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      ‘Subject’ Review: A Question of Ethics

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      Filmmaking principles come under scrutiny in “Subject,” a documentary about the making of documentaries.Many of the most compelling documentaries of the past several years, from Nathan Fielder’s HBO mini-series “The Rehearsal” to Kirsten Johnson’s self-reflexive feature “Cameraperson,” actively engage with the ethics of documentary filmmaking, posing difficult questions about participation, consent and the responsibility of the artist to the subjects of their art. These projects differ from “Subject,” Jennifer Tiexiera and Camilla Hall’s film about documentary ethics, in that their questions are posed by the filmmaking itself, threaded artfully into the documentary form. “Subject” just speaks the questions out loud, turning them into reductive fodder for talking heads.Tiexiera and Hall have assembled a kind of “Avengers” of nonfiction cinema here, as the participants in several high-profile docs reflect on the process of having had their lives laid bare on film. Their experiences range from a kind of wistful pride (Arthur Agee, of “Hoop Dreams,” looks back on the memory fondly) to clearly painful disillusionment (Margaret Ratliff, of “The Staircase,” makes a persuasive case that the movie practically ruined her life), and their testimony usually underscores a broader dilemma around the principles of storytelling and the nature of truth. Producers and critics are also on hand to expound on these topics in a cursory, surface-level way.“Subject” is at its clearest when interrogating the material conditions of documentary filmmaking, as during a segment about whether the subjects of nonfiction films have the right to be paid for their participation; it feels slipperier when glossing issues of diversity and representation, using buzzy phrases like “decolonize documentaries” in place of intellectual heavy lifting. And at no point do Tiexiera or Hall deal with their own complicity in any of this: They are, after all, making a documentary, and we get no sense of how they might answer the questions they pose to other documentarians. Perhaps we need another documentary to explore the making of this one.SubjectNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Quiz Lady’ Review: Dog in Jeopardy

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      Sandra Oh shines in this road trip buddy comedy about a pair of sisters getting on a TV quiz show to pay the ransom for their stolen dog.Jenny (Sandra Oh), a 40-something ball of chaos, is introduced in “Quiz Lady” the way you might expect of someone whose life savings are contingent on a hazardous fish bone-related lawsuit against a chain restaurant called Choochie’s: off in the distance, skittering heedlessly across the street before she’s suddenly struck by a car. Naturally, she pops right back up before having a meltdown over the mechanical entrance to the senior home where her younger sister, Anne (Awkwafina), is frustratingly watching from inside.It’s often said that comedic roles are deceptively trickier to play than dramatic ones, and Jenny is the type of character that would seem rife with potential pitfalls for an actor like Oh: an over-the-top eccentric whose humor can easily fall into caricature. Yet, “Quiz Lady,” a mostly winning comedy directed by Jessica Yu, is elevated most of all on the shoulders of Oh’s delightful and nuanced performance.When Jenny shows up at the senior home, Anne is already fed up. Their mother has run off to Macau to escape an $80,000 debt she owes Ken (Jon Park), a doggy daycare-owning gangster, and Anne naturally will be the one to take care of things. It’s the way things have been ever since Jenny, who has always lived a more free-spirited, if erratic and unstable, life, exited from their lives and left Anne to take care of their mother.Isolated and working as an office drone, Anne’s only form of solace is a Jeopardy-esque quiz show she’s watched religiously since childhood. When Ken steals Anne’s dog as collateral, Jenny, feeling the surge of her latest pipe dream of becoming a life coach, kidnaps Anne and drives her to an audition for the show in the hopes she’ll win the money to pay off the debt.Like so many road trip buddy comedies, the effectiveness of the enterprise rests, arguably more than the writing or direction itself, on the balance and chemistry between the central duo. And “Quiz Lady” in particular is predicated upon a role-reversing gamble: Typically a dramatic actress, Oh is playing the freewheeling Jenny, while her co-star, Awkwafina, who aside from her role in “The Farewell” has mostly made her name as the often cartoonish comic relief (“Crazy Rich Asians,” “The Little Mermaid”), is the serious and high-strung Anne.But the pair finds an easy harmony together, even as Oh does most of the heavy lifting. While Awkwafina’s little-sister turn often falls into uptight, one-note outbursts, Oh is a charismatic and natural counterbalance as the outsize Jenny. She knows when to reel her choices in and, most important, imbues Jenny’s kookiness with an emotional depth bubbling just underneath the surface.The funniest scene comes toward the end, when Jenny and Anne play a high-stakes game of charades on the quiz show. As they hit their stride, the sequence, punctuated by a strikingly tender moment that would have rung forced in lesser hands, floats off the comedic brilliance of Oh, at once natural and ridiculous, as her answers burst out of her via an intuition that could only exist through a lifetime of sisterhood.Quiz LadyRated R for some drug use and language. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Nyad’ Review: Neptune’s (Estranged) Daughter

