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      ‘Rustin’ Review: A Crucial Civil Rights Activist Gets His Due

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      Colman Domingo carries this biopic of a March on Washington organizer, the first narrative feature from Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company.Every so often an actor so dominates a movie that its success largely hinges on his every word and gesture. That’s the case with Colman Domingo’s galvanic title performance in “Rustin,” which runs like a current through this portrait of the gay civil-rights activist, a close adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Pacifist, ex-con, singer, lutist, socialist — Bayard Rustin had many lives, but he remains best known as the main organizer of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It was Rustin who read the march’s demands from the podium, remaining near King’s side as he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.At once a work of reclamation and celebration, “Rustin” seeks to put its subject front and center in the history he helped to make and from which he has, at times, been elided, partly because, as an openly gay man, he challenged both convention and the law. His was a rich, fascinatingly complex history, filled with big personalities and tremendous stakes, one that here is primarily distilled through the march, which the movie tracks from its rushed conception to its astonishing realization on Aug. 28, 1963, when a quarter million people converged at the Lincoln Memorial. It was the defining public triumph of Rustin’s life.After a little historical scene-setting — via images of stoic protesters surrounded by screaming racists — the director George C. Wolfe, working from a script by Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black, gets down to business. It’s 1960, and King (Aml Ameen) is exasperated. Several activists have asked King to lead a mass protest against the forthcoming Democratic National Convention. Sighing, King directs his eyes upward as if beseeching a witness from on high and politely declines: “I’m not your man.” A few beats later and his gaze is again directed up, but now at Rustin, who’s towering above King, challenging him.The protest, Rustin explains, will send a message to the party and its nominee, the front-runner John F. Kennedy. Unless the Democrats take a stand against segregation, Rustin says with rising passion and volume, “our people will not show up for them.” His directness and body language nicely dramatize Rustin’s gifts as a strategist, which reach a crescendo when he sits down, so that now it’s him who’s looking up at King. Swayed by Rustin’s forceful argument, King agrees to lead the protest, enraging establishment power brokers like the head of the N.A.A.C.P., Roy Wilkins (a miscast Chris Rock), and the U.S. Representative for Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (a ferocious Jeffrey Wright, taking no prisoners).Five minutes into the movie, and you’re hooked; everything works in this punchy opener. Yet while Domingo, the unfortunately underused Wright and most of the rest of the cast keep charging forward, the movie soon sags under the weight of its central personality and the monumental history it condenses in under two eventful hours. As it straddles the personal and the political, it struggles to do justice to Rustin, whose life story emerges in frustrating piecemeal, along with an anemic love affair, nods at past hurdles, hints of future milestones and appearances by various major players. Carra Patterson shows up as Coretta Scott King; a vivid Michael Potts pops in and out as the labor organizer Cleveland Robinson.Powell and Wilkins succeed in derailing the 1960 protest, causing a rift between King and Rustin. The story picks up three years later shortly before Rustin begins organizing the 1963 march, shifting the movie into high gear with bustling characters, clacking typewriters and ringing phones. At their best, these scenes underscore how the civil rights movement was a titanic communal effort. Yet partly because the movie also wants to be a great-forgotten-man-of-history story, the larger movement fades amid the clamor of what can seem like a one-man show. It suggests, for one, that Rustin originated the idea for the march when, in a 1979 interview, he specifically credited his mentor A. Philip Randolph (Glynn Turman) — whose March on Washington Movement dates to the 1940s — with its creation.The largest problem with the movie is that it’s finally too conventional, formally and politically, to do full justice to the complexities of either the civil-rights movement or Rustin, a socialist whose activism was rooted in his Quakerism and was informed both by his moral beliefs and by economic analysis. When Rustin and other activists on the Left first planned the march, economics was at the fore. “The dynamic that has motivated” Black Americans in their own fight against racism, the plan read, “may now be the catalyst which mobilizes all workers behind the demands for a broad and fundamental program for economic justice.”Whatever its flaws, “Rustin” can’t help but move you with its images of so many people joined in righteous harmony. The optimism of its moment feels very distant from the fractiousness of our own, yet it lifts you, as does Domingo’s fantastically alive turn. From the second that Rustin sweeps into the movie, throwing open his arms to King — and, by extension, welcoming the future they will help make — the actor seizes hold of you. He grabs you with his expressive physicality and then pulls you closer with the urgency, yearning and luminous sincerity that openly plays across his face. It’s such a lucid, persuasive, outwardly effortless performance that you may not even notice he’s carrying this movie almost by himself.RustinRated PG-13 for adults being adults and sometimes smoking. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      12 African Artists Leading a Culture Renaissance Around the World

