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      ‘Crater’ Review: A Rocking Road Trip

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      This Disney film is surprisingly nimble at incorporating an emotional core into its sci-fi adventure.You wouldn’t necessarily expect a lightly dystopian undertone concerning the oppressive state of labor in a family-friendly science-fiction Disney film (released during the writers’ strike, no less), but “Crater” manages just that while maintaining the lighthearted fun of a children’s adventure.The film, directed by Kyle Patrick Alvarez, takes place on a lunar mining colony, where miners agree to contracts with the promise that they and their families will earn a ticket to Omega, a distant, habitable planet. Legal loopholes, though, ensure that most don’t actually live to see that day arrive.Yet, via a rule that allows descendants of deceased miners to automatically go to Omega, the film’s young protagonist, Caleb (Isaiah Russell-Bailey, and Hero Hunter in flashbacks), is scheduled to leave the colony after his father (Scott Mescudi, a.k.a. Kid Cudi) dies — only, he doesn’t want to leave his friends behind. Hoping to make the most of their limited time together, Caleb and his friends, with the help of a new girl from Earth (McKenna Grace), steal a lunar rover and embark on a road trip in search of a mysterious crater that Caleb’s father told him to find as a kind of dying wish.It’s refreshing to see Disney invest a decent budget into an original sci-fi world for a live-action film (it’s also a movie that undoubtedly would have flailed at the box office, but may and should find an audience on streaming), and Alvarez makes good use of it. And while it might not have the indelible charm of other children’s classics, “Crater” does well not straining itself trying to please audiences beyond the family crowd. Most of all, the film is surprisingly nimble at incorporating an emotional core that makes its story more interesting than the adventure itself.CraterRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘The Mother’ Review: Are You My Sniper?

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      At the heart of this action-thriller, an expert killer, played by Jennifer Lopez, must rescue her daughter at all costs.A movie called “The Mother” is sure to have a lot of symbolism and this action-thriller, starring Jennifer Lopez as a trained killer who must protect the daughter she gave up, has plenty.In the opening scenes, Lopez’s character, known only as the Mother, is interrogated by F.B.I. agents who are trying to get information on two arms dealers she has worked, and slept, with. Agent Cruise (Omari Hardwick) is respectful. The other agent (Link Baker), not so much — and tells her so with a hectoring monologue. (One of the film’s guilty pleasures becomes anticipating when a mansplainer will get hushed.)In Niki Caro’s fast-paced film, Agent Cruise assures the Mother she’s safe. “No I’m not,” she says. Guess who’s right? Mayhem ensues and, in an act, stunning for its swift violence, we learn the Mother is pregnant. The newborn, Zoe, is placed with a loving family, and the Mother retreats to Alaska where the fellow soldier Jons (Paul Raci) has her back.This arrangement has kept the Mother and child safe for 12 years when Agent Cruise reaches out with news that Zoe (Lucy Paez) has been found by the Mother’s former partners: Adrian Lovell (Joseph Fiennes) and Hector Alvarez (Gael García Bernal). Lovell is a nasty-smooth piece of work. As Alvarez, Bernal basks in some candlelit cruelty when the action shifts to Cuba.What kind of resistance will the men encounter? Lovell trained the Mother as a sniper in Afghanistan. She also knows how to twist a blade.They shouldn’t fool with the Mother’s nature. Apart from some deadpan exchanges between the Mother and Zoe, Lopez plays the role fierce. Even so, it isn’t always clear which gestures in the film should be taken seriously, and which make sport of the genre’s masculine posturing while offering an allegory about a birth mother’s sacrifice.The MotherRated R for gun and knife violence, some language and brief drug use. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Striking Writers Find Their Villain: Netflix