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      Annette Bening plays the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad as a woman who doesn’t pity herself. Neither does the film.“Nyad” is about an athlete creating her own lore. Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) is proud that her last name stems from the naiads of Greek mythology. “My ancestors! The nymphs that swam in the lakes and the rivers and the ocean,” Diana trumpets to everyone in earshot. A record-breaking long-distance swimmer, she’s got the lung capacity of a real blowhard. Her ever-patient best friend, Bonnie (Jodie Foster), spends this exuberant and enervating biopic cutting Diana off mid-crow. Braggadocio takes you far in politics or business; jocks, however, have to prove it in sweat. And so, at 60, Diana vows to conquer the challenge that bested her at age 28. She’ll swim nonstop from Cuba to Florida — over two days of sharks, storms, stinging jellyfish and hallucinatory exhaustion. For most of this riveting crowd-pleaser, she fails.“I’m either a stubborn fool,” the real Diana Nyad wrote in “Find a Way,” her 2015 memoir, “or I’m a valiant warrior.” The film, in its first minutes, prefers the latter, opening with a rat-a-tat montage of her many successes: author, linguist, Phi Beta Kappa scholar. I groaned. Please, not an inspirational advertorial about women and aging and grit — the artificial saccharine Diana had to use to peddle her story to corporations who might sponsor her repeated attempts.To my relief, the directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, working with the screenwriter Julia Cox, trace Diana’s mythic roots not just to the naiads, but to zealots like Captain Ahab. Vasarhelyi and Chin specialize in documentaries (“Free Solo, “Meru”) about extreme outdoorsmen whose feats require a misery threshold, and a self-centered monomania, that few can understand. Chin, a mountaineer himself, gets that mind-set — and Vasarhelyi, his longtime filmmaking partner and wife, also knows the strain these adventurers put on the loved ones providing emotional support. Cheerleading can tip over into feeling complicit in their potential death.Bening, who has a convincing sidestroke, shows us a woman willing to endure Hell. I’ve never seen a performance with this little vanity in service of a character drowning in her own ego. “Everyone should have a superiority complex,” Diana says, but the line comes at a point in the film where her superiority looks a lot like martyrdom. We’ve already witnessed her skin blistered by sunburn, her eyes and lips swollen into monstrous bulges, her face and neck lashed with tentacle burns, and her body, coiled on the floor, vomiting — or worse, still in the surf, but so weak and semiconscious and sleep-deprived that she’s paddling in place, suffering agonies without an inch of progress. Hubris keeps her afloat. But it also forces her to jump back into the water.Diana doesn’t pity herself, so neither does the film. Instead, the audience’s empathy is rerouted to Diana’s support team, particularly her weary navigator, John (Rhys Ifans), forever crouched over a map of sea currents, and the film’s second lead, Bonnie, her head coach who is, in essence, a temperature-controlled Jacuzzi overlooking Hurricane Diana. A former racquetball champion and, briefly, Diana’s ex, Bonnie has long since forgiven her friend’s flaws. Their scenes together capture decades of camaraderie in effortless shorthand. Though this is Vasarhelyi and Chin’s first narrative feature, they’re good with actors — although, in fairness, casting Bening and Foster (and their four Oscar nominations each) is like arriving at the poker table with a pair of aces. You get everything about the pair in an early scene when Bonnie throws her best pal the surprise birthday party that she swears she doesn’t want (but, of course, does) only to be ratted out at the door when Diana squints, “Did you blow-dry your hair?”The film switches tones choppily. There’s a scene where a character coughs once and immediately announces that they’re terminally ill. When the swimming is rough, the editing froths into a horror movie with Diana haunted by visions of her sexually abusive childhood coach, Jack Nelson (Eric T. Miller); later, in a halcyon stretch, the film becomes a semi-animated phantasmagoria with Diana posing under the waves like Esther Williams above an imaginary Taj Mahal, colorful fish swirling about her ankles. Diana wants our respect — and by the end of the movie, she’s earned it. While she’s one of the prickliest protagonists you’ll see this year, she’s so raw and earnest and apologetically herself that you adore her anyway — from the safe distance of the screen. But weep for her neighbors, who she wakes up every day at dawn with a bugle blast of “Reveille.”NyadRated PG-13 for salty language and references to childhood sexual abuse. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘In the Court of the Crimson King’ Review: 50 Years of Off-Kilter Rock