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      In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More

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      ‘Best. Christmas. Ever!’ Review: Frenemies Rejoice

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      Heather Graham and Brandy play old friends who have a surprise reunion.Holiday cheer stokes an old source of envy in “Best. Christmas. Ever!,” the latest Netflix holiday film from the director Mary Lambert (“Under the Cherry Moon,” “Pet Sematary”).Heather Graham stars as Charlotte Sanders, whose pleasantly normal suburban life is interrupted every December when her old frenemy Jackie Jennings (Brandy) sends out a diner-menu-size holiday newsletter boasting of her and her family’s latest accomplishments. When a misunderstanding leads the Sanders family to end up on the Jennings family doorstep just before Christmas, Charlotte is forced to spend the holiday in close quarters with her rival — and she uses that time searching for evidence that Jackie’s seemingly perfect life is all a sham.At barely 80 minutes (and ending with a musical number from Brandy), “Best. Christmas. Ever!” resembles a television holiday special more than a feature film, and its plot follows the predictable Christmastime themes of love, acceptance, and being thankful for what you’ve got. Jackie’s sizable McMansion abode, where most of the action takes place, exists in the Home Depot ad version of American suburbia: cozy yet indistinguishable, decked out in holly wreaths and reindeer-shaped lights.Jason Biggs and Matt Cedeño turn in ho-hum performances as Charlotte and Jackie’s husbands, but the focus remains on two women burying the hatchet on old grudges. As one might expect, there’s some Christmas magic involved and, a bit more surprisingly, a hot-air balloon as well.Best. Christmas. Ever!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Disappearance of Shere Hite’ Review: The Feminist Mystique

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      Nicole Newnham’s documentary charts the life and times of the feminist Shere Hite, whose pioneering research on women’s sexuality earned her both fame and notoriety.“The Disappearance of Shere Hite” opens with a 1976 TV interview with Shere Hite about her pioneering study, “The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality.” As she talks about the revelations of her research — that women masturbate, and most men don’t know how to please them — the interviewer tells a crew member to stop snickering.Then a cut reveals that what we’re watching is actually a clip being screened within another archival clip, from a 1994 interview, in which Hite reflects on her early media appearances. It’s a nifty opening that drives home Hite’s prominence in culture from the 1970s to the ’90s — and how strange it is that the groundbreaking feminist, who died in 2020, is barely discussed now.Nicole Newnham’s film recoups Hite’s story from the margins of feminist history with both style and substance, taking its cue from its subject. Tall, blonde and immaculately dressed, Hite was a model who appeared in Playboy, and a Columbia University graduate student who railed eloquently against sexism and classism.“The Hite Report,” which compiled questionnaires completed anonymously by thousands of women, was a best seller — but in interview after interview, Hite struggled to be taken seriously. By the time her later studies on male sexuality and women’s love lives were published, she had been labeled a male-basher and a fraud, and went into self-imposed exile in Europe.Newnham weaves deftly between biography and history, damningly situating the backlash to Hite’s taboo-breaking work alongside Anita Bryant’s anti-gay activism and Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. Yet the film also shimmers with hope. Dulcet-voiced readings of Hite’s memoirs by Dakota Johnson (also an executive producer) remind us that it is possible, even in an unyielding world, to think far beyond one’s time.The Disappearance of Shere HiteRated R for brazen talk of women’s sexuality. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘JFK: What the Doctors Saw’ Review: A Clinical Take

