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      ‘The Shark Is Broken’ Review: A Bloodless Postscript to ‘Jaws’

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      Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the theater, a play about the making of Hollywood’s first summer blockbuster bobs up on Broadway.For nine weeks in 1974, off the shore of Martha’s Vineyard, the shooting of “Jaws” was repeatedly delayed by the whims of its temperamental stars. And by “stars,” I mean Bruce.Bruce was the name given to the three mechanical predators built to simulate the great white shark at the heart of the story. As one after another became bloated with saltwater or entangled in seaweed and failed to operate or flat-out sank — the crew called the movie “Flaws” — there was little the three equally temperamental human stars could do but try (and usually fail) to be patient. Occasionally they wondered if it might not have been better to train an actual great white for the role.After seeing “The Shark Is Broken,” a play about that disastrous shoot, you may wonder the opposite: whether it might not have been better to cast the movie with mechanical humans. The real ones were nearly as glitchy as Bruce. Aboard the Orca, the lobster boat on which much of “Jaws” was filmed, the actors Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider bickered, brawled, vomited, kvetched, drank, backstabbed and, like Bruce, broke down.All of that is faithfully rendered in “The Shark Is Broken,” which opened on Thursday at the Golden Theater, in a production directed by Guy Masterson. There’s a perfect replica of the Orca bobbing prettily on a C.G.I. sea, and costumes minutely matched to the film. (Duncan Henderson is the designer.) Accents, postures, props and hairstyles are fanatically accurate; there’s even a hat-tip (by Adam Cork) to John Williams’s sawing, rasping theme at the start.But these details do not on their own create much dramatic interest. Plots consisting of hurry-up-and-wait rarely do. Were it not for its curious meta-story, the play would be little more than a pleasant diversion: 95 minutes of bloodless, toothless, Hollywood-adjacent dramedy.The meta-story gives it a bit more bite. Robert Shaw, who played the Ahab-like shark hunter Quint in “Jaws,” is played here by Ian Shaw, who is one of his sons. Ian, who could be his father’s twin, is also, with Joseph Nixon, the play’s author. The ancient theme of paterfamilias versus prodigal is obviously engaged, also organizing the arcs of the characters. Like a dorsal fin poking over the waves, their filial conflicts suggest the story’s dark undertow.Unfortunately, the undertow remains mostly under in Masterson’s leisurely, self-satisfied staging; you could ask for more urgency even in a play about filling time. But this is quite clearly a love letter, if a complicated one, to a parent who achieved greater success in the same field as his son. (A noted stage actor who crossed back and forth to film, Robert won an Oscar for “A Man for All Seasons.”)So even though we see him drink himself into a stupor, ruthlessly bully Dreyfuss (Alex Brightman) to “improve his performance,” and browbeat Scheider (Colin Donnell) about his sunbathing and spirituality, Ian has him winking with gruff charm to take the edge off the awfulness. He also makes sure to show us, in two set pieces, how fine an actor his father was and thus, in an Oedipal somersault, how fine he is, too.Accents, postures, props and hairstyles are fanatically faithful to the movie, our critic writes, and the set is even a replica of the Orca, the lobster boat on which much of “Jaws” was filmed.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOne of those set pieces — the “U.S.S. Indianapolis” monologue from the movie, in which Quint reveals the origin of his shark hatred — can at least be justified by the story. We watch Robert rehearse it and flub it until, in the play’s last beat, he nails it. But the barely motivated inclusion of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 (“When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”) comes off as overkill, even though gorgeously spoken; it’s as if “The Shark Is Broken” were a brief for Robert’s admission to actors’ heaven, with Gielgud at the gate.The sonnet’s supposed purpose is to calm Dreyfuss, who is having a panic attack, but Dreyfuss, playing the marine biologist Hooper in the movie, is a full-time panic attack anyway. Brightman’s wicked impersonation, complete with Dreyfusian giggles, shrugs and glasses-pokes, highlights the boundless neurosis of a character who says, “Nothing good ever happened to any Jew on the water.” When he admits he took the role in “Jaws” only because he was sure, at 26, his career was over, it sounds like he means his life was.That he and Scheider (as the police chief Brody) are given daddy issues helps bind their stories thematically to that of both Shaws. Robert’s father, we learn, was an alcoholic who died by suicide; Ian’s of course was Robert, enough said.Still, Dreyfuss’s guilt over not becoming a lawyer and Scheider’s mild recollections of his father’s beatings feel underwhelming. In the competition for messed-up-ness, they lose every heat handily to Robert, and recede in his wake — especially Scheider, who has little to do but placate the others. His best scene, which the silky Donnell carries off perfectly, finds him stripping to his Speedo to catch some rays; there are no lines.That’s telling, because the dialogue overall is labored. Through much of the longish first scene, the authors stuff résumé excerpts and scraps of back story into envelopes of supposedly casual dialogue. (“I shot this thing last year,” Dreyfuss says, “‘The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.’”) Casting about for laughs, they use whatever chum they can, whether it’s borrowed W.C. Fields or cheesy backfilled irony. “There will never be a more immoral president than Tricky Dicky,” Scheider says of Richard Nixon, welcoming the audience’s look-how-that-turned-out response.In the end, “The Shark Is Broken” isn’t interested in argument and interpretation any more than “Jaws” was. When Dreyfuss says the movie they’re making is about the subconscious, and Scheider posits that it’s about responsibility, Shaw, as always, wins by proclamation. “It’s about a shark!” he brays.So is the play, in a way, and that’s why it remains diverting enough for a summer on Broadway. Its sharks are human, though. They’re called sons.The Shark Is BrokenThrough Nov. 19 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; thesharkisbroken.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Heart of Stone’ Review: Mission Improbable