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      Fear of protests prompted the streaming giant to shift an anticipated presentation for advertisers to a virtual event and a top executive to skip an honorary gala.Just over a week after thousands of television and movie writers took to picket lines, Netflix is feeling the heat.Late Wednesday night, Netflix abruptly said it was canceling a major Manhattan showcase that it was staging for advertisers next week. Instead of an in-person event held at the fabled Paris Theater, which the streaming company leases, Netflix said the presentation would now be virtual.Hours earlier, Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, said he would not attend the PEN America Literary Gala at the Museum of Natural History on May 18, a marquee event for the literary world. He was scheduled to be honored alongside the “Saturday Night Live” eminence Lorne Michaels. In a statement, Mr. Sarandos explained that he withdrew because the potential demonstrations could overshadow the event.“Given the threat to disrupt this wonderful evening, I thought it was best to pull out so as not to distract from the important work that PEN America does for writers and journalists, as well as the celebration of my friend and personal hero Lorne Michaels,” he said. “I hope the evening is a great success.”Netflix’s one-two punch in cancellations underscored just how much the streaming giant has emerged as an avatar for the writers’ complaints. The writers, who are represented by affiliated branches of the Writers Guild of America, have said that the streaming era has eroded their working conditions and stagnated their wages despite the explosion of television production in recent years, for much of which Netflix has been responsible.The W.G.A. had been negotiating with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of all the major Hollywood studios, including Netflix, before talks broke down last week. The writers went on strike on May 2. Negotiations have not resumed, and Hollywood is bracing for a prolonged work stoppage.Last week, at a summit in Los Angeles a day after the strike was called, one attendee asked union leaders which studio has been the worst to writers. Ellen Stutzman, the chief negotiator of the W.G.A., and David Goodman, a chair of the writers’ negotiating committee, answered in unison: “Netflix.” The crowd of 1,800 writers laughed and then applauded, according to a person present at that evening who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the strike.The last time the writers went on strike, in 2007, Netflix was little more than a DVD-by-mail company with a nascent streaming service. But over the past decade, Netflix has produced hundreds of original programs, helping to usher in the streaming era and upending the entertainment industry in the process.Initially, Netflix was cheered by the creative community for creating so many shows, and providing so many opportunities.Demonstrations over the past week have underscored just how much writers have soured on the company. In Los Angeles, Netflix’s Sunset Boulevard headquarters have become a focal point for striking writers. The band Imagine Dragons staged an impromptu concert before hundreds of demonstrators on Tuesday. One writer pleaded on social media this week that more picketers were needed outside the Universal lot, lamenting that “everyone wants to have a party at Netflix” instead.People were passing out fliers with messages like “Please Cancel Netflix Until a Fair Deal Is Reached” on the picket lines.Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesOn Wednesday, demonstrators were out in force outside the headquarters. “Ted Sarandos is my dad and I hate him,” read one sign. Another said: “I shared my Netflix password. It’s ‘PAY ME’!”While the writers marched, the veteran television writer Peter Hume affixed fliers to picket signs that read “Cancel Until Contract” and “Please Cancel Netflix Until a Fair Deal Is Reached.”Mr. Hume, who has worked on shows like “Charmed” and “Flash Gordon: A Modern Space Opera,” said the streaming giant was responsible for dismantling a system that had trained writers to grow their careers into sustainable, fulfilling jobs.“I have 26 years of continuous service, and I haven’t worked in the last four because I’m too expensive,” Mr. Hume said. “And that’s mostly because Netflix broke the model. I think they put all the money into production in the streaming wars, and they took it away from writers.”Netflix’s decision to cancel its in-person showcase for marketers next week caught much of the entertainment and advertising industry off guard.The company had been scheduled to join the lineup of so-called upfronts, a decades-old tradition where media companies stage extravagant events for advertisers in mid-May to drum up interest — and advertising revenue — for their forthcoming schedule of programming.Netflix, which introduced a lower-priced subscription offering with commercials late last year, was scheduled to hold its very first upfront on Wednesday in Midtown Manhattan. Marketers were eager to hear Netflix’s pitch after a decade of operating solely as a premium commercial-free streaming service.“The level of excitement from clients is huge because this is the great white whale,” Kelly Metz, the managing director of advanced TV at Omnicom Media Group, a media buying company, said in an interview earlier this week. “They’ve been free of ads for so long, they’ve been the reach you could never buy, right? So it’s very exciting for them to have Netflix join in.”So it came as a surprise when advertisers planning to attend the presentation received a note from Netflix late Wednesday night, saying that the event would be virtual.