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      Why Tetris Consumed Your Brain

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      Rotating a colorful shape before slotting it into the perfect position is such a satisfying experience that Tetris has joined chess in the pantheon of universally recognizable games.Less familiar is the true story of how a prototype created in 1984 by a software engineer for the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences ended up reaching millions of players across the world. The movie “Tetris,” which stars Taron Egerton and was released on Apple TV+ on Friday, explores those humble beginnings.The addictively simple puzzle game features seven uniquely shaped pieces, each composed of four square blocks. Players move, rotate and position the pieces to form solid lines, which are then cleared away, allowing for potentially endless play. The game’s name — derived from the words “tetra” (Greek for “four”) and “tennis” (the sport enjoyed by the game’s creator, Alexey Pajitnov) — has even pervaded culture as a verb, like when you “Tetris” your luggage into the overhead bin on a plane.In an interview with The New York Times, Pajitnov described Tetris as “the game which appeals to everyone” and said he hoped that its future included e-sports and the integration of artificial intelligence. He is also working on making “a very good” two-player version of the game but said “we are not there yet.”Before Tetris was able to cement itself as a household name with releases on consoles like the Nintendo Game Boy, Henk Rogers, the character played by Egerton, had to journey to the Soviet Union and fend off competitors to secure the game’s rights. As the film shows, that was an arduous task that paid off immensely.Here are more details about the game’s creation and why it has resonated with so many for so long:The Nintendo Game BoyIn the nearly four decades since Pajitnov created Tetris using the Pascal programming language on the Electronika 60, a Soviet-made computer, more than 215 officially recognized versions of Tetris have been released.Perhaps the most notable variant is the one that was packaged with each copy of the Nintendo Game Boy when the hand-held gaming console was released in 1989. But that incredibly successful pairing — the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color have combined for about 120 million unit sales — almost didn’t happen.The president of Nintendo of America, Minoru Arakawa, initially wanted to bundle Super Mario Land with the Game Boy, following the company’s success packaging Super Mario Bros. with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Rogers, however, was able to convince Arakawa that Tetris should be included instead, in part because it would appeal to a broader group of demographics.Pajitnov described the partnership as “two creatures created for each other: Game Boy for Tetris and Tetris for the Game Boy.”“Tetris” shows an early example of the video game featuring seven unique shapes.AppleThe Tetris EffectAs anybody who has spent hours playing Tetris knows, it is an incredibly addictive game. Many people who play for extended periods of time have reported seeing Tetris pieces outside of the game, such as in their mind when they close their eyes, or in their dreams. It’s a phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect.You may have experienced the Tetris Effect yourself if you’ve ever seen tetrominoes, officially known as Tetriminos, when you’re trying to bag your groceries.In professional studies, the psychologist Richard Haier found that regularly playing Tetris resulted in an increased thickness of the cerebral cortex. Haier’s studies also demonstrated how Tetris can affect the plasticity of cortical gray matter, potentially enhancing a person’s memory capacity and promoting motor and cognitive development.A study in 2017 by researchers at Oxford University and the Karolinska Institutet showed that Tetris had the potential to provide relief for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, if they played the game after an incident while recalling a stressful memory.The Quest for PerfectionDecades after it was invented, Tetris continues to have staying power. Newer versions of the game include Tetris Effect, which builds a Zen experience via music, and Tetris 99, in which players try to outlast opponents who are meddling with their boards.In competitive play, new methods of moving the pieces are still being discovered. The standard way to play the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Tetris — yes, the game first released in 1989 is still used at the Classic Tetris World Championships — is by holding the gray rectangular controller so that the left hand controls the movement of the pieces, and the right hand manages the rotation. But that method, known as “delayed auto shift” in the competitive community, has been usurped in recent years by “hypertapping” and “rolling.”Hypertapping involves rapidly pressing the buttons, countering the traditional sensation that pieces are slowly being dragged into position. Rolling lets pieces be moved even more quickly, by flicking the fingers of one hand along the back of the controller.The power of hypertapping became clear in 2018, when a 16-year-old named Joseph Saelee used the method to defeat Jonas Neubauer, a seven-time world champion. But in the years since, the rolling method has dominated the competitive scene. Not only is it incredibly effective, but it seems to be less strenuous on fingers and hands. More

