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      Why the Documentary Oscar Race Is the Most Unpredictable One

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      All five nominees are international features focused on geopolitical events, and three are directed by women.Most post-nomination Oscar chatter focuses on surprises and snubs connected to the fiction nominees. But I’m a nonfiction nerd, so for me the documentaries are where it’s at, and in recent years, the picks have grown delightfully unpredictable. This year, two seeming slam dunks were left off the list: “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” and “American Symphony,” about the musician Jon Batiste. Both are artful, and their nominations had seemed assured because, at least in the past, well-made portraits tended to get eyeballs and thus votes.But here we are, in a strange new world. Biographical documentaries are still hugely popular; next to true crime, they’re what’s hot in nonfiction right now, as our recently reviewed releases “June” and “Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero” indicate. This time around, though, the voters cast their net more widely.Much more widely, in fact. Don’t look now, but this may be the most groundbreaking category at the awards. All five are international films, centering mostly on geopolitical situations. Three are directed by women. And all five are also, as it happens, very good.“The Eternal Memory,” a second nomination for the Chilean director Maite Alberdi (her first was “The Mole Agent”), landed on my Top 10 list last year. (Stream it on Paramount+.) It deals with the erasure of public memory in Chile, refracted through the relationship of one couple: the prominent cultural journalist Augusto Gongora and his wife, Paulina Urrutia, as she cares for him after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. (Gongora died last May.)The nomination of “Four Daughters” made its Tunisian director, Kaouther Ben Hania, the first Arab woman to be nominated twice at the Oscars. (Her first, “The Man Who Sold His Skin,” was nominated for best international feature.) “Four Daughters” (for rent on most major platforms and streaming here) explores radicalization in a single Tunisian family and uses unexpected techniques, like having actors play out scenes in the family’s life.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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      2024 Sundance Film Festival: Will Ferrell Documentary and More

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      A documentary about Will Ferrell and his friend Harper Steele brought the house down. It was just one of several discoveries at this year’s festival.On Tuesday, after days of tramping around Park City, Utah, griping about the movies and the logistical headaches this mountain resort town presents, I was transported into the Sundance Film Festival that I always hope for, the one in which a movie surprises and moves and maybe delights me, and so successfully makes good on its promise that, after the lights come up, the crowd delivers the festival version of hallelujah with a floor-shaking standing ovation. I admit, I wasn’t expecting that to happen when I walked into the new Will Ferrell joint.That would be “Will & Harper,” a documentary by Josh Greenbaum in which Ferrell and his longtime friend Harper Steele, a trans woman, set off on a momentous cross-country journey of discovery. Former colleagues at “Saturday Night Live,” where Steele was a head writer, they have collaborated on other Ferrell vehicles, including the Spanish-language comedy “Casa de Mi Padre.” Here, prompted by love and interest — Steele yearns to feel more at ease in public, Ferrell wants to support and understand his friend’s transition — they deepen their friendship while traveling through a predictably divided country.Like many, if not most, of the movies on this year’s slate, “Will & Harper” will probably make its way into theaters and onto streaming. I hope that’s the case for another movie about trans identity: Jules Rosskam’s “Desire Lines,” a low-budget documentary that doesn’t have star power, just heart and intelligence. It deserves more attention than, say, “It’s What’s Inside,” Greg Jardin’s gimmicky, ugly-looking and unscary horror movie, which Netflix bought for an eye-popping $17 million. Splashy festival deals like this one generate a lot of noise but there’s always much behind-the-scenes haggling, so I’m hopeful that “Desire Lines” and some of the other lower-radar selections will reach a larger audience.Aden Hakimi and Theo Germain in “Desire Lines,” directed by Jules Rosskam.Marie Hinson, via Sundance InstituteMovie love is why tens of thousands of attendees continue to gather at Sundance, which ends on Sunday. With 91 features on the slate, the program was somewhat more streamlined this year than in recent editions; in 2023, it presented 110 features. The smaller lineup and reduced number of Park City theaters suggested that the rumors about the festival having some serious money issues were true. It also made me wonder if this time the festival really was going to leave Park City. When I asked Eugene Hernandez, the festival’s director, whether the event was moving, he answered, “Park City is our home, Utah is our home.”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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      ‘In the Summers’ and ’Didi’ Among 2024 Sundance Film Festival Winners