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      Barbara Shearer’s documentary unpacks the medical opinions of physicians who treated John F. Kennedy in Dallas.Amid a climate of invigorated interest in the assassination of John F. Kennedy — stoked by the media capitalizing on the 60th anniversary of his death to reignite familiar debates — Barbara Shearer’s “JFK: What the Doctors Saw” contributes some clarity to the conspiratorial noise by centering on a tiny piece of the puzzle: the professional opinions of the physicians present in the president’s Parkland Memorial Hospital emergency room.While some documentaries feel like rundowns of a Wikipedia page, “What the Doctors Saw” (streaming on Paramount+) more closely resembles a Q. and A. session with Siri. What did the staff observe? An entrance wound on Kennedy’s throat. What does that suggest? A bullet entered from the front. Why is that significant? It contradicts the findings of the Warren Commission.I’m willing to bet that viewers drawn to this documentary will have a basic knowledge of the history. It is smart, then, that this film so clearly defines its scope. Rather than dwell on the actions of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, the documentary dedicates its running time to medical analyses, unpacking the inconsistencies between injuries that doctors observed in Dallas and the autopsy report conducted in Bethesda.This approach also has its drawbacks. The recollections of those who treated Kennedy in Trauma Room 1 at Parkland are remarkably consistent, which is another way of saying that much of this documentary is remarkably repetitive. You will finish the film agreeing that what the doctors saw is crucial. But what it all means for America’s most enduring mystery is no less clear.JFK: What the Doctors SawNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      ‘The Stones and Brian Jones’ Review: Sympathy for a Founding Rocker

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      A new documentary looks back at Jones’s rise and fall, but also underlines his crucial strand in the Rolling Stones’ DNA.There’s a particular indignity to being dropped from the band you founded.In the annals of tragic pop mythology, Brian Jones’s ejection from the Rolling Stones has continued to reverberate long past his exit; Jones died at home in England just one month later, at age 27, in July 1969. Nick Broomfield’s latest documentary, “The Stones and Brian Jones,” looks back at Jones’s rise and fall, lingering on the intra-band power plays and fast living that helped bring him down.Mick Jagger and Keith Richards today enjoy rock immortality, but Broomfield underlines Jones’s crucial strand in the Stones’ DNA. Jones’s love for blues set a fire burning in the band’s soul, even as it shifted gears musically. The Stones bassist Bill Wyman is on hand to praise (and sweetly act out) his bandmate’s inspired instrumental touch, from slide guitar work to his fluttering recorder on “Ruby Tuesday.”But the interviews (many audio-only) lean decisively into Jones’s personal instability. His rebellious streak led his family to throw him out; later, he fathered children by multiple women. The tender twist to this film is that some of his exes — who included Anita Pallenberg and Zouzou, the French actress — help narrate much of his drug-aided decline, most with fondness. Zouzou Gallically muses that Jones pursued women who resembled him though he disliked himself.Despite Broomfield’s having made investigative docs about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and Biggie and Tupac, he doesn’t reopen the case of Jones’s drowning. His announcer-like voice-over and sometimes dishy interviews might evoke a “Behind the Music” exposé, but he seems most like a fan with a rueful sympathy for his devil of a subject.The Stones and Brian JonesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Next Goal Wins’ Review: Offside

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      Michael Fassbender plays a bitter soccer coach in this sloppy underdog comedy from Taika Waititi.Bland photography and perfunctory writing are the very least of my issues with “Next Goal Wins,” a movie-shaped stain on the class of entertainment known as the sports-underdog comedy.Inspired by Mike Brett and Steve Jamison’s 2014 documentary of the same name, the New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi has concocted something so indolent, offensive and comedically barren that the only deserved response is bafflement. Whatever Waititi’s past sins — I’m looking at you, the cringe-inducing “Jojo Rabbit” (2019) — his work has usually been polished and, yes, funny; this degree of carelessness is something new.A horrifyingly miscast Michael Fassbender stars as Thomas Rongen, a pugnacious Dutch-born soccer coach whose sideline rages have earned him professional banishment to American Samoa. Ten years earlier, the island’s soccer team had suffered a 31-0 defeat in its 2001 World Cup qualifying match against Australia, and since then has failed to score a single goal. With just three weeks until the team’s next important game, can Rongen whip its cosmically inept members into shape?That, as it turns out, is the wrong question, as this inspired-by-true-events debacle disdains to embrace the familiar beats of its own genre. The team members are barely differentiated, their names and personalities mostly a blur and their training sessions given short shrift. As for Rongen — who appears to spend more time drinking and fuming than coaching — how he is helping is anyone’s guess. It’s soon clear, though, that fixing the team is not really the point: Rather, every good-natured, quirky inhabitant of this slow-moving island exists mainly to repair Rongen.From the moment we see him exit the plane, dragging — in the film’s clunkiest metaphor — his damaged suitcase, we know Rongen is a broken man. His bitterness, though, extends beyond an estranged wife and her new boyfriend (a barely-seen Elisabeth Moss and Will Arnett); but the screenplay (by Waititi and Iain Morris) would rather indulge lazy jokes about the islanders’ lack of sophistication than earn the emotional capital it needs for the direction it plans to take.This flippancy feels especially egregious when we meet the team’s talented transgender center forward, Jaiyah Saelua (an astonishing debut by Kaimana). Openly stunned by her easy glamour, Rongen crassly demands details of her physical transition before informing her that he intends to use her deadname. His treatment of her is vulgar and insulting, yet she will become his most important ally in recruiting the athletes that the team needs. She is also — thanks to the delicacy of Kaimana’s performance — the locus of what little heart the movie contains.One crucial, late-movie conversation between the two is particularly troubling, as Jaiyah’s confessed gender struggles become roadkill on Rongen’s supposed journey toward sensitivity. The real Saelua (who appears with others in a brief coda before the end credits) was the first openly nonbinary and trans athlete to play in a FIFA World Cup qualifier; and as Waititi busies himself with sloppy humor and sports clichés, he fails to notice that a much better movie has been right in front of him all along.Next Goal WinsRated PG-13 for minor vulgarity and major insensitivity. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Thanksgiving’ Review: Gobble, Gobble, Gasp