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      Gal Gadot plays an international superspy who teams up with an all-powerful computer in this ludicrous and derivative Netflix espionage thriller.In the early going, “Heart of Stone” seems like a pretty routine action thriller about spies. Gal Gadot stars as Rachel Stone, a rookie hacker for an MI6 unit; when we meet her in the movie’s opening sequence, she’s in the middle of a covert mission to ensnare an arms dealer in the Italian Alps, ferrying her elite squad of operatives past high-tech security systems, mainly by tapping away at a computer, looking very serious and saying stuff like “writing a new access code … the system’s offline!”As tradecraft goes, this is not exactly John le Carré. But soon the bland espionage intrigue gains a surprising wrinkle: It transpires that Stone is a double agent working for another, even more secret intelligence agency, known as the Charter, which controls an all-powerful computer called the Heart. A kind of omniscient algorithm described at one point as “the closest thing mankind has to perfect intelligence,” the Heart has access to “trillions of data points” that effectively allow it to predict the future. Wired into the Charter headquarters via earpiece, Stone receives prophetic guidance from the Heart’s tech guru (Matthias Schweighöfer) to be transformed into an all-seeing superhero.The Heart’s on-the-fly analyses are rendered as big floating digital maps clogged with barely legible graphs and statistics, and Schweighöfer, scrutinizing the data, is forced to spend much of his screen time standing there waving his hands around in a vain effort to look like he’s actually controlling something. (Steven Spielberg made this same sort of thing look cool in “Minority Report,” but the “Heart of Stone” director Tom Harper does not have quite the same touch.) And yet, even if the computer shenanigans look goofy, they’re more interesting than the movie’s run-of-the-mill spy thrills. Bewilderingly, Rachel’s access to the Heart is severed early in the film’s second act — dragging us right back to the mundane cloak-and-dagger stuff.Computerless, Rachel gets her hands dirty through car chases, fist fights and more to regain control of the Heart’s predictive powers. Here, the movie’s influence shifts from “Minority Report” to a franchise also starring Tom Cruise: “Mission: Impossible,” from which “Heart of Stone” steals multiple set pieces in their entirety. A motorcycle chase strikingly similar to the exquisite one from “Rogue Nation” looks flat and pedestrian by comparison, with dull staging and a corny gag; its knockoff “Fallout” HALO jump, however, is shameless plagiarism, made all the more insulting by appearing so ludicrously fake. Cruise jumped out of an actual airplane. Gadot free falls through bad C.G.I.Cruise’s adversary in the latest “Mission: Impossible” is an omnipotent algorithm with the power to destroy humanity — a metaphor for the data-driven forces of the streaming landscape eroding the sanctity of the cinema. What does it say that in “Heart of Stone,” from Netflix, the heroes work for the computer, and the powerful algorithm is represented as a force for good? If Cruise is trying to save the movies, as he’s often credited with doing, he’s trying to save us from films like this.Heart of StoneRated PG-13 for intense action, strong language and some graphic violence. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Striking Writers and Studios Agree to Restart Negotiations