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      The jury focused largely on under-the-radar titles, though a Jesse Eisenberg-Kieran Culkin collaboration also was recognized.“In the Summers,” an independent film about two sisters navigating fraught summer visits with their father, won the top prize in the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. dramatic competition on Friday. The movie also won the competition’s directing award for its first-time filmmaker, Alessandra Lacorazza.“This film snuck up on us,” read a citation delivered by the jury, which was made up of the director Debra Granik, the cartoonist Adrian Tomine and the producer Lena Waithe. “A film like this can easily slip through the cracks, and for that reason we have chosen to shed light on this beautiful piece of cinema and we hope it finds the audience it so well deserves.”That appeared to be the animating ethos for many of the jury’s picks, which went to worthy but lower-profile entries in competition, though the screenwriting award was given to Jesse Eisenberg for his buzzy comedy, “A Real Pain,” a road-trip movie he directed and starred in alongside Kieran Culkin. The film sold to Searchlight for $10 million in one of the festival’s biggest deals.Audience awards voted on by festival attendees went to the likes of “Didi,” a teen coming-of-age movie from Sean Wang, the documentary “Daughters,” about four girls attending a daddy-daughter dance with their imprisoned fathers, and the Irish rap movie “Kneecap.”Here are the rest of the top awards. For a complete list of winners, including short films and special jury prizes, go to sundance.org.Grand Jury PrizesU.S. Dramatic Competition: “In the Summers”U.S. Documentary Competition: “Porcelain War”World Cinema Dramatic Competition: “Sujo”World Cinema Documentary Competition: “A New Kind of Wilderness”Next Innovator Award: “Little Death”Directing, U.S. Dramatic: Alessandra Lacorazza, “In The Summers”Directing, U.S. Documentary: Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, “Sugarcane”Directing, World Cinema Dramatic: Raha Amirfazli and Alireza Ghasemi, “In the Land Of Brothers”Directing, World Cinema Documentary: Benjamin Ree, “Ibelin”Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic: Jesse Eisenberg, “A Real Pain”Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award, U.S. Documentary: Carla Gutiérrez, “Frida”Audience AwardsFestival Favorite Award: “Daughters”U.S. Dramatic Competition: “Didi”U.S. Documentary Competition: “Daughters”World Cinema Dramatic Competition: “Girls Will Be Girls”World Cinema Documentary Competition: “Ibelin”Next: “Kneecap” More

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      Malia Obama Debuts Short Film at Sundance Film Festival

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      The former first daughter’s short, “The Heart,” focuses on a sensitive man racked with guilt when his mother dies after they have an argument.If you’re a celebrity seeking to rebrand, the Sundance Film Festival can offer a useful assist. From Marvel superheroes seeking an indie turn to teenage movie stars hoping to segue into spicy adult roles, the snowy event is the perfect place to debut a new direction.This year’s big rebrand was so skillfully executed that many people I ran into here at Sundance didn’t even know it had happened at all. If they had, we might have gotten a mob scene at one of the typically sedate short-film showcases, where an 18-minute project called “The Heart” premiered from a fledgling filmmaker credited as Malia Ann, though she’s much better known as Malia Obama, the daughter of the former president.Now 25, Obama is no Hollywood neophyte: After interning at the Weinstein Company in 2017, she studied filmmaking at Harvard as a visual and environmental studies major and then, upon graduation, wrote for the Amazon series “Swarm.” That show was cocreated by Donald Glover, who also served as executive producer of “The Heart” and has been helping to steer Obama’s nascent career: “The first thing we did was talk about the fact that she will only get to do this once,” Glover told GQ last year. “You’re Obama’s daughter. So if you make a bad film, it will follow you around.”That’s not a fate likely to befall “The Heart,” a well-shot and spare debut. Effectively a two-hander, the short stars singer-actor Tunde Adebimpe as Joshua, a sensitive man who still lives with his mother (LaTonya Borsay). After they have a passive-aggressive fight about the groceries and share a silent, side-by-side TV dinner, Joshua goes upstairs for a shower. Minutes later, his mother clutches her chest, collapses to the floor and dies alone.Tunde Adebimpe in a scene from “The Heart.”Sundance InstituteRacked with guilt, Joshua finds it hard to move on, not least because he must now carry around a jar containing his mother’s preserved heart, as per her will. But he gets a second chance of sorts when he encounters a stranger on the street who looks just like his departed mother. Determined to say the things he never got to tell her when she was alive, Joshua ultimately learns that maybe he should go a little bit easier on himself.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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      ‘Mutt,’ ‘Unpregnant’ and More Streaming Gems