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      A Movie Confronts Germany’s Other Genocide

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      “Measures of Men” tells the story of the systematic massacre of Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia. Its maker hopes the film will bring a debate about Germany’s colonial guilt into the center of society.Germany is often praised for its willingness to confront the darkest moments of its history, but in recent years, activists have pointed to a blank spot in the country’s culture of remembrance. Decades before the Holocaust, Germany perpetrated the 20th century’s first genocide: From 1904 to 1908, German colonial officials systematically killed tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia. This atrocity is little known outside academic circles, and there are few memorials or pop cultural depictions of those events.Now, a new movie, “Measures of Men,” aims to change that and bring a debate about Germany’s colonial guilt into the center of society. The glossy film, directed by the German filmmaker Lars Kraume, tells the story of the killings through the eyes of a German anthropologist. Aside from playing in movie theaters, where it opened last week, “Measures of Men” had a special screening for lawmakers in Germany’s Parliament, and was the focal point for a series of events at the Humboldt Forum, a central Berlin museum housing ethnological items. Its distributor, Studiocanal, said in a statement that it was planning to show the film in school and educational contexts.“Measures of Men” has also prompted a new discussion in the German media about what many see as Germany’s sluggish attempts to come to terms with its colonial past. In recent years, the country has moved to return numerous artworks acquired during the colonial period, but the process of ratifying a reconciliation agreement between Namibia and Germany has stalled, and thousands of African human remains, transported to Germany from its colonies, remain in institutional collections.In an interview in Berlin, Kraume, 50, explained that his movie was partly inspired by the 1978 NBC mini-series “Holocaust,” an early fictionalized TV depiction of the Shoah, which played a key role in spreading awareness of German guilt after it was broadcast here. “You have the possibility through cinematic storytelling to reach an audience that doesn’t engage so much with history books,” he said, adding that he hoped his film would be the first of many, much in the way “Holocaust” paved the way for films like “Schindler’s List.”Lars Kraume, who directed “Measures of Men,” said, “You have the possibility through cinematic storytelling to reach an audience that doesn’t engage so much with history books.”Gordon Welters for The New York Times“Measures of Men,” which was filmed in Berlin and Namibia, focuses on an ambitious German ethnologist (Leonard Scheicher) who develops a fascination with a Herero woman (Girley Jazama) after measuring her cranial features as part of his research. His fixation leads him to travel to German South West Africa (now Namibia), where he witnesses and eventually become complicit in the colonial slaughter.“It’s not just a film about the genocide,” Kraume said, “but also about ethnologists who want to explore foreign cultures, but destroy them.”Many of the scenes were based on real events of the genocide, which took place during a conflict between Germans and Africans known as the Herero and Nama War. After thousands of Herero men, women and children fled into the Omaheke Desert in 1904 to escape the fighting, German troops sealed off its edges and occupied the territory’s water holes, leading many to die of thirst. Lothar von Trotha, the governor of the colony, then issued a proclamation calling for all remaining Herero to be killed.After the Nama joined the fight against the German colonizers, they were also targeted, and colonial officials set up concentration camps, ostensibly to provide labor for German-owned businesses, in which hundreds of prisoners died. The film depicts real facilities in one such camp in which the decapitated heads of Herero and