Aurelia Butler

A new documentary follows the ceaseless innovations of a man who made art out of television sets and found inspiration in disruption.Nam June Paik died in 2006, one year before the first iPhone was released. Now that hand-held glowing screens have become as dominant as television once was, one misses that influential artist’s subversive spirit. But it’s on ample display in Amanda Kim’s new film “Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV,” which shows how Paik forged novel avenues of expression and communication in the televisual era.Born into privilege in Korea in 1932, during the Japanese occupation, Paik studied unhappily to be a composer in Germany until he was electrified by a bold and divisive John Cage performance in 1957. Over the next 10 years, he was off like a rocket: staging outré musical performances with the cellist Charlotte Moorman, joining the raucous Fluxus avant-garde collective in New York, building a robot and pioneering the use of TV sets in gallery art.Paik found many ways to mess with the banal monitors, which were stacked, worn, and, famously, plunked opposite a contemplating Buddha. But an art documentary like Kim’s also questions first principles generally, to underline the beauty and power built into objects around us. Beyond eliciting truly lovely halos of eerie color from video, Paik sought to democratize technology through innovations in video production and live global broadcast. (Paik’s aphoristic writings are read in voice-over by the actor Steven Yeun.)Despite the interviews with graying contemporaries that bubble up in the stew of imagery, the film’s sense of art history is somewhat blinkered by lack of context. But Paik is undeniable, creating despite lean times (and slowing after a 1996 stroke). His dragging of a violin on a string — shown in a recurring performance — evokes an almost mystical dedication to disruption.Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TVNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

The filmmaker behind “Garden State” has created a fully drawn female character in Florence Pugh’s grieving addict. But this recovery drama often has too heavy a hand.An interesting litmus test of the shift in our zeitgeist’s consideration of female characters — or of female agency at large — exists in the space between the release of Zach Braff’s “Garden State” in 2004 and the reconstituted consensus around the film in the next decade.The movie remains a charming piece of mid-aughts indie quirkism, but over the years its character Sam, played by Natalie Portman, became emblematic of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope: a hollow tool, conjured by purportedly sensitive male indie fantasies, to help the protagonist on his journey toward self-actualization. That isn’t the case with “A Good Person,” Braff’s latest film. Its strongest quality, in fact, is how fully embodied and how human Florence Pugh is as the grieving Allison, a woman who is undone by a car accident that kills her sister- and brother-in-law-to-be.Yet, there’s another storytelling mechanism Braff has repurposed and coarsely dialed up. Like “Garden State,” in which Andrew (Braff, who wrote and directed the film) has been medicated and stuck his entire life after being involved in the accident that killed his mother, “A Good Person” sees Allison suffocated by guilt and desperately seeking to escape herself through opioids.Soon, she falls into addiction, a downward spiral the film handles quickly. After Allison hits rock bottom, she goes to an A.A. meeting, where she bumps into Daniel (Morgan Freeman), whose son she had planned to marry and whose daughter died in the crash. Daniel, a recovering alcoholic whose sobriety is being tested as he struggles to raise his granddaughter on his own, has always blamed Allison, who was driving the car, for the crash. The unlikely bond Pugh and Freeman create becomes the beating heart of the film, and there is rich emotion in Allison and Daniel’s shared struggles as they sketch the contours of their pain to each other.Allison’s sparkling life before and her descent after the accident are written with such a heavy hand and confused tone, however, that much of the film reads as a crassly manufactured setup for the arc of redemption and healing that follows. A climactic moment at a party involving Allison’s and Daniel’s sobriety is so bizarre and overwrought, you might find yourself shocked to learn it’s not a dream sequence.Braff is going for something broader than indie naturalism, so perhaps the film calls for less subtle brushstrokes. But the result is something that rings with far less thoughtfulness than he’s clearly capable of (particularly in light of the opioid crisis that the film mentions), despite Pugh’s remarkable attempts to ground the story.This isn’t to say that “A Good Person” is disingenuous: Braff wrote the script while wrestling with the deaths of several loved ones in the last few years. But the film would do better understanding that its core sufferings, of mourning and of self-blame, are dramatic enough. Instead it gets lost in raising the stakes to center a big-hearted tale of recovery. The real story is in the quiet moments, where the silence of grief hangs palpably between Allison and Daniel, ever-present and consuming.A Good PersonRated R for drug abuse, language throughout, and some sexual references. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters. More

