"There's plenty to get frustrated about with Gaylene Preston's latest My Year With Helen, in which the Kiwi doco-maker spends time within Helen Clark's camp during her campaign for the United Nations' top job.

However, it's the boys-led system that will have you raging as the film plays out, not the way the film is constructed.

Tagging along with Clark, Preston had the idea to follow and see what doing good (as was Clark's desire) could actually achieve. But what, of course, transpired is that the former Labour leader and Prime Minister became the eye of the hurricane in a bid to become the next UN Secretary General.

Hindsight is both a blessing and a curse to this documentary.

It's a curse in that we all know the failed outcome of Clark's campaign, but it's also a blessing because what Preston actually captures, rather than an intimate diary of Clark's moods, dreams and desires is the fact the UN is in crisis. Having had eight men run it since its inception, what Preston's doco does is show what exactly is wrong with the global organisation, why the zeitgeist desire to get a woman to the top job galvanised so many, and ultimately, why the final result was a thumping defeat to those campaigning for glass-ceiling change."

Read the review in full here.