Nama were boiled and cleaned for export to German ethnological institutions. Thousands of skulls of unclear origin remain in German collections to this day.Kraume long wrestled with how to tell the story as a European filmmaker, and said he had decided to depict it from a German perspective for fear that centering it on African protagonists would represent a form of “cultural appropriation.” At one point in the development, he hoped to structure it similarly to Hollywood films about the Vietnam War, such as “Platoon” and “Apocalypse Now,” that center their plots on conflicts between “good” and “bad” American soldiers. “But there were actually no good Germans,” Kraume said.Girley Jazama, who plays the movie’s female lead, discovered that her great-grandmother has been born in a German-run concentration camp while researching to play the role.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesJazama, an acclaimed Namibian actress who plays Kezia Kambazembi, the film’s lead female role, learned German to play her part. In preparation for the role, she spoke to relatives about her family’s connection to the genocide and discovered that her great-grandmother had been conceived in a German-run concentration camp. “My ancestors need to be at peace,” she said in an interview. “That’s why I became a part of this story.”Jazama said that, though the film had largely been made to spur discussion in Germany, it had also been a talking point in Namibia, where the events of the genocide had often been passed down via family members. “A lot of people are grateful,” she said, recalling that one audience member had shared appreciation that “now there is a visual representation of what happened, versus just it being told orally.”The reaction in Germany has been more mixed. Writing in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper, the critic Bert Rebhandl wrote that the film focused too much on “German self-understanding” while pushing African perspectives to its edges. A writer in the Süddeutsche Zeitung argued that the film depicts too little of the genocide to transmit the scope of the killing and it does not do “justice to the horror.”Henning Melber, a political scientist who has written extensively about German colonialism, said that criticism of the film shouldn’t distract from its potential role in remedying what he described as Germany’s “colonial amnesia.” He said that the film “triggers a debate in a wider German public in a way that none of us academics can achieve.”Kraume emphasized that, although “Measures of Men” was meant to appeal to a mass audience, it was an explicitly “political film,” and that its rollout was partly engineered to spur a discussion. He hoped the screening for lawmakers would drive politicians to work harder at compensating the Herero and Nama, he added.A scene from “Measures of Men.” In 1904, thousands of Herero people fled from German soldiers into the Omaheke Desert, where many died of thirst.Willem Vrey/Studiocanal GmbHAlthough Namibian and German authorities agreed in 2021 on the terms of a reconciliation agreement, including around $1.1 billion in aid that Germany would pay over the next 30 years, the process has since come under fire from groups representing victims’ descendants, who argue that amount is too low, and say they were unfairly left out of the negotiation process. The Namibian government has since backtracked on plans to ratify the agreement, and the German authorities have resisted calls by the Namibians to reopen talks.Kraume said Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, should travel to Namibia and officially apologize for the genocide, and that all human remains still held in Germany should be returned. “Europe has done far too little to reconcile with victims,” he said. “I think cinema allows us to awaken emotions, and implant images that can let you see events differently,” he said. “But this is only the beginning of the discussion.” More

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      ‘Murder Mystery 2’ Review: The Case of the Innocuous Sequel

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      Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston return as private detectives in this Netflix follow-up comedy.For a certain brand of Adam Sandler films, you know what you’re going to get: something cheerfully lowbrow, easygoing and listlessly comforting when used as background programming. Such movies are what make the actor’s longstanding partnership with Netflix perhaps too suitable a match, as the bulk of the company’s original content has been gradually cheapened to a similar brand. With “Murder Mystery 2,” the sequel to the 2019 comedy “Murder Mystery,” it’s much of the same.The film, directed by Jeremy Garelick, reintroduces us to Nick (Sandler) and Audrey (Jennifer Aniston), the married-couple leads of the