Hong Sang-soo’s latest film traces the relationships in a small Seoul apartment building as they evolve and grow heavier with complications.Just five months after the theatrical release of “The Novelist’s Film,” the fantastically prolific filmmaker Hong Sang-soo offers “Walk Up,” an equally spare and melancholy study of the small moments that define a life. A conversation falters. Another bottle is opened. Three people share drinks and their universe is completely reordered.More than most filmmakers, Hong makes movies that benefit from being considered as pieces of a much greater whole. Since the mid-90s, he has directed more than 30, and each I’ve seen tells a talky, minor-key tale of life at the borders of art and self, of relationships and time, set among a sophisticated subset of Seoul’s contemplative class. Think Eric Rohmer but with a lot more Soju.“Walk Up” follows suit, a simple but not simplistic portrait in black-and-white, tracing the relationships in a small Seoul apartment building as they evolve and grow heavier with complications. At the center is a successful filmmaker, Byungsoo (Kwon Haehyo), who brings his semi-estranged daughter, Jeongsu (Park Miso), to a boozy meeting with an old friend (Lee Hyeyoung) who owns the building. With hindsight, the meeting seems to alter the course of Byungsoo’s life, from triumph toward tragedy. But as Hong shows, the seeds of Byungsoo’s undoing were there all along. Tragedy arrives often by drips, failures by slow accretion.Like many great artists, Hong appears in some ways to be trying to tell the same story over and over, each new film an attempt to solve the same essential riddle about what makes us tick. Just as well. For decades, Giorgio Morandi painted almost nothing but bottles and vases. What sublime and subtle insights arise from the variations!Walk UpNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

A frustrating new advocacy documentary about the WikiLeaks founder, with appearances by his father and wife, loses its footing on weak assertions and reporting.Julian Assange’s legal travails began in 2010, when Swedish prosecutors ordered his detention on suspicion of rape and sexual coercion. To avoid being extradited to Stockholm, Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, jumped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London; today he’s in London’s Belmarsh Prison, fighting extradition to the United States on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. Yet “Ithaka,” a frustrating advocacy documentary directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton, argues that Assange’s most crucial trial is in the court of public opinion.The documentary insists that the computer hacker, who’s accused of publishing classified government documents, is the victim of a smear campaign. What exactly those smears are, the film declines to specify or debunk. On your own, you may recall that viral stories about Assange have ranged from criminal to embarrassing — like when Ecuador said its increasingly unwelcome guest needed to tidy up after his cat.Free speech advocates looking to hear a strong argument defending Assange against those espionage charges will not find one here — only vague calls to protect the First Amendment. We’re told the case is unjust but never told why, or even what exactly the case is. Instead, the documentary repeats three monotonous points: Journalists lie. Regardless, Assange is a journalist who deserves protection. Also, his family misses him a heck of a lot.The film’s weak assertions hurt more than they help. Even those inclined to support Assange — like those who agree that releasing footage of a U.S. helicopter attack on unarmed Iraqi civilians is a moral good — will probably come to the documentary knowing enough to be rankled when it seeks to combat news media deception with evasions, half-truths and speculative accusations (the very weapons with which it suggests that Assange has been attacked).A sampler platter of its flimsy reporting: While Stella Moris, Assange’s wife and a member of his legal team, maintains that her husband was never charged with sexual assault, both she and Lawrence neglect to add that the statute of limitations on such a charge had expired during his seven-year embassy stay. Moris also shows the faces of several men in a parked van and declares them government assassins. Lawrence accepts this with no follow-up questions. By the time “Ithaka” makes the claim that WikiLeaks published only redacted versions of sensitive documents — yes, but only after earlier unredacted postings were met with significant outrage — the continual thumbing of its nose to the facts may make you want to issue a few unredacted words of your own.The doc is on stronger footing when it tracks the efforts of Moris and her father-in-law, John Shipton, to get their loved one home. With Assange unavailable, Shipton takes center stage as his onscreen avatar. (Father and son, Moris tells us, are “very similar.”) Bashful and soft-spoken when the film begins, Shipton strikes later as stubborn, secretive and messianic, likening his son to everything from Prometheus to a pod of hunted whales. Shipton is the kind of complex and contradictory figure who would have been fascinating under the lens of a filmmaker actually interested in unbiased journalism — one willing to press him on why he’s re-emerged in his son’s life after several decades of absence. Here, however, Shipton waves off any personal questions about their relationship as “an invasion of privacy.”IthakaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

The rise and fall of a classic-rock band is chronicled (shakily) in this documentary.What happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears, judging by this spurious, somewhat cranky documentary by John Scheinfeld, is that the band faced the unforeseen consequences of its own bad decisions.In 1970, Blood, Sweat & Tears, the enormously popular nine-piece jazz-rock group, undertook a tour of Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland under the aegis of the U.S. State Department, inadvertently outraging the progressive, college-age fans whose enthusiasm had made the group such a stratospheric counterculture success. To make matters worse, upon their return, the members of the band — who had headlined Woodstock and spoken out against the war in Vietnam — now decried communism as “scary,” professing gratitude for freedoms they’d previously taken for granted — quite the about-face. As David Felton wrote acidly in a 1970 issue of Rolling Stone, it sure sounded like “the State Department got its money’s worth.”The backlash was swift and, the documentary argues, effectively career-ending. “I felt canceled,” Steve Katz, the band’s guitarist, confesses dolefully, and indeed the movie is a pharisaical effort to paint the musicians as victims of what we now call cancel culture: misunderstood, unreasonably maligned and never afforded a chance to explain themselves, until now. But like many laments of the self-identified canceled, what’s being complained about is really just a form of accountability — of having to stand by and answer for actions they evidently didn’t think much about. (“We were just musicians, man,” is the lead singer David Clayton-Thomas’s lame justification.) The film frames them as having been somehow embroiled in a political situation, rather than actively, knowingly engaged in it — and its attempts to remain apolitical and focus on the music are as naïve as the band’s.What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

