.S. foreign policy that plays like a well-told but unbelievable conspiracy theory”.

DocPay’s fifth streaming coup is This Is a Bomb (May 25). Reads the blurb:

In 1980, an ingenious boobie-trapped ticking time bomb – filled with 1,000 pounds of dynamite – was wheeled in the front doors of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe. Along with the bomb was a note demanding $3 million within 24 hours. While the bomb squad attempts to disarm the explosive, the FBI races the clock to deliver the ransom and simultaneously catch the extortionists. Nothing goes as planned, and each step uncovers darker secrets and suspicions of a deeper motive.

New from May 18 are the three-part BBC series Spice Girls: How Girl Power Changed the World and Freddie: The Final Act, which recounts the extraordinary final chapter of Freddie Mercury’s life and how, after his death, Queen staged one of the biggest concerts in history.