“We look forward to sharing our progress on ads and upcoming slate with you,” the note said. “We’ll share a link and more details next week.”The prospect of hundreds of demonstrators outside the event apparently proved too much to bear. Other companies staging upfronts in Manhattan — including NBCUniversal (Radio City Music Hall), Disney (The Javits Center), Fox (The Manhattan Center), YouTube (David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center) and Warner Bros. Discovery (Madison Square Garden) — said on Thursday that their events would proceed as normal, even though writers were planning multiple demonstrations next week.After Ted Sarandos said he would skip the PEN America Literary Gala, the organization said, “As a writers organization, we have been following recent events closely and understand his decision.”Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesMr. Sarandos’s decision to pull out of the PEN America Literary Gala will not disrupt that event either. Mr. Michaels, the “Saturday Night Live” executive producer, will still be honored, and Colin Jost, who co-hosts Weekend Update on “Saturday Night Live,” is still scheduled to M.C.“We admire Ted Sarandos’s singular work translating literature to artful presentation onscreen, and his stalwart defense of free expression and satire,” PEN America said in a statement. “As a writers organization, we have been following recent events closely and understand his decision.”The writers’ picket lines have successfully disrupted the productions of some shows, including the Showtime series “Billions” and the Apple TV+ drama “Severance.” On Sunday, the MTV Movie & TV Awards turned into a pretaped affair after the W.G.A. announced it was going to picket that event. The W.G.A. also said on Thursday it would picket the commencement address that David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, is scheduled to give on the campus of Boston University on May 21.One of the writers’ complaints is how their residual pay, a type of royalty, has been disrupted by streaming. Years ago, writers for network television shows could get residual payments every time a show was licensed, whether for syndication, broadcast overseas or a DVD sale.But streaming services like Netflix, which traditionally does not license its programs, have cut off those distribution arms. Instead, the services provide a fixed residual, which writers say has effectively lowered their pay. The A.M.P.T.P., which bargains on behalf of the studios, said last week that it had already offered increased residual payments as part of the negotiations.“According to the W.G.A.’s data, residuals reached an all-time high in 2022 — with almost 45 percent coming from streaming, of which the lion’s share comes from Netflix,” a Netflix spokeswoman said.“Irrespective of the success of a show, Netflix pays residuals as our titles stay on our service,” the spokeswoman said, adding that the practice was unlike what network and cable television did.Outside Netflix’s Los Angeles headquarters on Wednesday, writers on picket lines expressed dismay that the company was beginning to make money off advertising.“If they make money doing ads, my guess would be that ads will become a bigger revenue stream for them,” said Christina Strain, a writer on Netflix’s sci-fi spectacle “Shadow and Bone.” “And then we’re just working for network television without getting network pay.”Sapna Maheshwari More

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      Onstage in Brooklyn, ‘Monsoon Wedding’ Tries to Capture the Film’s Spirit

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      The director Mira Nair was standing inside St. Ann’s Warehouse last week, pointing at a marigold-covered archway that was being assembled near the entrance. Conscious of the wedding photo shoots that often happen just outside the space, she was talking about the musical adaptation of her 2001 film, “Monsoon Wedding,” at the theater, which, situated along the Dumbo waterfront and a stone’s throw from where the East and Hudson Rivers merge. “That’s what our show is about,” she said. “Confluence.”Like the film, the show centers on an arranged marriage that brings together two vastly different Indian families, wedding planners and domestic workers. In the musical, the joyfully chaotic nuptials form a mosaic of questions of genuine attraction (the bride must deal with a scorned secret lover), diaspora (the party, notably the New Jersey-born groom, assembles from all over the world) and relationships across castes and religions.First staged in 2017 at Berkeley Repertory Theater, where it received mixed