Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Into the Weeds’ Review: Man Versus Monsanto

    This documentary by Jennifer Baichwal recounts a legal battle in which a groundskeeper in California took on a multibillion-dollar company.In 2018, Dewayne Johnson won a lawsuit against Monsanto; he had argued that the company’s glyphosate-based weedkiller, which he had used as a school district groundskeeper in Northern California, caused him to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Jurors found that Monsanto had failed to warn consumers of the potential risks.The company, which had just been acquired by Bayer, was initially ordered to pay $289 million. Although that award was later reduced, Johnson’s suit was at the vanguard of tens of thousands of similar claims that linked Monsanto’s herbicide to cancer. (Bayer has repeatedly said that the product does not cause cancer.)The Canadian filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal is known for environmental documentaries (“Manufactured Landscapes,” “Anthropocene: The Human Epoch”) that emphasize aesthetics as much as advocacy. In “Into the Weeds,” subtitled “Dewayne ‘Lee’ Johnson vs. Monsanto Company,” she explores similar concerns through the more conventional framework of a legal battle.The documentary delves into the specifics of Johnson’s case. Various lawyers from his side walk viewers through the logistics of the lawsuit; the movie makes clear just how difficult it is for one person to take on a corporation that has vast resources, dexterity in countering evidence and — the film argues — unfairly easy access to regulators.More potent as muckraking than as filmmaking, the documentary also spends time with Johnson, who is shown applying ointment to the lesions that, as of shooting, still appear all over his body and leave blood stains on his sheets. Elsewhere, “Into the Weeds” meets with others in the United States and Canada who developed lymphoma and had used glyphosate-based herbicide. Their stories illustrate the breadth of the ecological and agricultural challenges that remain.Into the WeedsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Our Son’ Review: The Right to Break Up

    A simple yet engaging melodrama, starring Billy Porter and Luke Evans, explores what it means for two fathers to divorce.Nicky (Luke Evans), a grizzled book publisher, is visiting his family with his 8-year-old son, Owen (Christopher Woodley) — and Gabriel (Billy Porter), Nicky’s husband of 13 years, is conspicuously absent. At the dinner table, Nicky awkwardly breaks the news: He and Gabriel are divorcing. “It must be hard fighting for the right to marry and then ending up in a divorce court like everyone else,” says Nicky’s teenage nephew.“Our Son,” a simple yet engaging melodrama by the director Bill Oliver, explores the nature of this stinging remark. What does it mean to upend a family when generations of gay people before you have struggled to attain this right?Gabriel, a former actor who abandoned his career to become a stay-at-home dad, is the more affectionate parent, while Nicky preaches the gospel of tough love. At first, the two live in a beautiful brownstone in New York, where their lives seem picture perfect: They attend dinner parties with their tight-knit group of gay friends, including Nicky’s former boyfriend (Andrew Rannells) and a lesbian couple (Liza J. Bennett and Gabby Beans) about to have their first baby.When things begin to fall apart, Nicky revolts. He struggles to accept reality, throwing Gabriel out of their home and starting a vengeful custody battle that forces him to confront his own paternal track record. This basic conflict is given some texture through Evans’s prickly vulnerability. He’s a tough guy on the outside with a gooey core of desperation.What divides the two men is a little opaque. While Nicky doesn’t want a divorce yet, Gabriel is adamant about wanting to move on. Gabriel’s reasoning may seem unconvincing, but there’s also something vaguely moving about the film’s refusal to make the men’s relationship seem hyperbolically terrible.Is simply falling out of love not enough to merit a divorce? At the risk of seeming ungrateful, Gabriel reminds us that gay people owe nothing to an institution that was once denied to them. The point is happiness.Our SonRated R for sex scenes and some cursing. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Total Trust’ Review: Under Surveillance