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      The two sides in the Hollywood stalemate will formally meet on Friday, after an informal sidebar session last week.As television and movie writers started their 101st day on strike on Thursday, the leaders of their union said they had agreed to formally restart negotiations with studios for a new three-year contract.“Our committee returns to the bargaining table ready to make a fair deal, knowing the unified W.G.A. membership stands behind us and buoyed by the ongoing support of our union allies,” the Writers Guild of America negotiating committee said in a statement. The session will take place in Los Angeles on Friday.The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of entertainment companies, declined to comment. Carol Lombardini, the alliance’s president, contacted the Writers Guild on Wednesday with a request to return to formal negotiations. Her appeal followed an informal sidebar session between the two sides late last week.After that meeting, the Writers Guild sent a note to its 11,500 members saying Ms. Lombardi had indicated a willingness by studios to sweeten their contract offer in some areas, including finding ways to safeguard writers from artificial intelligence technology. The note added, however, that Ms. Lombardini had said studios “were not willing to engage” on other Writers Guild proposals, including success-based residual payments from streaming services. The note said guild leaders would not return to negotiations until studios were willing to engage on all proposals.The announcement of a return to the bargaining table was the first positive development in a dual labor walkout — tens of thousands of actors went on strike in mid-July — that has brought Hollywood production to a halt. Late-night television shows immediately went dark, and broadcast networks have retooled their fall seasons to include mostly reality series.Last week’s session, which lasted about an hour, was the first time the lead negotiators from each side had sat down in person since May 1, when talks collapsed. Both sides had characterized it as a meeting to determine whether it made sense to restart talks. With a strike starting to hurt companies and writers alike, was there a give-and-take to be had? Pressure has been increasing from multiple directions to reach an agreement.“It is critical that this gets resolved immediately so that Los Angeles gets back on track, and I stand ready to personally engage with all the stakeholders in any way possible to help get this done,” Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, said in a statement last Friday.Screenwriters and actors are worried about not receiving a fair share of the spoils of a streaming-dominated future. They say streaming-era business practices have made their profession an unsustainable one.Many streaming shows have eight to 12 episodes per season, compared with more than 20 made for traditional television. Writers are fighting for better residual pay, a type of royalty for reruns and other showings, which they have said is a crucial source of income for the middle-class writer whose compensation has been upended by streaming.The Writers Guild also wants studios to guarantee that artificial intelligence will not encroach on writers’ credits and compensation. The studios rejected the guild’s proposed guardrails, instead suggesting an annual meeting on advances in technology. (In recent weeks, studio executives have said in interviews that they made a mistake by not taking the union’s A.I. concerns more seriously.)The studios defended their offer after negotiations broke down, saying in a statement that it included “generous increases in compensation for writers.” The primary sticking points, studios have said, are union proposals that would require studios to staff TV shows with a certain number of writers for a specified period, “whether needed or not.”Caught in the crossfire of the Writers Guild and SAG-AFTRA, as the actors’ guild is known, are tens of thousands of crew members and small businesses (dry cleaners, caterers, lumber yards) that support movie and television production. The 2007-8 writers’ strike cost the California economy more than $2 billion, according to the Milken Institute, which recently estimated that losses this time could be double that figure. More

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      ‘The Last Voyage of the Demeter’ Review: Blood on the Water