reviews, the show has made a “beautiful odyssey” to New York, as Nair put it. (It’s actually a return of sorts: Rehearsals for that first staging took place in Manhattan — Anisha Nagarajan reprises her principal role as the bride’s maid, along with Palomi Ghosh as an auntie.) Since then, “Monsoon Wedding” has been retooled, with new choreography, movement direction and scenic design. An additional writer was brought in to help work on the book, and the show was workshopped for friends and family in New Delhi in 2019, where Gagan Dev Riar joined as the bride’s father. Although plans for performances in Britain in 2020 were canceled because of the pandemic, it was staged in Doha last year as part of the cultural programming for the World Cup in Qatar.“It’s about our families, but so deeply universal; it’s an essential story of understanding a whole society,” the director Mira Nair said.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesAt St. Ann’s last Thursday, just two days before the musical was to begin previews, Susan Feldman, the theater’s artistic director, walked by at one point. Minding her step amid sections of a yet-assembled wedding tent, she chimed in that the production “has pushed the Warehouse farther than it’s ever been.”A visual validation of that claim might be Jason Ardizzone-West’s imposing Brutalist set, which runs the length of the large performance space. “It’s a holistic design in the way that the audience relates to the scenery,” Ardizzone-West said during a video call earlier that day. Inspired by the domestic courtyards found in India, he added, the set is a mix of “ancient stepwell structures and modernist architecture, specifically inspired by Le Corbusier, who has a lot of buildings in India.”Nair explained that she always wanted audience members to feel like guests at the wedding, calling the new scenic design “the fruition of many a dream.”From left, Sargam Ipshita Bali, Gagan Dev Riar and Palomi Ghosh in the production. “In India, when you have a wedding in a home, it spills out into courtyards,” Nair said, adding that Jason Ardizzone-West’s imposing Brutalist set conveys that sentiment.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“In India, when you have a wedding in a home, it spills out into courtyards, in canopies, under tents,” she said. “It’s an open door for the community to come celebrate this wedding, and that was the feeling I wanted.”The concrete stateliness of the set, which audience members must cross to get to their seats, is balanced by Arjun Bhasin’s colorful, culturally specific costumes. (“India is like Japan,” Nair quipped, “everything is coded.”) The men’s turbans are a particular shade of lilac, for example and, following tradition, the bride is never seen alone the night before the wedding. Bhasin, who worked on the film and thus considers himself “one of the oldest members of the production,” said the key to preserving its DNA was preserving its focus on character.Nair, left, with one of the show’s book writers, Arpita Mukherjee, center, and its costume designer, Arjun Bhasin, during rehearsals.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“When you eliminate the close-up and get to these tableaus, it becomes about people,” Bhasin explained. “The show is about the interactions of these people together; the upstairs versus the downstairs, the bride’s family versus the groom’s family, all these different love stories.”Work on the adaptation began in 2006, with Nair and the film’s screenwriter, Sabrina Dhawan, collaborating with the composer Vishal Bhardwaj and the lyricist Susan Birkenhead. Nair said she’d been inspired by the 2004 Broadway revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” a show built around cultural traditions adapting to survive. The film, like the musical, touches upon the fallout of India’s 1947 partition, brought to life in the characters’ religious, social and economic differences.“We’d made a movie that was our version, in a sense,” Nair said. “It’s about our families, but so deeply universal — this essential story of understanding a whole society and movement through a very personal story.”Marigold tapestry: The flowers are popular decorations at Hindu weddings.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesMarigolds, umbrellas and suitcases backstage at the theater.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesThat specificity meant weaving into the adaptation the concept of jugalbandi performance, a type of Indian duet. This is felt, not only in the score, which now also features lyrics by Masi Asare (a Tony nominee last year for “Paradise Square,” which similarly dealt with cultural cross-pollination), but in the placement of the band on the sides of the stage.