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      Toby Amies’s documentary dives into the history of the British progressive rock band King Crimson and its chief disciplinarian, Robert Fripp.The director Toby Amies’s documentary “In the Court of the Crimson King” is part road chronicle and part retrospective, and captures King Crimson, the adventurous British rock ensemble, at what may be the end of its existence. Robert Fripp, for years the band’s sole original member, has strongly suggested that its 2021 tour would be its last. (It hasn’t toured since.)One of the originators of the subgenre called progressive rock or art rock, King Crimson is, depending on whom you ask, either impossibly pretentious or startlingly adventurous. Fripp, an endlessly thoughtful and meticulously articulate guitarist, is the group’s most tireless and paradoxical explainer in the film. He’s fond of pronouncements like, “For silence to become audible, it requires a vehicle. And that vehicle is music.”At one point Fripp describes his experience in the band from 1969 to 2016 as “wretched.” What changed in 2016? He put together a group of stellar musicians who did as he requested. The film features their thoughts along with interviews with past members who had strong differences with Fripp.While the YouTube videos Fripp and his wife, the singer Toyah Willcox, began making during the pandemic reveal the guitarist as a mild-mannered, eccentric, uxorious madcap, he can come off like an egghead martinet in the context of the band he has helmed for half a century. But he is as hard on himself as he is on anyone else, practicing the guitar four to five hours a day and subjecting himself to other forms of discipline such as taking a cold shower in the morning: “Your body doesn’t want to go under a cold shower,” he says in the film. “So you’re saying to your body, ‘Do as you’re told.’”Bill Rieflin offers another perspective on the band, as a musician who chose to spend his last years alive touring with Crimson. He died of cancer in 2020. His devotion renders Fripp’s adages about the sacred nature of music-making palpable.In the Court of the Crimson King: King Crimson at 50Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sly’ Review: No More Mr. Tough Guy

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      This documentary from Thom Zimny tracks Sylvester Stallone’s life and career, though focuses too much on “Rocky” and “Rambo.”“An actor is what he looks like,” Sylvester Stallone told The New York Times in 1976, and more than most stars, Stallone has been viewed as an action figure come to life. In “Sly,” the director Thom Zimny excavates the acts of self-creation behind a career that minted two indelible titular characters in “Rocky” and “Rambo” — whose underdog narratives proved highly influential.“Sly” kicks off with Stallone, now 77, lamenting how life whizzes by, followed by a montage set to Gang of Four’s sizzling “To Hell with Poverty.” Made in collaboration with Stallone’s production company, Balboa Productions, the film doesn’t go on to become an exposé. But it does dwell on his being the son of a violently abusive father, growing up in Hell’s Kitchen in Manhattan before a series of moves.His resulting desire for approval is par for the course among star biographies, but that hurt and his father’s vicious jealousy become the most poignant aspects in the film’s increasingly predictable path. Stymied in the 1970s by stereotypes about his looks and voice, Stallone essentially became his own hero by writing screenplays, soon manifesting success when “Rocky” (1976), which he wrote, won the best picture Oscar over “Taxi Driver,” “All the President’s Men,” “Network” and “Bound for Glory.”What ensues in this documentary is largely a pop-psychologized tour through the “Rambo” and “Rocky” sequels, with the odd outlier. Quentin Tarantino, a Stallone superfan; Frank Stallone, Sylvester’s brother; Talia Shire (Adrian herself); and Wesley Morris, a Times culture critic, offer commentary — with Arnold Schwarzenegger (who also recently got the Netflix documentary treatment) playing hype man.But Stallone’s flair for words — and his references to Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” and the 1968 dynastic drama “The Lion in Winter” — make one wish he’d talked about much more than his greatest hits and misses.SlyRated R for tough talk. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Radical’ Review: To Sergio With Love

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      A vaguely unconventional teacher galvanizes disadvantaged eighth graders in this highly conventional drama.Stop me if you’ve seen this one before: A free-spirited teacher takes a stake in a classroom full of underprivileged youth and unleashes their true potential. This stale and sometimes patronizing premise is recycled in Christopher Zalla’s “Radical,” a sentimental drama that is based on a true story but boxes neatly into familiar packaging. The title is nearly oxymoronic: It boldly belies how close to convention the film hews.Set at an under resourced school in Matamoros, Mexico, the film charts the development of a group of eighth graders after Sergio (Eugenio Derbez) transfers in as their teacher. Drawing side eyes from fellow staff (“the key is to discipline them,” one advises), Sergio adopts a novel method: He lets the students steer their education, and encourages them to seek out knowledge through experiments and play.Sergio’s approach is admirable. But the screenplay distills each of his students into a single salient problem: the one with gang ties; the one saddled with caring for younger siblings; the impoverished one whose timidity veils genius. The film trades in the trope of the angelic, sage child of the slums just waiting for a galvanizing mentor. (One of Sergio’s students constructs a telescope out of garbage heap scraps.)“Do you want to learn from books or from life?” a gang member flaunting a gun asks one of the kids early in the movie, vocalizing the only two paths this movie permits for its young ensemble. Despite its foundation in reality, “Radical” is as by the books as it gets.RadicalRated PG-13 for some gang violence, lots of grandstanding. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fingernails’ Review: Love, Factually