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      This horror movie, based on a chapter from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” is set on a cargo ship unwittingly transporting an evil demon.Horror heads are accustomed to screeching at the screen, “Don’t go in the basement!” In “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” I found myself inclined toward the reverse exclamation: “Just go below deck and kill him already!”Based on a chapter in Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula,” this squally scary movie is set on a London-bound merchant ship doomed to a bloody routine. Days are safe, but sundown brings the terrorizing thirst of the vessel’s vampire stowaway, who emerges in darkness to bite a few necks before retiring to his makeshift cargo coffin.The regularity of Dracula’s circadian timetable raises the question: Why doesn’t the crew just attack around noon? It could have saved the movie’s beneficent hero, Clemens (Corey Hawkins), a boatload of trouble.The movie begins as Clemens, a British doctor, appeals to Captain Eliot (Liam Cunningham) to join the Demeter’s company. The only educated man onboard, Clemens nonetheless proves an able deckhand, winning the favor of both the salty first mate, Wojchek (David Dastmalchian), and the captain’s wide-eyed grandson, Toby (Woody Norman).But “The Last Voyage,” directed by André Ovredal, doesn’t waste time on characterizations. Before long, bad omens and creaky floorboards give way to repetitive, swollen set pieces as Dracula picks off the shipmates one by one. The script does find time for a feeble feminist gesture — the story’s sole woman can cock a rifle — and a monologue about racism. These efforts to update the tale are about as successful as those of the sorry crew, whose fates were written over a century ago.The Last Voyage of the DemeterRated R for fighting and biting. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Love Life’ Review: Encounters in Grief

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      In this Japanese drama from Koji Fukada, the death of a child alters life for a couple and for the boy’s previously absent father.The Japanese writer-director Koji Fukada made his international mark with “Harmonium” (2017). Like that film, “Love Life,” his latest feature, concerns a family shaken up both by an interloper’s arrival and by a sudden tragedy, this time in the reverse order.Taeko (Fumino Kimura) is raising a 6-year-old son, an Othello board game prodigy named Keita (Tetta Shimada), with her husband, Jiro (Kento Nagayama). The arrangement wasn’t Jiro’s original plan: He had been preparing to marry a colleague, but he cheated on her with Taeko and ended up marrying Taeko instead. Taeko was already a mother to Keita, whose father abandoned them. Now Jiro’s parents, especially his dad, scorn Taeko and Keita as not theirs.Then — in a development that occurs around 20 minutes in, necessitating a spoiler warning — Keita dies while sustaining a concussion in a bathtub accident, after wandering off during a party. (Fukada, who elsewhere favors a placid, unobtrusive visual style, plays the drowning for suspense with an exceptionally cruel slow zoom.)The death lures back Keita’s absent father, Park (Atom Sunada), a South Korean man who is also deaf, and who, crashing the funeral, immediately hits Taeko before slapping himself. The recriminations, and efforts to downplay recriminations, begin. Taeko can’t forgive Park for leaving, but she also believes he needs her help. Jiro feels guilty for his relative lack of guilt.It’s more a grief triangle than a love triangle, and a late revelation alters its symmetry, erasing hard-won sympathy for one character. Part of Fukada’s rationale may be that straightforward catharsis would be too easy. But his drama is facile in other ways, particularly in its use of child endangerment as a device.Love LifeNot rated. In Japanese, Korean and Korean sign language, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Last Waltz’ With Robbie Robertson Is One of Rock’s Great Docs