original movie, who, after solving the first film’s high-profile murder, have formed a private detective agency, which they are having trouble getting off the ground. They are soon whisked away to the destination wedding of a friend, the Maharajah (Adeel Akhtar), a familiar face from the first movie.A new murder occurs, and the Maharajah is kidnapped. Nick and Audrey are on the case, while they again find themselves wanted by authorities as prime suspects. There’s a bit more scale to this sequel, and plenty of flat gags that will have just a tad more vigor if you’re familiar with the recurring characters.As they have in past team-ups, Sandler and Aniston maintain a charming midcareer looseness, and have a palpable affability as a duo — one can sense the fun they had making such silliness, even if the result isn’t gold. You could do worse for something to turn on while making dinner.Murder Mystery 2Rated PG-13 for violence, bloody images, strong language, suggestive material and smoking. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Michael Blackwood, Who Captured 20th-Century Artists on Film, Dies at 88

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      He made cinéma vérité movies — more than 160 — about musicians (Thelonious Monk), architects (Frank Gehry), composers (Philip Glass) and sculptors (Isamu Noguchi).Michael Blackwood, a prolific documentarian who explored the work of 20th-century artists, architects, musicians, dancers and choreographers in more than 160 films and yet never became widely known, died on Feb. 24 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.His wife, Nancy Rosen, confirmed the death, in his sleep, but said she did not know the cause.Mr. Blackwood filmed his subjects in the unobtrusive, no-frills cinéma vérité style, seeking to capture the creative process behind their art, often in studio visits. Sometimes they were their own narrators; sometimes there were no narrators at all. Mr. Blackwood was invisible to viewers.He followed the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk on tour in Europe. He tagged along as the minimalist composer Philip Glass prepared for the 1984 premieres of his opera, “Akhnaten,” in Houston and Stuttgart, Germany.He observed the creative process of the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist Christo during his creation of epic environmental projects like “Running Fence” and “Wrapped Walkways.” And he let Isamu Noguchi explain his approach to his art as they walked among his sculptures.A scene from “Monk,” one of Mr. Blackwood’s two documentaries about the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk.Michael Blackwood Productions“I go from one piece to the next,” Mr. Noguchi said in the 30-minute film, “Isamu Noguchi” (1972). “It’s a continuous development. It’s not something that I have intellectually arrived at as a way of doing things. I change with the work.”Mr. Blackwood took a similar approach to his own work, which he often undertook with his brother, Christian, a cameraman, director and producer. He moved from project to project on subjects that reflected his eclectic personal tastes, remaining largely under the film world radar and giving few interviews. Most of his films were carried on European television networks, but some were shown on public television stations in the United States and at art house theaters in Manhattan. They were also sold to libraries and museums.“He made the films he wanted to make and hoped people would want them,” Ms. Rosen said in a phone interview. “Any money he made from distributing his films was plowed into the next film.”Mr. Blackwood felt a particular urgency to make films about artists like Philip Guston, Larry Rivers, George Segal and Robert Motherwell.“There are no film portraits in existence of the artists of the early century, but barely a few haphazard meters of footage on such great figures as Rodin, Renoir and Kandinsky,” he told the Canadian magazine Vie Des Arts in 1981 in one of his rare interviews. “What a pity!”His fascination with architecture led him to make films about some of its stars, including Louis Kahn, Richard Meier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry.In his review of “Frank Gehry: The Formative Years” (1988) in The New York Times, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that Mr. Blackwood “has built up an admirable oeuvre of films about architects and architecture,” and that Mr. Blackwood has Mr. Gehry “ramble though his work in a way that is both inviting and informative.”A scene from “Isamu Noguchi” (1972), a 30-minute film about Noguchi’s approach to sculpture.Michael Blackwood ProductionsMichael Adolf Schwarzwald was born on July 15, 1934, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) and moved to Berlin when he was 2 years old. During World War II, his parents sent him for his safety