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      ‘Into the Weeds’ Review: Man Versus Monsanto

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      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

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      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?

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      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’

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      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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      Obamas’ Vision for Hollywood Company: ‘This Isn’t Like Masterpiece Theater’

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      With three new films on Netflix, Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground, is pursuing projects in different genres that aren’t always uplifting.The film “Leave the World Behind” centers on the idea of mistrust and how easy it is for humans to lose empathy for one another when faced with a crisis. It is at once unnerving, misanthropic and bleak and, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, it’s produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground.Set to become available on Netflix on Friday, it is one of three films from Higher Ground that will be released within a month of one another on the streaming service. The others are “Rustin,” a biopic about a gay Civil Rights era activist, Bayard Rustin, and “American Symphony,” a documentary tracking the relationship between the musician Jon Batiste and his partner, Suleika Jaouad. Together, the films provide the best evidence of the five-year-old company’s attempts to evolve from an earnest, feel-good brand to one that is more complex and focused primarily on good storytelling centered around, Mr. Obama said, people who are dealing with “the tensions that are in our society.”“It’s taken a while for us to remind our team at Higher Ground, as well as the creative community in Hollywood, that this isn’t like Masterpiece Theater — not everything we do has to fit on PBS,” Mr. Obama said in a phone interview. “We are known to watch other things.”Those familiar with Mr. Obama’s lists of his favorite books, movies and TV shows know that his interests are varied. (When he named Amazon’s raunchy superhero show “The Boys” as one of his favorites in 2020, it shocked the show’s creator and its fans.)“I’m a bit of a sucker for science fiction, dystopias or thrillers,” he said. “Michelle jokes that my favorite movies involve horrible things happening to people and then they die, whereas she actually likes fun, uplifting stories that make her laugh.”In the past 18 months, the company has made its ambitions known to Hollywood by signing with the talent agency Creative Artists Agency to improve its access to new material; agreeing to an audio deal with Amazon’s Audible Originals after parting ways with Spotify; and, in April, hiring a senior executive with film and television experience, Vinnie Malhotra from Showtime.Ethan Hawke, Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali in a scene from “Leave the World Behind.”NetflixSam Esmail, the director of “Leave the World Behind,” is known for a paranoid and dark outlook on society, as represented by “Mr. Robot,” the acclaimed thriller series he created. He was surprised his path ever crossed Mr. Obama’s. But when they discussed “Leave the World Behind,” which is based on Rumaan Alan’s novel that was a pick of Mr. Obama’s, Mr. Esmail said he was heartened that the former president was not interested in shying away from the themes of the film, whose starry cast includes Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali.“He really didn’t want to pull punches,” Mr. Esmail said. “He wanted to have these characters face the truth about the fragility of our society and how do we reckon with that. I found that refreshing.”Some in the Hollywood trade press criticized Netflix’s deal with Higher Ground, struck in 2018, as being more about name recognition than actual content. “Rustin” and “Leave the World Behind” are the first narrative feature films from the company.“There’s plenty of reason to believe that it could be a vanity brand,” said Ted Sarandos, the co-chief executive of Netflix, who last year extended the initial four-year deal for another two years. “But they got street cred right out of the gate.”He referenced Higher Ground starting out with “slightly lower stakes things,” like Ms. Obama’s kid-oriented food show “Waffles + Mochi” and documentaries like “Crip Camp,” which centered on disability rights, “American Factory,” which highlighted the plight of blue-collar workers in a globalized society and won an Oscar for best documentary.Michelle Obama in a scene from “Waffles + Mochi.”Adam Rose/Netflix“I think this year, with ‘Rustin’ and ‘Leave the World Behind,’ you can see the scope and scale and potential for the ambitions that they have, and we have for them,” Mr. Sarandos said.Among the projects Higher Ground has in development is a film adaptation of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography by David W. Blight. Regina King is set to direct, with a script by Kemp Powers, reuniting the duo behind “One Night in Miami.”But now the company is also expanding into other genres: It has grabbed the rights to S.A. Cosby’s best-selling crime thriller “All the Sinners Bleed,” which it will produce with Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, and to “Hello, Beautiful” by Ann Napolitano, a family drama that was a pick in Oprah Winfrey’s book club. Both will be made into series for Netflix.Ms. Obama is also working closely with Lupita Nyong’o, who will produce and star in a romantic comedy called “Fling,” based on a novel by J.F. Murray. An unscripted series called “Boomin Love,” about older people finding companionship, is currently in production with a Harvard-trained behavioral scientist, Logan Ury, who is serving as one of the on-air experts.“These might not be something people expect,” Mr. Obama said of the upcoming projects. “I think we’re now in a place where we’re branching out into different genres, and people are starting to probably get the signal that ‘Oh, if we’ve got a good story that doesn’t neatly fit into what we expect Higher Ground might be interested in, they still might be a good partner for us.’”In a scene from the documentary “American Factory,” two women working at Fuyao glass company in Ohio, in 2019.Netflix, via Everett CollectionProducing projects based on high-profile novels, which have a built-in fan base, could augur well for Higher Ground, whose output so far has had respectable reviews though none have topped Netflix’s weekly top 10 most-watched lists.Still, there are plenty in Hollywood who find themselves star-struck by the Obamas. When Mr. Obama visited C.A.A.’s offices in September, agents flooded into the company’s conference room and later described the day with words like “magical” and “the greatest.” Matthew Heineman, who in his 20 years as a documentary filmmaker has embedded with vigilantes fighting drug cartels and American special forces stationed in Afghanistan, said he was “nervous” walking into the restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard for what he described as a “surreal” meeting with the former president about “American Symphony.”The couple is known to give notes on scripts and will look at various edits as a project moves through post production, though Mr. Obama says he does so “with great humility.”“One of the great pleasures of being president is everybody having an opinion about how you can do your job and frequently from people who have no idea what it’s like to do your job,” he said.“Michelle and I do not aspire to be full-time Hollywood moguls,” Mr. Obama said.Stephen Voss/NetflixDespite the projects ahead, Mr. Obama said the couple intended to continue spending just 10 to 15 percent of their time nurturing Higher Ground, especially as the 2024 election approaches and they are called to the campaign trail.“Michelle and I do not aspire to be full-time Hollywood moguls,” he said.For the projects they do choose, however, their support can make the difference. Bruce Cohen, a producer of “Rustin,” credits the Obamas with getting his film made after HBO passed on it years earlier.“Once you have them in your corner, it gives you a really good chance,” he said.And Mr. Heineman, whose film documents Ms. Jaouad’s battle with leukemia, was able to form a partnership with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Be the Match organization, which helps connect patients to bone marrow donors, because of Higher Ground, he said. “The idea of trying to make an impact with the film was something that was important to him and important to me,” Mr. Heineman said, referring to Mr. Obama.While Mr. Obama was no stranger to Hollywood — since his early days of campaigning for the presidency he found a welcoming audience among the show business elite — he has found that working in this business has taken some getting used to.“It’s ironic that the private sector is made out to be this hyper-efficient thing, and the government is plodding, slow,” he said. “I think part of it is ideological and part of it is people’s experience with the D.M.V.“Everything takes so long — decisions, contracts, scripts,” Mr. Obama said. “We organized a major address or a G20 meeting in three weeks. Getting somebody to read a script in three weeks is lucky, much less write a script in three weeks.” More