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      The film capturing the Band’s final performance in 1976 is a showcase for the group’s main songwriter and guitarist, Robbie Robertson. And for some, that was a problem.By the mid-1970s, the Band was well known as the group that had backed Bob Dylan on his first electric tour and released a series of its own reverentially reviewed albums that returned music to a pre-psychedelic era and augured a return-to-basics movement in rock. But in 1976, with the quality and sales of its albums both declining, the Band announced a farewell show, full of illustrious guest stars, at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day. The gala concert would be filmed by Martin Scorsese, who in the last few years had directed the provocative and acclaimed films “Mean Streets,” “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” and “Taxi Driver.”The music documentaries of the late ’60s and early ’70s — “Don’t Look Back,” starring a scabrous Dylan, in 1967, then the concert films “Monterey Pop” in 1968 and “Woodstock” in 1970, as well as the Rolling Stones debacle “Gimme Shelter” the same year — were low-budget affairs, underground in their lighting, camerawork and sound. D.A. Pennebaker shot “Don’t Look Back” by himself, using a hand-held camera and 16-millimeter film.“The Last Waltz” — which put a spotlight on the Band’s guitarist and principal songwriter, Robbie Robertson, who died this week at 80 — was a confident, dramatic upgrade with an atypical structure. It begins with the concert’s final song, and incorporates band interviews and B-roll shots to give personality to each member. The 1978 film employs highly stylized backlighting and footlights, avoids audience shots and uses nearly every camera angle except low angle front, which is how bands are traditionally seen by members of an audience. The musicians dressed like western gunslingers ready to face their end, and to counteract all the mythic imagery, the interviews are full of the kind of artifice other films edit out, including awkward exchanges between the band members and Scorsese, their stumbling inquisitor. The movie dwells in shades of purple, the color of bruises and cabernet sauvignon.It didn’t take long for critics to laud “The Last Waltz.” In the British music weekly Record Mirror, Mike Gardner called it “the first rock movie to eschew the shambling amateurism that passes for rock cinema and replace it with the most illustrious professionals within Hollywood.” More resoundingly, Pauline Kael of The New Yorker (no big fan of cinéma vérité) wrote that it was “the most beautiful rock movie ever.”These days, “The Last Waltz” is by consensus one of the best music films in the canon, neck and neck with “Stop Making Sense,” the Talking Heads concert film by Jonathan Demme. Many deconstructions of the Scorsese film describe it as a crucial and irreversible departure in rock filmmaking, a move away from naïve image-capturing and the “shaky camera” of Jonas Mekas, and toward canny image-making.The star power in front of the camera — guests included Dylan, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr and Muddy Waters — was matched by the filmmaking expertise behind it. The crew included the director of photography Michael Chapman, plus seven camera operators, including the renowned Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs, all shooting with 35-millimeter film, as well as the recording engineer and Neil Young collaborator Elliot Mazer. The production designer Boris Leven dressed the Winterland stage with columns, chandeliers and wall hangings from the San Francisco Opera’s staging of “La Traviata,” bringing some 19th-century Italian brio to the farewell concert.How did it all come together? Once the Band decided to disband, Robertson wanted to find “someone special to capture this event on film,” he wrote in “Testimony,” his 2016 memoir. He considered most of the emerging young directors of the mid-70s — Hal Ashby, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Milos Forman — but picked Scorsese, who had been an assistant director and editor on “Woodstock” and was already considered gifted at using music cues onscreen, most notably Jackson Browne’s “Late for the Sky” in “Taxi Driver,” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” by the Rolling Stones, in “Mean Streets.”Robertson, the most sophisticated, charming and socially fluent member of the Band, met Scorsese through Jon Taplin, a Princeton graduate who had been a road manager for the Band, and later produced “Mean Streets.” Once Scorsese signed on, he asked for lyrics to each song in the concert, so he could plan camera movements and lighting changes. He eventually wrote a 200-page shooting script, according to Robertson. Other sources say it was 300 pages.The director and the guitarist grew close, especially during postproduction, and pretty soon they were living together and jetting off to parties in Paris or Rome. That closeness caused friction: Despite the acclaim for “The Last Waltz,” some members of the Band felt that Robertson had made the film about him, rather than about them.The drummer Levon Helm, whose superlatively soulful voice electrifies “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Up on Cripple Creek,” made these criticisms public with the 1993 publication of his memoir “This Wheel’s on Fire.” He called the movie “a disaster” and accused Scorsese of making Robertson look great while ignoring other band members.By then, Robertson and Helm had arrived at very different levels of success and financial comfort. “Robbie won. Levon lost,” Ken Gordon wrote in a 2015 essay in The Bitter Southerner. Some people reflexively side with winners, others with losers, and after Helm’s book came out, Robertson’s reputation suffered in some circles, and possibly influenced subsequent evaluations of “The Last Waltz,” especially after it was rereleased in theaters and on DVD in 2002.“The movie’s real subject is not the Band as a whole, but Robbie Robertson,” Stephen E. Severn wrote in Film Quarterly, adding that “virtually every visual and thematic aspect of ‘The Last Waltz’ is designed to showcase his talents at the expense of the other members of the group.” Nonetheless, Severn affirms that it “may be the best film ever made about the music scene,” one that, unwittingly or not, reveals the cutthroat nature of the business.Nearly 25 years after the release of “The Last Waltz,” its placement on lists of the best music documentaries was so common that the consensus around the film was ripe for a challenge. “‘The Last Waltz’ has inexplicably been called the greatest rock documentary of all time,” Roger Ebert wrote in 2002. In a re-evaluation of the movie that same year, Elvis Mitchell wrote in The New York Times that “part of the pleasure is in watching Robbie Robertson, the group’s leader, seduce Mr. Scorsese.”The movie is more skeptically understood now, but its stature has never waned. Even its stoutest opponents recognize its quality. “Critics called the movie the best and most sumptuous film ever made about a rock concert,” Levon Helm wrote grumpily in his book, “and I suppose that’s true.” More