    Jialing Zhang’s documentary follows a journalist and two families fighting for rights while dealing with invasive surveillance tactics from Chinese authorities.Partway through the documentary “Total Trust,” the Chinese journalist Sophia Xueqin Huang diagnoses the readiness of Chinese civilians to comply with expanding surveillance measures. “It’s just like the story of the boiling frog,” she says; the ceding of small privacies gives way to the surrender of larger freedoms until — before you know it — every facet of life is monitored and controlled.“Total Trust,” directed by the Chinese filmmaker Jialing Zhang (“One Child Nation”), offers a persuasive picture of this Big Brother system in action. Filmed largely during the pandemic, the film tracks three stories of people policed by the Chinese government: Huang, who came under scrutiny by authorities for her coverage of the #MeToo movement; and the families of two lawyers, Chang Weiping and Wang Quanzhang, who were imprisoned after taking on human rights cases. In a climactic scene, Chang’s wife and son travel to attend his trial; they are held for hours at a highway checkpoint, supposedly as a Covid precaution, until the end of the hearing.These accounts cut off rather abruptly; ending titles brief us on where the subjects are now, including the troubling update that Huang was arrested and detained in China despite plans to study in the United Kingdom. That the film fails to track this turn of events feels like a missed opportunity, and reminds us that “Total Trust” is not a chronicle of how circumstances can go from a simmer to a boil, but rather a moment’s temperature check.Total TrustNot rated. In Mandarin and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Concrete Utopia’ Review: Housing Insecurity

    Love thy neighbor is far from mind when disaster strikes a Seoul apartment complex in this blackhearted social satire.Murder, mayhem and moral collapse follow all too quickly when an apocalyptic earthquake flattens Seoul in “Concrete Utopia,” South Korea’s entry in this year’s Oscar contest for best international feature. Smoothly shaping familiar genre tropes into a brutal study of class warfare and the stifling of pity, the director, Um Tae-hwa (who wrote the script with Lee Shin-ji), makes human kindness the first casualty of social disorder.A brief introduction sets the scene as a newscaster notes the city’s declining prosperity, its towering apartment blocks no longer steppingstones to a home, but a final destination. And when the ground buckles and heaves in terrifying waves, the stunned residents of the Hwang Gung Apartments emerge to discover that their building is the only one left standing. Surrounded by corpse-strewn rubble, lacking water or power, they wait for rescue teams that never arrive. So when newly homeless survivors beg for entry, the residents must decide: Who deserves to live?Centering our concerns on a compassionate young couple (Park Seo-jun and Park Bo-young), and shot through with shards of dark humor, “Concrete Utopia” observes how quickly we dehumanize the needy when they threaten our survival — and asks if we can be blamed for doing so. After the residents elect a leader (Lee Byung-hun) who swiftly shapes order from chaos, flashbacks reveal his violent past in scenes as morally ambivalent as his present behavior. He is not who the residents think he is, but he may very well be who they need.As housing shortages fill our news feeds, “Concrete Utopia” pokes relentlessly at the meaning and moral obligations of owning a home. When things get desperate, the film wonders, how far would you go to protect yours?Concrete UtopiaNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Origin’ Review: Ava DuVernay’s Film Explores the Roots of Our Racism

    Ava DuVernay’s new feature film, adapted from the Isabel Wilkerson book “Caste,” turns the journalist into a character who examines oppression.Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” is as audacious as it is ambitious. At its core, it concerns an intellectual argument about history and hierarchies of power, but it’s also about the fraught process of making this argument. It’s a daunting conceit that DuVernay has shaped into an eventful narrative that is, by turns, specific and far-ranging, diagnostic and aspirational. It is a great big swing about taking a great big swing, and while the film is more persuasive as a drama than the argument it relays, few American movies this year reach so high so boldly.The inspiration for “Origin,” which DuVernay both wrote and directed, is Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed, best-selling 2020 book “Caste.” In it, Wilkerson argues that to fully understand the United States and its divisive history, you need to look past race and grasp the role played by caste, which she sees as an artificial and static structural “ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.” Caste, she writes, separates people — including into racially ranked groups — and keeps them divided. These separations, as the subtitle puts it, are “The Origins of Our Discontents.”For the film, DuVernay has turned Wilkerson into a dramatic, at times melodramatic character of the same name — a moving Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor — who develops her thesis while traversing history and continents on a journey from inspiration to publication. The movie also includes segments of varying effectiveness that dramatize Wilkerson’s understanding of specific caste systems: One is set in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, another in Depression-era Mississippi and a third in India over different time periods. This last interlude focuses on Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar (Gaurav J. Pathania), who helped draft India’s Constitution and championed the rights of Dalits, people once deemed “untouchables.”Isabel’s intellectual quest is bold, sweeping and determinedly personal — a handful of close relatives have decisive roles — and DuVernay’s version of that venture is equally expansive. She gives it tension, tears, visual poetry, shocks of tragedy, moments of grace and many interlocking parts. “Origin” opens in 2012 with a re-enactment of the last night in the life of Trayvon Martin (Myles Frost), the unarmed 17-year-old who was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer. The killing becomes the catalyst for her thesis about caste because, the more she considers it, the more she believes that racism alone can’t explain it. Racism, she says at one point, has become “the default” explanation.Isabel’s process unfolds rapidly and is framed by her resistance to the default. Her resistance surfaces in a discussion that she has with her husband, Brett (a sympathetic Jon Bernthal), and mother, Ruby (Emily Yancy), as they watch President Obama address Martin’s death on TV. It also informs Isabel’s talks with an acquaintance (Blair Underwood), who early on urges her to write about the case, pushing her to listen to the 911 calls that were made the night Martin was killed. (Wilkerson is a former bureau chief for The New York Times; her first book is “The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration.”)Isabel does listen to the 911 calls one quiet evening at home. Steeling herself, she begins the recordings, at which point the scene shifts to the night of the killing; it’s as if she had hit play on a grotesque movie. As DuVernay cuts back and forth between Isabel and that night, you hear George Zimmerman, a largely offscreen presence, talking to a dispatcher as he follows the worried teenager in his car. (“He’s running.”) You also watch as a terrified Martin struggles for his life. DuVernay’s staging here is blunt, visceral and harrowingly intimate. Isabel is shaken and so are you, in part because the 911 calls in the re-enactment are real.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    ‘The Archies’ Review: A Masala Milkshake at Pop’s, Anyone?