“I think of it as a call-and-response between the music and the actors, and that has shaped it very deeply,” Nair said. “That is why the musicians are on par with the actors, and you see the sitar player and the trombone. It’s a real combination of a brass band and the big full heft of an Indian wedding sound, distilled and very exquisite.”Arpita Mukherjee, the book’s co-writer, was Nair’s assistant before being promoted to associate director and dramaturg during the Berkeley run. She moved to the United States from Delhi when she was 12 and brings an understanding of the emigrant experience to Dhawan’s updated book, which reconfigures the groom’s family as second-generation Indian American.The sitar player Soumitra Thakur at a rehearsal. Nair said she wanted “a real combination of a brass band and the big full heft of an Indian wedding sound.”Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“At the time the film came out, there were still some really antiquated notions about what India was, and no understanding of what a globalized India looked like,” Mukherjee said on a video call. “There’s a great story here about what home, and belonging, means.” She continued: “The really exciting thing is all these different types of brown people who have very different experiences of brownness because of class, or upbringing.”Nair’s work has never shied away from examining cultural distinctions, as in “Mississippi Masala,” an interracial romance between an Black man and Indian American woman, or exploring her native India’s underexposed aspects, like “Salaam Bombay!,” a drama about children living in the slums.For the musical, this quest to reflect the times meant revising one of the film’s subplots about a relative’s grooming and sexual abuse of two younger family members. Where the film’s family grants the wealthy patriarch some degree of amnesty, the musical condemns.The show has new choreography by Shampa Gopikrishna, and Carrie-Anne Ingrouille is the movement director.Lanna Apisukh for The New York Times“We’ve made a concerted effort to have the women question the patriarchy and speak up,” Nair said. “Other characters who are afflicted by this don’t shove it under the rug; they make decisions in their own lives that reflect that they will not accept this behavior, which we didn’t have before.”Mukherjee echoed that sentiment, calling the women “the stewards of a new way of thinking and being.”“They all have a voice in the show, which is looking at what the musical form can do to capture the spirit of the film, but go deeper,” she added. “Music is at the core of that; who gets to sing, who gets to have a voice? There’s a great theme of wanting things to be different from generations before, and it’s all led by women.” More

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      ‘L’immensità’ Review: Roman Holiday

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      Loosely based on the transgender director Emanuele Crialese’s transition, this Italian period drama is a sun-dappled nostalgia trip bristling with Oedipal tension.Penélope Cruz is a vision of tragic beauty when she first appears in the Italian period drama “L’immensità.” The camera captures her in adoring close-up as it grazes over her eyes, traced with black eyeliner and wet with tears. Her character, Clara, is an ordinary upper middle-class mother of three, but in the mind of her eldest, Andrew (Luana Giuliani), she’s a goddess akin to the nation’s great stars, like Monica Vitti or Sophia Loren.Loosely based on the director Emanuele Crialese’s transition, “L’immensità” is a sun-dappled nostalgia trip marked by young Andrew’s hot temper and robust inner fantasy life. He was assigned female at birth, but he knows — despite resistance from his emotionally distant father (Vincenzo Amato), his siblings and his extended family — that he is a man.1970s Rome is no easy place for a transgender person, and though Andrew isn’t outright persecuted, his struggles are ignored or trivialized. Clara, a housewife stuck in a deadbeat marriage, understands the feeling all too well.Unremarkable, naturalistic scenes of youthful adventuring fill out the coming-of-age drama. Andrew takes his younger siblings on excursions through the patch of wild reeds that separate their handsome neighborhood from working-class encampments, eventually striking up a romance with a local girl unaware of — or completely indifferent to — the nature of his identity.More striking are the Oedipal tensions that flare up between Clara and Andrew. He stands up to his father who forces himself on Clara, as he does the creeps who sexually harass her on the streets. In dreams, he imagines himself and his mother as glamorous figures in a monochrome variety-show spectacle, poignant bouts of movie-magic that underscore both Andrew’s innocence and his sharpening intuition: Freedom, for the both of them, will mean upending reality itself.L’immensitàNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Starling Girl’ Review: As the Spirit Moves