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      Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed play confused lonely-hearts torn between science and emotion in this adorable near-future romance.Heartache and horror walk hand in hand in “Fingernails,” a disarmingly sweet science-fiction romance from the Greek director Christos Nikou. Opening with a brief explanation of the title — the first sign of heart disease is often noticed in the fingernails — and closing on a note of indescribable yearning, this gently humorous movie operates so smoothly you may not notice its subversiveness.Set in an indeterminate near future (the production design has a warm, slightly worn familiarity), the story follows an unemployed schoolteacher named Anna (Jessie Buckley, glowing beneath one of the most unflattering hairdos since Cameron Diaz’s scary perm in 1999’s “Being John Malkovich”). Though comfortably settled with her longtime boyfriend, Ryan (Jeremy Allen White), Anna feels strangely lost: Ryan is sweet but dull, their interaction as predictable as the job interviews she disinterestedly pursues.“Have you tested?” a friend inquires one evening. Responding to a crisis of dwindling romantic partnerships, scientists have developed a test that can determine whether you and your significant other are truly in love. Years earlier, Anna and Ryan had passed the test with flying colors; so why was she feeling so restless, and so attracted to Amir (Riz Ahmed), her handsome new work colleague?And it’s here, in the sly, dry wit of the movie’s middle section, that Nikou jabs cheekily at the wearying clichés of the rom-com, from its de rigueur tropes (wordless eye-gazing, rain-soaked encounters) to its too-easily-forecast finales. As Anna and Amir work with couples at the Love Institute, preparing them to take the test under the benign guidance of a true believer (perfectly played by Luke Wilson), the cinematographer, Marcell Rév, washes scenes in a comforting antique glaze that grounds their ludicrousness. Like eager children, loving couples perfect their romance skills — like memorizing their partner’s scent and, of course, inhaling Hugh Grant movies — before surrendering to the test. Few are thrilled to learn that this will require one of their fingernails, a pair of pliers and a clanking contraption that looks like a vintage oven.Offsetting its outlandish premise with performances of touching credibility, “Fingernails” chooses restraint over passion and silent longing over emotional declaration. The result may feel too cool for some; but Buckley and Ahmed are so naturally expressive that their scenes together have a haunting, wistful quality that’s more moving than any number of florid speeches. And watching White, currently burning hot off “The Bear,” play an unadventurous dullard is its own twisted pleasure.Like Nikou’s first feature, “Apples” (2022), “Fingernails” is absurd and more than a little dystopian. Both movies are carefully paced and mildly melancholic, their characters alienated from the common herd. This time, though, Nikou is more clearly linking belonging with pain, underscoring the foolishness of believing we can love without risk — and questioning why we would want to.Unlike too many conventional rom-coms, “Fingernails” sees love as ineffable, its ebb and flow impervious to scientific measurement or behavioral tinkering. Maybe, in the words of the unimpeachable Iris DeMent, we should just let the mystery be.FingernailsRated R for bloodied fingers and bruised feelings. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ Review: Mississippi Memories

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      Raven Jackson’s film offers a rich portrait of growing up in rural Mississippi and heralds a fresh, poetic talent.The opening of Raven Jackson’s debut feature, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” announces the arrival of a filmmaker grounded in the lyrical beauty of her characters and the loamy grace of the place they so deeply inhabit. In this case, rural Mississippi.Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson), our protagonist, strokes a fish’s opalescent scales. Frogs call and cicadae whir. Mack’s father (Chris Chalk) guides her fishing as her sister, Josie (Jayah Henry), watches doubtful. This scene offers the first close-up of hands. There will be many more: hands grasping river silt, long fingers against the weave of a blanket swaddling a newborn, hands clasped in youthful want.While several performers portray Mack at different stages of her life, Charleen McClure depicts her as an observant teenager and as a pensive woman. The film sidesteps being a coming-of-age tale, instead looping from Mack’s past to her present, again and again, because that’s how memory unfolds.So, the film isn’t chiefly about what happens, however understatedly: the death of a young mother (the mesmerizing Sheila Atim), the tentativeness of first love, the relinquishment of a child. It is about the where of these events and how they really feel.The movie is steeped in the sensual (like a Toni Morrison novel or a Mary Oliver poem). Exquisite use of close-ups, fluid editing and a deeply observant sound design renders Mack’s story tactile but also poetic, making plain that the salt here is the stuff of tears, the stuff of sorrows and of joys.All Dirt Roads Taste of SaltRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More