    Archie and pals get radicalized when their hometown, now conveniently relocated in India, is threatened by corporate overlords.Namaste from Riverdale! In “The Archies,” the director Zoya Akhtar transplants the all-American comic book hamlet to India, where the Anglo-Indian teenager Archie Andrews (Agastya Nanda) is up to his usual tricks, dating both Betty (Khushi Kapoor) and Veronica (Suhana Khan).Set in 1964, this inessential Bollywood-tinged fantasia is two and a half hours of soda shops, chaste dates, candy-colored petticoats, and athletic musical numbers choreographed to a mix of modern-ish new tunes and classics like “Wooly Bully.” Akhtar, who wrote the script with Ayesha Devitre Dhillon and Reema Kagti, is fearless in her fanciful reorientation. Why not?It’s an extravagant stunt perked up by moments of absurdity. Reggie (Vedang Raina) invents beat-boxing; the kids applaud a quote from Jean-Luc Godard: “Cinema is truth 24 times a second.” Mostly, however, it’s rote shtick. Jughead (Mihir Ahuja) chows down on some kind of burgers while Archie and his girlfriends flirt, fight and flirt some more.Suddenly, the focus shifts from how much Riverdale hasn’t changed to how much it might under threat of a corporate takeover. This wheezy old save-the-town plot only holds our interest because of our long acquaintance with the characters who are now being radicalized. It’s strangely compelling to watch Archie transform into an anticapitalist activist. “I can’t just live my life for kicks,” he sings, “Everything is politics — hey, hey!”The cast is tasked solely with looking chipper and gyrating enthusiastically. The ladies do a saucy number on roller skates; later, Khan’s vampy Veronica lands a back flip. The film does its darnedest to dazzle from its lavish production design to its showboating cinematography. For good measure, Akhtar slaps cartoon-style exclamations on the screen: “Smack!” “Pow!” and, for Hindi speakers, “Dhishoom!”The ArchiesNot rated. In Hindi and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 21 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Rob Reiner Remembers Norman Lear and ‘All in the Family’