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      From a fake genre trailer comes a full horror meal, courtesy of Eli Roth.The origin of this seasonal slasher is in an ersatz trailer the horror filmmaker Eli Roth made for the portmanteau movie “Grindhouse” in 2007. The two lurid features directed by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino were separated by a series of teasers for imaginary movies concocted by like-minded pals of the filmmakers, also including Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright. Believe it or not, Roth’s feature-length version of “Thanksgiving” is the third such trailer to get its Pinocchio-esque real-movie wish.The movie posited in that trailer was, of course, a way-trashy variant on John Carpenter’s “Halloween.” Roth’s feature realization, scripted by Jeff Rendell from a story by both Rendell and Roth, opens with a Carpenter tribute, a shot from an unknown point of view, approaching a door, perhaps menacingly.What follows is different: Thanksgiving in Plymouth, Mass., celebrated by two families, one lower-middle class, one affluent. The turkey and pie are interrupted in both households by the run up to an early Black Friday sale at the big box store owned by the affluent clan. The store is overrun by a mob of unusually lumpen bargain hunters, and the riot that ensues is a bloody doozy, coming off like an amalgam of George A. Romero and Jean-Luc Godard. No, really.That’s the thing about Roth, who’s coming back to the undiluted horror that made him notorious (see “Hostel”) after the career detours of a “Death Wish” remake and the altogether more wholesome “The House With a Clock in Its Walls,” both from 2018. He’s not a poetic horror moviemaker; he doesn’t dwell on eerie atmosphere. Any calm that exists in his pictures is just there to set up a jump scare. Horror for him is a blunt instrument. The thing is, he knows his stuff and he’s very adept at serving up both gross-outs and real leap-from-your-seat moments.As for those gross-outs: if you know the fake trailer for this movie, you know they included a genuinely objectionable knife-through-a-trampoline gag, and a terribly improbable human turkey gag. Spoiler alert: a toned-down version of the former and a ramped-up version of the latter feature here. Like his exploitation feature forebears, who include not just Romero but Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, and on the arguably minus side, Sean S. Cunningham (the man behind another holiday horror, “Friday the 13th”) Roth enjoys imagining and then simulating lacerations of the body parts you’d least like to be wounded in, but his sadism also has a wicked wit.The scenario, in which an unknown lunatic seeks to avenge the casualties of the aforementioned riot one year later, of course features a group of beleaguered teens. Their primary member, Jessica, is the daughter of the mega-mart’s venal owner, but also the one family member with a real conscience. Nell Verlaque, who plays her, turns in a better performance than the role genuinely calls for. Patrick Dempsey, recently designated People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, takes the role of the town sheriff, which here is not as thankless a role as it is customarily. The movie also includes a Black Sabbath joke that is both funny and accurate.ThanksgivingRated R for grisly violence, language. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. More