Sally Hawkins lights a fire under this droll dramedy about the search for the final resting place of Richard III.Sally Hawkins is a gift, to directors and audiences alike. When she smiles, it’s a face-splitting beam, so contagious that we would likely love her even if she were playing a murderer. And while her character in “The Lost King” is firmly tethered to a dead man, she didn’t kill him: She’s trying to dig him up.As Philippa Langley, the single mother from Edinburgh who, in 2012, spearheaded the successful search for the grave of King Richard III, Hawkins lends wings to this otherwise languid dramatic comedy. In a transformative moment, Philippa attends a production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and becomes mesmerized by the handsome actor playing the King (Harry Lloyd). This could easily have read as romantic attraction; but as Zac Nicholson’s camera zooms in on Hawkins’s wonderfully unguarded features, we see instead the stirring of a mission, one that will upend her life and alter history: to find Richard’s grave and disprove his reputation as a hunchbacked nephew-killer and unworthy usurper.That’s a tall order for a dissatisfied woman who suffers from chronic illness and whose ex-husband (played by Steve Coogan, who wrote the screenplay with Jeff Pope) is only marginally more tolerant than her co-workers. Yet Philippa, small and sensitive and herself a little lost, feels an affinity with the maligned monarch, gobbling up history books and finding common cause with the Richard III Society, whose members have long wondered if Richard’s twisted mind and body were fictions concocted by the Tudors and corroborated by Shakespeare. Let’s find out!Coogan and Pope, working once again with the director Stephen Frears (the alliance that brought us the unexpectedly moving “Philomena” in 2013), have shaped Philippa’s story into an easily digestible underdog tale. Vulnerable yet adamant, Philippa bulldozes bureaucrats and scientists into supporting her plan to excavate the parking lot where she believes the King is buried. She’s an immovable force, a battering ram of niceness, and Frears (now 81, and with a stunningly varied back catalog) is beguiled by the wonder of her tenacity and intuition. Her occasional chats with Richard’s ghost might be a sugar cube too far; but the movie’s sweetness is cut with enough acid — including subversive digs at academic pomposity and rampant sexism — that it never becomes cloying.Though raising serious questions about the way history is written, and by whom, “The Lost King” isn’t a polemic, or even a biopic. It’s a quietly droll detective story, a warm portrait of a woman who lost her health and found her purpose, exhuming her self-respect along with Richard’s bones. Those quibbling about factual liberties may be missing the point: This is a movie that’s less about rehabilitating a monarch than reinvigorating a life.The Lost KingRated PG-13 for a few cheeky words. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

Part queer love story, part supernatural psychodrama, the uncanny second feature by Léa Mysius follows a young girl with a magical sense of smell.Vicky (Sally Dramé), the creepy kid at the center of “The Five Devils,” has a strange power: her sense of smell is so strong, she can track her mother, Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulous), from dozens of yards away with her eyes closed; can detect the scent of chlorinated swimming-pool water and spilled coffee in the pages of an old journal. Smell is perhaps the most opaque of the five human senses; the one that’s hardest to put into words. No wonder it’s key to the uncanny intrigues of the film, part queer love story, part supernatural psychodrama, by the French director Léa Mysius.Vicky literally sniffs out trouble with the arrival of her enigmatic aunt, Julia (Swala Emati) — the sister of her father, Jimmy (Moustapaha Mbengue), and the local pariah. Joanne seems particularly affected; she implores Jimmy to send Julia away. A decade prior, around the time Vicky was born, Julia was exiled after an episode of pyromania. Her actions left Joanne’s friend, Nadine (Daphné Patakia), permanently disfigured.As the sexual tension between Joanne and Julia become increasingly apparent, Vicky’s abilities take on a new dimension. Julia’s scent causes Vicky to experience visions of the past, and in woozy flashbacks, we see the origins of her family history alongside her: the unspoken racism and homophobia that swirls around Julia, a skilled gymnast who seems to be blamed for Joanne’s sexual orientation.At the same time Vicky, who is multiracial, is aggressively bullied by her provincial peers. Like her aunt, she’s a modern-day witch, even spending her free time concocting perfumes out of dead crows.The film cleverly relies on color, physicality and elemental symbolism to express these tensions: the repressed Joanne swims daily in freezing waters; the untouchable Julia lights things aflame. The story’s various interpersonal frictions are rarely detailed in the dialogue — a distance that resonates with Vicky’s peculiar coming-of-age. She doesn’t know what the adults are going through, but she intuits how they feel.The Five DevilsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More