    With “All in the Family,” Lear “tapped into something that nobody had ever done before or even since,” the star of the hit sitcom said.Reflecting on Norman Lear’s death, Rob Reiner was understandably heartbroken on Wednesday. Not only because he loved Lear, whom he’d first met as an 8-year-old, like a second father, as Reiner put it, but because Lear exited this world during a resurgence of many of the problems he’d tried to air out and squash through his television shows — namely, intolerance and bigotry.“He just couldn’t believe that this was happening to America,” said Reiner, who had seen Lear several times in the past couple of months, in a phone interview on Wednesday. “He would always say, ‘This is not the America that I grew up in and that we fought for to preserve. Something’s happened to this country that’s gone so far away from everything it stands for.’”“We’d talk about this, and he would say, ‘It’s like Alice in Wonderland,’” said Reiner, 76, an Oscar-nominated director. Reiner won two Emmy Awards for playing the liberal son-in-law, Michael, of the close-minded racist Archie Bunker on Lear’s most famous sitcom, “All in the Family,” which ran from 1971 to 1979 on CBS.The show aired in the era of appointment viewing, when there were only a handful of TV channels and households across the United States tuned in to the same programs at the same time. The shifting habits of American viewers, who can much more easily silo themselves in echo chambers when it comes to viewing habits, has only contributed to the fracturing and divisions, Reiner said.Of about 200 million Americans in the 1970s, “we were seen by 40-45 million people every single week,” he said. “There was no TiVo. There was no DVR. If you wanted to watch it, you had to watch it when it was on. That meant that you had a shared experience with 40 million people in America.”No matter the issue that “All in the Family” dealt with on any given week — and it tackled thorny topics that would be considered contentious today: abortion, racism, gun rights — that issue would became water cooler talk the next morning. “You don’t have those kinds of communal experiences where you can talk to people,” Reiner said.“The country either sided with Archie or sided with Mike, and that made for great discussions,” he continued. Lear “definitely tapped into something that nobody had ever done before or even since.”Lear, who was 101 years old, drew inspiration from his favorite play: George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara.” If you did not know that Shaw was a liberal, Reiner said, “you’d go to the play and you’d come away with the equal pro-war/antiwar — you’d come away with equal arguments on both sides, and it was made to spawn discussion.” And that’s what Lear wanted to do. “So he presented both sides. Archie had his side. And the character I played had my side, and we went at each other,” Reiner added.That approach would likely never gain ground today, Reiner said. “He put a racist out there and the way racists really talk. And now, if you said things like that, you would get canceled.”Lear would stir the pot. “He would ask us to look into ourselves and what did we think, what were our feelings about this. And we poured it into the show. So it made the show better. And he did that with everything he did. Fearless.”“This is the guy who — he flew 57 missions, bombing missions over Nazi Germany during the Second World War. And so he was scared enough in the sky,” Reiner said, adding that Lear was particularly disgusted by former President Donald Trump’s brand of politics. (“I don’t take the threat of authoritarianism lightly,” Lear wrote in The New York Times just last year.)Reiner reflected on comparisons between Trump and Archie Bunker. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former adviser who remains an influential figure in right-wing circles, has playfully compared Bunker to Trump, at one point saying, “Dude, he’s Archie Bunker.”“I said, no, no, it’s not like Archie Bunker. Archie Bunker, he had conservative views and he certainly was racist and all those things, but he had a decent heart,” Reiner said. “You could argue with him. You could fight with him and stuff. You can’t do that now, and that’s the difference with him and Trump.”But it was Lear’s convictions and his desire to demystify tough topics that Reiner hopes will endure in the memories of Americans. “I’m going to miss him for a million reasons. He showed me the way, which is, you can take your fame and celebrity and you can do something with it, do something positive with it. And I learned from him.”“He always has hope. That’s what’s so great about him. He was a realist, but he also had hope that we would find the right path, and I still hope that we can,” Reiner went on. “He was a man who really cared about this country and wanted it to succeed and be a more perfect union and all that. And then we’re losing a guy, a real champion of America.” More

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    Denny Laine, Founding Member of the Moody Blues and Wings, Dies at 79