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      The complexities of 21st-century romantic entanglements are front and center in this month’s roundup of hidden gems on your subscription streaming services.‘Mutt’ (2023)Stream it on Netflix.Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s micro-budget New York drama is everything indie movies are supposed to be: keenly observed and modestly executed, telling us a story and showing us a world we don’t usually see in mainstream cinema. In this case, it’s the world of Feña (Lío Mehiel), a transgender man and a semi-desperate pseudo-hustler whose life goes momentarily topsy-turvy when he accidentally reconnects with a former boyfriend from before his transition. Every performer is on point, natural and credible, and the screenplay is lived-in and mostly devoid of histrionics (Feña gives a big speech to his dad about how difficult it all is, and it’s the single false note, the only scene that feels like a scene from a movie instead of a scene from real life). This is a small film, but a mighty one.‘Unpregnant’ (2020)Stream it on Max.When this Max original debuted in 2020, its story — of a young woman (Haley Lu Richardson, “The White Lotus”) inviting her former BFF (Barbie Ferreira, “Euphoria”) on an impromptu road trip to a state that doesn’t require parental consent for an abortion — felt a bit less urgent. In this post-Dobbs world, in which such journeys have become necessary even for some adults, the picture’s light tone and comic beats could seem to make light of a serious situation. But the co-writer and director Rachel Lee Goldenberg balances these trick tones with aplomb, primarily focusing on the splintered (but repairable) friendship between these disparate women, without trivializing the motivation for their reunion. The result is a sharp but likable road movie, and a fine showcase for two charismatic performers.‘Crush’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.The filmmaker Sammi Cohen, who had a popular hit on Netflix with last year’s Adam Sandler (and family) vehicle “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” directs this delightfully frisky queer teen sex comedy. Rowan Blanchard is Paige, split between two potential romantic interests: the popular Gabriela (Isabella Ferreira) and the introverted AJ (Auli‘i Cravalho), who also, inconveniently enough, happen to be sisters. Though contemporary in its setting and sexual politics, “Crush” betrays Cohen’s love for ’90s teen comedies of the “Clueless” ilk, borrowing their candy-colored aesthetics as well as their knowing and occasionally adult-oriented sense of humor. Blanchard is a charming anchor, Ferreira a memorable counterpoint and Cravalho, currently brightening up “Mean Girls” and best known to younger viewers for voicing “Moana,” is one of the most exciting young actors on the scene.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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      ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Stomps Into ‘Oppenheimer’ Territory

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      Those movies, along with “The Boy and the Heron,” are essentially in conversation about the moral weight of American and Japanese actions in World War II.I wasn’t expecting to cry as much as I did at “Godzilla Minus One.” The strong word-of-mouth made it sound like an awesome spectacle with cool action courtesy of the scaly title creature. And while there were awe-inducing showdowns with the monster, the Toho International production, written and directed by Takashi Yamazaki, is largely a meditation on sorrow and survival in the wake of World War II.The specter of trauma has long hung over Godzilla, a creature unearthed from slumber by H-bomb testing in the 1954 original. But “Godzilla Minus One” (a black-and-white version is reaching theaters on Friday) further literalizes that as it tells the story of Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), a kamikaze pilot who shirks his duties, surviving both the war and an initial encounter with the beast, only to return to the ruins of Tokyo haunted by what he witnessed. Godzilla poses a threat, but one that lives mostly in the background. Instead, this is a story about finding community in the wake of destruction and learning to value yourself in a society that deems you worthless.As I watched, I couldn’t help but think about how “Godzilla Minus One” exists in conversation with two other recent releases: Hayao Miyazaki’s otherworldly exploration of grief, “The Boy and the Heron,” and Christopher Nolan’s biographical drama, “Oppenheimer.” Both “Godzilla Minus One” and “The Boy and the Heron” at least partly answer the question that some audiences had after the release of “Oppenheimer,” which documents the invention of the atomic bomb. Namely, where was the Japanese perspective in this story about the man whose invention caused so much pain for them?Neither “Godzilla Minus One” nor “The Boy and the Heron” is explicitly about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They both deal with life in Japan during and after World War II, using the fantastical to portray a people grappling with the lasting effects of a devastating conflict and their anger at those in power who were responsible. Together, the films also prove that literalism isn’t always required in stories that impart messy truths about humanity.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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      ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ Review: Layers of Love and Memory