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      Eliza Scanlen plays a pious teenager who begins an affair with her youth pastor in this tender coming-of-age drama.In the fundamentalist Christian enclave where “The Starling Girl” takes place, Jem Starling (Eliza Scanlen) is a sensitive 17-year-old who nonetheless cannot escape the idea that she is prone to selfishness.The source of that particular reproach is often the teenager’s intransigent mother, Heidi (Wrenn Schmidt), but beyond parental scolding, a pietistic attitude hangs over this insular Kentucky hamlet like a muggy summer heat wave. Jem even acts as her own castigator, murmuring “out, Satan!” when she feels the urge to masturbate.Jem’s burgeoning libido coincides with the homecoming of Owen (Lewis Pullman), a stoic 28-year-old who returns from a missionary trip to become Jem’s youth pastor. Before long, Jem is nursing a crush on the worldly stud, and Owen, miserable in his marriage and wrestling with conservative Christian dogma, reciprocates her flirtation to commence a clandestine affair.In her debut feature, the writer-director Laurel Parmet uses her rigidly religious setting to home in on the moral anxieties of a young woman socialized to feel shame about vanity, sexuality and pleasure. The drama seems to pose the question: How do you come of age when you are told that one’s love for life should never outweigh one’s fidelity to an outside authority — be it God, community or a self-serving older boyfriend?A tender tale, “The Starling Girl” twirls through a spate of clichés — many surround Jem’s relationship to her alcoholic father, Paul (Jimmi Simpson) — but sticks the landing thanks to Parmet’s rapt attention to the shifting desires of her central character.The Starling GirlRated R. Sins of the flesh. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘It Ain’t Over’ Review: When Yogi Berra Saw a Strike, He Hit It

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      The baseball player, known for his quirky malapropisms, was perpetually underestimated. But a new documentary proves he was a phenomenal talent.The main brief of “It Ain’t Over,” a lively, engaging and moving documentary is more or less stated upfront by a friendly but mildly indignant Lindsay Berra, the granddaughter of its subject, the baseball player Yogi Berra.She recollects watching the 2015 All Star Game with her granddad. That day at the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati were four special guests deemed the greatest living players: Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays. All legends, to be sure. But Berra, in crucial respects a humble man, felt snubbed, as did Lindsay. Because the movie makes a very credible case that Berra was as great a player as any of them.The reason he didn’t make this cut, Lindsay believes, is that Yogi’s boyish, generous personality had come to overshadow his prodigious skill. As Sean Mullin’s documentary points out: As a catcher for the New York Yankees, Berra was awarded Most Valuable Player three times during that team’s remarkable dominance of the game in the 1950s. He was an All-Star for 15 consecutive seasons, and he collected 10 World Series rings.But Berra cut a different figure from baseball heroes of the day. He had an easy grin and read comic books in the locker room. Only five foot seven, he wasn’t big and strapping like Joe DiMaggio. “Everything about him was round,” Roger Angell, one of several sportswriters interviewed here, says of Berra. (Plenty of players chime in, including Derek Jeter, who reflects on Berra’s deceptively simple advice: “When you see a strike, hit it.”)And for all that, he was a phenomenal player. While he didn’t become a catcher until he joined the Yankees, his mental acuity, discipline and intense training from the coach Bill Dickey, plus his own relatively low center of gravity, made him ideal in the position. Yes, you read “mental acuity” correctly. A good catcher has to carry the whole equation of the game in his head. The movie’s account of Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, in which Berra caught the pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game — the only no-hitter in World Series history until last year, and the more recent accomplishment took three different pitchers — is a thrilling demonstration of Berra’s baseball genius.He was also a devoted family man, married for 65 years to Carmen Berra; his extravagantly affectionate and charmingly repetitive love letters to her are read aloud here. And he was a war hero — he was on a rocket boat off Normandy on D-Day in World War II, and while he was wounded, he didn’t apply for a Purple Heart because he didn’t want to worry his mother.Berra’s exemplary life is animated by the inevitable trotting out of his folksy malapropisms known as Yogi-isms. The movie’s title comes from one, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” which nobody, apparently, is sure Berra ever uttered. But the best of them, when you really turn them over, are as profound as Zen koans: “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.” Only an original like Berra could come up with that.It Ain’t OverRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie’ Review: Hiding in Plain Sight