to Lubeck, on Germany’s Baltic Coast, to one of a network of children’s homes run by the Lutheran Church.His father, Gerhard, who was Jewish, did forced labor jobs in Berlin during the war; his mother, Elinor (Feist) Schwarzwald, converted from Lutheranism to Judaism but subsequently rejoined the Lutheran Church to survive in Nazi Germany and protect her family. She worked at the Finnish consulate. After the war, his parents started a business that made sets and curtains for the German film industry and local theaters.The family, including his brother, emigrated to New York in 1949. Michael changed his surname to Blackwood and dropped his middle name after becoming a United States citizen in 1955.After his graduation from George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan, he found work with a special film unit of NBC. He swept the floors at first, but eventually learned to edit and direct there, which led him to make his first film, “Broadway Express” (1959), a 19-minute portrait of people riding the New York City subway, set to a jazz score.In 1961, after leaving NBC, Mr. Blackwood moved to Munich, West Germany, where he directed documentaries for public television. He returned to New York in 1965 and soon began making his own independent documentaries. In 1968, he and his brother directed two films about Monk for West German television: “Monk,” which focused on recording sessions and performances in New York and Atlanta, and “Monk in Europe,” about a European tour.Much of their footage was used in another documentary, Charlotte Zwerin’s “Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser” (1989). Jon Pareles wrote in a review in The Times that “Monk’s feet were as busy as his hands, and Mr. Blackwood’s alert camera crew zeroed in on them.”“Although Monk’s recorded piano sound is percussive,” Mr. Pareles went on, “the film shows him using the sustain pedal within single notes, using extraordinary finesse.”In a 1993 film, “The Sensual Nature of Sound,” Mr. Blackwood examined four distinctive performers and composers — Laurie Anderson, Tania León, Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros — devoting significant time to their discussions of their own work.“The thread that ties together so much of Blackwood’s work,” Sasha Frere-Jones wrote last year on the website for Pioneer Works, a Brooklyn culture center that was streaming some of Mr. Blackwood’s films, “is a sense of patience and respect, so that even when the documentary form includes narration, it usually comes from the painters and musicians themselves.”Mr. Blackwood also made films about subjects who were not artists, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe and the diplomat George F. Kennan, and several about Germany and German Americans.In addition to his wife, he is survived by their son, Benjamin; his daughter, Katherine Blackwood and a son, Daniel, from his marriage to Ela Hockaday Kyle, which ended in divorce; and six grandchildren. His brother died in 1992.Mr. Blackwood’s last three films were all completed in 2014: one about the expansion of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.; another about the painter Carroll Dunham; and the third a portrait of Greg Lynn, a leader in computer-aided architectural design.One film remains — one that Benjamin Blackwood said he may complete — about the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s “Greene Street Mural,” an installation created in 1983 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan. It measured 18 feet tall and 96½ feet wide and was destroyed, at Mr. Lichtenstein’s direction, after six weeks.“His priority wasn’t making an art piece,” Benjamin Blackwood said by phone, referring to his father’s cinematic ambitions, “but to make a film about the art his camera was capturing.” More

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      Stream These 9 Titles Before They Leave Netflix in April

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      A bunch of great TV shows and movies are departing for U.S. subscribers this month. Catch them while you can.This month’s assortment of titles leaving Netflix in the United States includes three hysterically funny series, two of must-see documentaries, two comic-book adaptations that buck expectations and one of the scariest movies the streamer has to offer. See them before they leave. (Dates reflect the last day a title is available.)‘Hush’ (April 7)The director Mike Flanagan has become the horror king of Netflix, with credits including “Gerald’s Game” “The Haunting of Hill House” and “Midnight Mass.” But before any of those high-profile projects, he co-wrote (with his star and spouse, Kate Siegel) this lean, mean, efficient little single-location slasher thriller. Siegel plays Maddie, a deaf and mute novelist who works and lives in an isolated country home and must fight for her life when she is targeted by a brutal killer (John Gallagher Jr.). The result is tense, frightening and wildly effective.Stream it here.