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      The Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho draws on fact and fiction in this image-rich documentary that moves fast and far, but always returns home.Early in “Pictures of Ghosts,” an exhilarating documentary about specters onscreen and off, the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, pulls out a VHS tape. It’s of a 1981 TV interview with his mother, Joselice, a historian who died at age 54. In close-up, she discusses gathering information left out of history, an approach that her son has embraced here. After the tape abruptly cuts off, he says in voice-over, “it may seem like I’m discussing methodology” — as if speaking now both for his mother and for himself — “but I’m talking about love.”Love suffuses “Pictures of Ghosts,” a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home. Divided into three fluidly edited sections that build into a cohesive whole, the movie draws from both original and archival material, including photographs, newsreels, home movies, amateur films and images sampled from Mendonça Filho’s features. The results unfold at the crossroads of fiction and documentary, a space that Mendonça Filho knows well. “Fiction films are the best documentaries,” as a character in a movie says here.A film critic turned filmmaker, Mendonça Filho is best known for his own fictional movies, most notably “Aquarius” (2016). A nuanced, idiosyncratic drama set in his hometown, Recife, a northeastern port city on the Atlantic coast, it centers on a music critic (Sônia Braga), her circle of intimates, the enviably ocean-facing apartment in which she lives and the gentrification that she resists. It’s about stasis and change, memory and loss, art and commerce as well as a struggle for sovereignty. The building’s owners are trying to force her out, which means that it’s also about money and power — all themes that haunt “Pictures of Ghosts.”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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      ‘Miller’s Girl’ Review: Teacher’s Dirty Looks

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      Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega fight pheromones and cliché in this eye-rolling duel between a teacher and his student.You can almost smell the arousal wafting from the screen as “Miller’s Girl” wends its overheated way through lubricious conversations and a comically on-the-mark soundtrack. Even the camera turns dreamy whenever the improbably named Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) — a microskirted tease and the film’s linchpin — activates her pout, especially if she’s chewing or smoking. It should be said that either is preferable to her talking.And oh, how she talks, her pretentious narration as grating as her precocious reading habits. A trust-fund teenager with absent parents and a Southern mansion at her disposal, Cairo arrives for her initial high-school writing class having already inhaled everything on the syllabus. Her professor, Jonathan Miller (an uncomfortably miscast Martin Freeman, who may have lost his professional bearings along with his English accent), is understandably turned on: A languishing writer who lacks both literary inspiration and behavioral boundaries, Jonathan is easy prey for Cairo’s jailbait shtick.A work of glaring artifice, “Miller’s Girl,” written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, is being touted as a psychological thriller, but it’s too vapid and silly to do much besides titillate. Bugs crawl on windowsills and a lighted cigarette drifts lazily to the floor in a movie that traps gifted actors in a fog of pheromones and cliché. Jonathan’s disappointed wife (Dagmara Dominczyk) slinks around in various states of undress and sobriety, like one of Tennessee Williams’s ruined heroines; Cairo’s best friend (Gideon Adlon, a standout) lusts after a baseball coach (a jovial Bashir Salahuddin), who lusts right back. Of course Cairo’s favorite author is Henry Miller.“This is inappropriate,” a chastened Jonathan finally admonishes Cairo, having climaxed while reading her term paper. She may be a minx, but he’s the real monster.Miller’s GirlRated R for smutty language and puerile poetry. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More