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      ‘Sound of the Police’ Review: The Silence and the Fury

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      This documentary dives into the nation’s outrageous history of the policing of Black citizens by touching on the 2022 killing of Amir Locke.It is not the first image in “Sound of the Police,” a documentary about the chronically vexed relationship between Black people and police officers, but it is its most chilling: the ominous hush of the police at a front door, signaling the horror to come.In February 2022, a SWAT team entered an apartment in Minneapolis. Body camera footage, released by the city’s police, shows a key being quietly inserted into a lock during a no-knock search warrant operation. Seconds later, Amir Locke, 22, who had been asleep on the living-room couch when roused by the officers, was mortally wounded. Footage shows him, groggy and confused, under a blanket holding his legally owned handgun.The director Stanley Nelson’s freighted film opens with family and friends gathering for Locke’s funeral, a celebration of his life, followed by interviews with his parents. The movie also concludes with them. In between those sad but cleareyed bookends, the filmmakers have packed a necessary history of policing. That Locke’s death came after the killings of Breonna Taylor (also a no-knock warrant) and George Floyd, underscores the movie’s argument: Reforming policing remains a life-or-death matter.For viewers who’ve digested the bitter lessons of the documentaries “13th” and “MLK/FBI,” as well as more recent social-justice portraits of the activist Rev. Al Sharpton (“Loudmouth”) and the civil rights attorney Ben Crump (“Civil”), many of the images of brutality and insights about the abuses of institutional power will be familiar, though no less outrageous. Some early police forces in America were formed from slave patrols, and their violent tactics descend from post-Civil War attempts to control and contain Black people, engendering a justified mistrust.The film boasts a formidable collection of interviewees — among them the legal scholar James Forman Jr., the historian Elizabeth Hinton as well as David Simon, the creator of the police procedural “The Wire.” Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, dissects the social conditions that have enabled police departments to rebuff oversight and have emboldened white citizens to imagine a personal relationship to the police. (The montage of white women making 911 calls to report Black citizens — bird watching, lemonade selling, just tending to life — might be amusing, were it not so pathological.) If you need a refresher on what “systemic” looks like, these thinkers offer it.Sound of the PoliceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and on Hulu. More

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      ‘Aurora’s Sunrise’ Review: A Patchwork Record of the Armenian Genocide

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      This standout documentary combines archival footage and animated re-enactments to share one survivor’s memories.The documentary “Aurora’s Sunrise” shares the great and terrible story of Aurora Mardiganian, an Armenian survivor of the genocide that began in 1915. Aurora was 14 years old and living in a small town in the Ottoman Empire when the violence started. Her peaceful life was obliterated when her father and brother were rounded up and murdered by Ottoman Turk soldiers. Aurora was then forced into a death march across the desert of what is now Syria. She survived weeks of the march and two years of subsequent violence. Aurora witnessed unimaginable atrocities: rivers teeming with corpses, children begging for their lives, bandits pillaging the caravans of survivors.Aurora escaped these horrors through the aid of Armenian resistance groups. Her survival already made her a rarity, but Aurora’s most improbable achievement was that she was able to create a contemporary record of her own memories. This film follows Aurora’s story after she resettled in America and starred in the 1919 silent film, “Auction of Souls,” which dramatized the events of her own life. She never stopped sharing her memories, including in interviews that were filmed decades later.Using many of the materials Aurora left behind, the documentary’s director, Inna Sahakyan, crafts a cohesive narrative of the woman’s life. Clips from “Auction of Souls” and footage from Aurora’s later interviews support animated re-enactments of her recorded memories. Despite the presence of material that is more than 100 years old, the parts using cutouts and rotoscoping (redolent of the 2008 war docudrama “Waltz With Bashir) are what feel the most dated. But even with that herky-jerky animation, the effect of Sahakyan’s compilation is still admirably seamless, and she creates a reconstructed, yet still personal record of a long-unrecognized genocide. The film’s coherence is a reflection of both the skill of the filmmaker, and the heroic efforts of Aurora herself to ensure that her view of history would not be forgotten.Aurora’s SunriseNot rated. In Armenian, Turkish, English, German and Kurdish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More