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      The “Back to the Future” star time-travels through his career in this documentary, charting his experiences learning to live with Parkinson’s disease.With apologies to Dr. Emmett Brown, you don’t need a flux capacitor to build a time machine. All you need to do is make a film. “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” a new biographical documentary from Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”), zips through the “Back to the Future” actor’s career with humor and style; it gives the impression that its subject is willing to answer any question. Fox appears, head-on, in contemporary interviews with an off-camera Guggenheim. None of the charisma and charm that made him a star have diminished.But much of what distinguishes “Still” — as it’s simply titled onscreen, sans marketing hook — is how cleverly it has been edited. While this documentary draws on a standard tool kit of re-enactments and archival material, its best device is to use clips of Fox’s own movies as a counterpoint to his words, as if Fox weren’t playing fictional characters, but himself.In a way, he was. “Still” charts his experiences learning to live with Parkinson’s disease, a diagnosis he kept private for years before going public in 1998. One montage — tackily but irresistibly set to INXS’s “New Sensation” — illustrates how he managed to hide his illness in plain sight. Movies like “For Love or Money” (1993) and “Life With Mikey” (1993) reveal his practice of putting an object in his left hand to mask its trembling. What looked like nimble character work was, even then, documentary evidence.Guggenheim presents this sequence as if it were depicting an illicit drug binge, in part because Fox discusses his habit of popping Sinemet pills to keep up his level of dopamine, which is deficient in Parkinson’s patients. The segment ends by cutting to the present-day Fox, who says he needs more pills and asks Guggenheim for a couple of minutes so that the meds can kick in, to make him less “mumble-mouthed.”“Still” certainly doesn’t sugarcoat Fox’s life with Parkinson’s. An early scene shows him taking a spill across the street from Central Park. At another point, a makeup artist gives him a touch-up because a fall has broken bones in his face. But such moments are reminders of just how much any movie would necessarily leave unseen.The film establishes a brisk, appealing pace early on, as Fox, the only formal talking head (although we see him with his family), recalls how he came to acting. The title comes from one of Guggenheim’s queries: “Before Parkinson’s, what would it mean to be still?” Fox answers, “I wouldn’t know.”After moving from his native Canada to Hollywood, he says, he lived in an apartment so cramped that he washed his hair with Palmolive and his dishes with Head & Shoulders. Marty McFly emerges as an almost autobiographical creation, because the making of “Back to the Future” (1985) required Fox to engage in a bit of temporal dislocation himself. To fulfill his obligations to the sitcom “Family Ties” while making the movie, he had to shuttle between sets, with little sleep in between. In another toe-tapping montage — this time scored to Alan Silvestri’s “Back to the Future” theme — “Still” conveys the sheer whirlwind of what Fox’s life was like as drivers chauffeured him from one place to another and he could barely keep straight which role he was playing.Fox’s wife, Tracy Pollan, who appeared with him as a love interest in “Family Ties” and as a possible salvation for the cocaine-addled magazine employee he played in “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), is held up as a rare person who could stand up to his arrogance during his peak period of stardom. “Still” becomes something of a love story, of how Pollan stayed with Fox not just through his sickness but during long gig-related absences and what he characterizes as a period of alcoholism.But the documentary is, perhaps improbably, not a downer in the least. It isn’t oriented primarily around illness, even as it shows Fox working with doctors and aides throughout. It’s a character study in which Fox reflects on his life with quick wit and self-deprecation. “If I’m here 20 years from now, I’ll either be cured or like a pickle,” he says. The real-life Marty McFly may not have a time machine. But he now has this crowd-pleaser of a movie.Still: A Michael J. Fox MovieRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More