    He wrote “Mull of Kintyre” with Paul McCartney and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame with the Moody Blues.Denny Laine, a singer, songwriter and guitarist who co-founded two of the biggest British rock bands of the 1960s and ’70s, the Moody Blues and Wings, before embarking on a long solo career, died in Naples, Fla., on Tuesday — 50 years to the day after Wings released its most successful album, “Band on the Run,” in the U.S. He was 79.His wife, Elizabeth Mele-Hines, said the cause of death, at a hospital, was interstitial lung disease.Mr. Laine was part of the efflorescence of British rock music in the early 1960s, when many young musicians were still soaking up the influence of American blues. Performers like Eric Clapton, Spencer Davis and the Beatles became not just friends with Mr. Laine but also frequent collaborators with him.A native of Birmingham, England, he moved to London after his first band, Denny Laine and the Diplomats, broke up. In 1964, he joined four other Birmingham-area transplants, Graeme Edge, Mike Pinder, Ray Thomas and Clint Warwick, to form the M&B 5, a rhythm-and-blues band named after a Birmingham brewery. They soon changed their name to the Moody Blues.Mr. Laine was with the band for only two albums, but in 1964 he sang lead on its first No. 1 hit, “Go Now!” The success of that song, a cover of an R&B song recorded that same year by Bessie Banks, won the Moody Blues slots on a series of high-profile tours, opening for acts like Chuck Berry and the Beatles.Mr. Laine, right, with his fellow members of the Moody Blues in an undated photo. From left were Ray Thomas, Clint Warwick, Graeme Edge and Mike Pinder.Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesMr. Laine left the Moody Blues in 1966 over artistic differences and spent the next five years working on solo projects and with, among other bands, the short-lived jazz-rock ensemble Ginger Baker’s Air Force. It was while singing and playing guitar with that band that he caught the attention of Paul McCartney.By 1971, Mr. McCartney was more than a year out of the Beatles and looking to form a new band. One day, from his rural home west of Glasgow, he cold-called Mr. Laine.“He said, ‘Do you want to do something? Get on a plane, we’re in Scotland,’” Mr. Laine recalled in an interview with The Boston Globe in 2019. The two added Mr. McCartney’s wife, Linda McCartney, and the three — with a rotating cast of other bandmates — became Wings.Though Wings is often remembered as a McCartney vehicle — at times it went by the name Paul McCartney and Wings — Mr. Laine was an equal member.He appeared on all seven of the group’s studio albums, sang lead and played lead guitar on several prominent tracks and wrote or co-wrote a number of the band’s songs, including “Mull of Kintyre,” which reached No. 1 on the British charts and sold more than two million copies. (He also claimed to have had a hand in writing another No. 1 Wings hit, “Band on the Run,” although Paul and Linda McCartney are the only credited writers.)Mr. Laine received four Grammy nominations with Wings and won two: best pop vocal performance by a duo, group or chorus in 1975, for “Band on the Run,” and best rock instrumental performance in 1980, for “Rockestra Theme.”“Me and him had this kind of feel together musically,” Mr. Laine said about working with Mr. McCartney in an interview with Guitar World this year. “We slotted in well together. We could read each other, and that came from growing up on the same musical influences. Paul’s got a good sense of rhythm, and he doesn’t overplay, which I like.”Mr. Laine was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2018 as a founding member of the Moody Blues. In what many critics and fans consider one of the bigger snubs in the Hall of Fame’s history, Wings has yet to follow.Mr. Laine in 1972, a year after Paul McCartney cold-called him asking him to join a new band, Wings.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesBrian Frederick Hines was born on Oct. 29, 1944, in Birmingham. His parents, Herbert and Eva (Basset) Hines, worked in factories.Denny was a childhood nickname, and he later added the surname Laine as a nod to one of his sister’s favorite singers, Frankie Laine.He grew up listening to the so-called Gypsy jazz of musicians like Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, as well as to Spanish guitar — a love he explored in between his time with the Moody Blues and Wings, when he lived in Spain and studied flamenco.After returning to Britain, he formed two bands, the Electric String Band and Balls, both of which fizzled — though the first, which featured a string section and lush orchestration, would greatly influence a similarly named band, the Electric Light Orchestra.He counted the McCartneys among his closest friends, but he left Wings in 1981 after Mr. McCartney was arrested in Japan for marijuana possession. Mr. Laine’s departure ended the band and put a strain on their relationship, though he later played on several of Mr. McCartney’s solo projects.Mr. Laine performing this March at the City Winery in Manhattan. He continued to record and tour regularly in the four decades after Wings split up.Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Laine married Joanne Patrie in 1978; they divorced in 1981. He married Rosha Kasravi in 2003; they later separated and divorced in 2021. He married Elizabeth Mele this year. Along with her, his survivors include two children from his first marriage, Heidi and Laine Hines; three other children, Damian James, Ainsley Adams and Lucy Grant; his sister, Doreen; and several grandchildren.Even while he was with Wings, Mr. Laine kept up a spirited solo career, releasing two albums in the 1970s: “Ahh … Laine” (1973) and “Holly Days” (1977), a tribute to Buddy Holly.He continued to work and tour regularly in the four decades after the band split up, playing a mix of his own compositions and material from the Moody Blues and Wings. Often he would perform what he called “Songs and Stories,” a combination of music and tales from his rock life.“I can’t live without live work,” he told Guitar World. “There’s no substitute for playing live and getting the feeling of connecting with an audience.” More