‘New Girl’: Seasons 1-7 (April 9)On first sight, this Fox sitcom seemed tailored entirely (and narrowly) to spotlight the specific pixie-like charms of its star, Zooey Deschanel. But within a few episodes, “New Girl” became much more:a fast-paced, frequently quotable showcase for an ace comic ensemble. Deschanel remained at the center, but the uproarious characterizations and onscreen teamwork of Max Greenfield’s high-maintenance Schmidt, Lamorne Morris’s oddball Winston, Hannah Simone’s complicated Cece and (especially) Jake Johnson’s rough-edged-but-soft-centered Nick turned this into one of the freshest and funniest network comedies of the 2010s.Stream it here.‘We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks’ (April 23)The prolific documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney waded into one of the most complicated stories of his career when he took on the rise of Julian Assange’s organization — and the fall of Assange himself. It’s a story toward which neutrality is all but impossible — for a filmmaker or a viewer — but Gibney is admirably evenhanded, praising WikiLeaks’ high-minded mission and notable scoops while also asking pressing questions about its founder, his motives and his misdeeds. And the filmmaking unfolds with the tension and propulsion of a tightly-wound political thriller, which, in many ways, is exactly what it is.Stream it here.‘Bill Nye: Science Guy’ (April 24)As the (comparatively) science-friendly Obama administration gave way to the climate denialism of Donald Trump, the 1990s-era children’s television personality Bill Nye reconsidered his mission and his audience, repositioning himself as an advocate and educator for older generations. The directors David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg document that tricky career shift as Nye changes from an innocuous fellow with a perpetual smile and bow tie into a surprisingly polarizing political lightning rod. The results are as enlightening, thought-provoking and frequently amusing as the man himself.Stream it here.‘The IT Crowd’: Series 1-5 (April 25)Several international comedy stars-to-be — including Chris O’Dowd (“Bridesmaids”), Matt Berry (“What We Do in the Shadows”) and Richard Ayoade (“Travel Man”) — made their first big splash in this unfailingly clever British office sitcom. O’Dowd and Ayoade star as Roy and Moss, socially inept, know-it-all IT technicians. Katherine Parkinson is Jen Barber, their manager, who is tech illiterate (much to their chagrin) but personally adept (much to their amazement). It sports a tone and style not unlike the original British version of “The Office,” and it accomplishes a similar duality: though unmistakably local in its details, it taps into universal truths about work, class and life.Stream it here.‘Ash vs. Evil Dead’: Seasons 1-3 (April 28)The new “Evil Dead” sequel, “Evil Dead Rise,” hits theaters on April 21, though it continues in the grim, humorless vein of the series’s 2013 installment. Those who prefer the zany, slapstick-heavy, gore-and-grins iteration of the franchise, tweaked to perfection by the director Sam Raimi and the star Bruce Campbell in “Evil Dead II” (1987) and “Army of Darkness” (1993), can direct their attention to this Starz Original series, codeveloped by Raimi, with Campbell reprising his role as the wisecracking, chain saw toting, Book-of-the-Dead-battling hero Ash Williams. The results are somewhat uneven (the early episodes, with which Raimi was most directly involved, are the highlights), but fans of the films will love it anyway.Stream it here.‘Leap Year’ (April 30)This light-as-a-soufflé romantic comedy was not exactly received with enthusiasm upon its release in 2010, but time has been kind to it for several reasons, among them the general dearth of theatrical rom-coms and the slow-burn charms of the screenwriters Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont (whose “Josie and the Pussycats” has undergone a spectacular popular and critical reappraisal). Perhaps most important, it’s an opportunity to see Amy Adams at her light and breezy best, in sharp contrast to her more recent spate of Serious Actor Oscar bids.Stream it here.‘Road to Perdition’ (April 30)This 2002 adaptation of the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins (itself inspired by the “Lone Wolf and Cub” manga and film series) was only the second feature film from the director Sam Mendes. Yet it plays like an elegy, a film about endings, mortality and what we leave behind. It was the final film of the award-winning cinematographer Conrad L. Hall, whose visions of Depression-era America here are staggeringly evocative, and one of the final onscreen appearances for Paul Newman. The actor nabbed one last Academy Award nomination for his work as the patriarch of a crime family, caught between his irresponsible biological son (a pre-Bond Daniel Craig) and his beloved surrogate son (Tom Hanks, in a rare and affecting non-hero turn).Stream it here.‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the World’ (April 30)Edgar Wright’s 2010 action-comedy, initially a box-office disappointment, has become a cult favorite in the intervening years, and for good reason: Its fizzy look and feel, energetic direction and spirited performances make it one of the most purely entertaining comic book adaptations of recent years, and Wright’s light touch keeps it from bogging down into the endless back stories and crossovers that have tended to burden such pictures. Michael Cera is a delight in the title role, and the stacked supporting cast includes such MVPs as Kieran Culkin, Chris Evans, Anna Kendrick, Brie Larson, Aubrey Plaza, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as his dream girl and Jason Schwartzman, cast against type as a supervillain.Stream it here. More

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      ‘Imagining the Indian’ Review: Fighting Offensive Imagery

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      This documentary, subtitled “The Fight Against Native American Mascoting,” argues that Native-themed sports team branding fits into a history of systemic racism.In July 2020, the National Football League team in Washington announced that it would shed a name that was long considered a slur against Indigenous people. The decision was a victory in the campaign by Native American activists to eliminate disparaging sports team names and iconography.“Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting,” a straightforward and often repetitive documentary, spotlights this movement by arguing a handful of key points: Native-themed mascots and branding are offensive. They fit into a national history of systemic racism. And the sustained use of stereotypical images has material consequences for Native people.To deconstruct these tenets, the directors Aviva Kempner and Ben West call on a raft of experts, historians and Native activists, including Suzan Shown Harjo, a trailblazer for the cause. The sources share their personal grievances and act as guides through the annals of racist American imagery, from “The Lone Ranger” and Bugs Bunny cartoons to footage of sports fans in headdresses. The effect is a frenzied slide show of sorts, set to galvanizing music that echoes the passion of the speakers.The marriage of talking heads and troubling material from the archives is a familiar documentary format, and “Imagining the Indian” rarely breaks free from the generic quality of its structure. The speakers introduce a few fresh ideas, such as the notion that football, in which teams use violence to compete for territory, mimics white land-grabbing. But in tuning the project to the key of advocacy, the directors have created a film to nod along with, not one that unpacks complexity.Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American MascotingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Rye Lane’ Review: A Lively Modern Rom-Com With a British Accent

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      Raine Allen-Miller’s feature debut revives the genre with exuberant performances and a vibrant South London setting.The director Raine Allen-Miller’s debut feature, “Rye Lane,” is self-assured in a way that recent, by-the-numbers rom-coms from the likes of Netflix have shied away from. Whereas some films make the mistake of equating “crowd-pleasing” with “generic,” Allen-Miller brings us right into the heart of South London alongside her characters. Every detail of the film is full of specificity, even as the dreams and insecurities of its two leads are ubiquitous genre staples.The meet-cute, however, is decidedly 2023: Dom (David Jonsson), clearly upset over a recent breakup, goes to have a private cry in a restroom stall at his friend’s art gallery opening, only to realize with embarrassment that the facilities are gender-neutral. The woman who walks in on him, Yas (Vivian Oparah), tries to reassure him through the stall door to no avail, but she later recognizes Dom out on the gallery floor from his pink Converse. The twist? Dom doesn’t recognize her voice.Before long, the two are bonding over the ways their respective exes wronged them — Dom’s partner cheated on him with his best friend, and Yas’s boyfriend, a pretentious sculptor, kept her treasured A Tribe Called Quest LP after she walked out on him, even though he scoffs at hip-hop. Spurred by their mutual heartbreak, Dom and Yas end up racing around London together, by foot and by moped, looking to settle the scores of their old relationships and growing closer as a result.“Rye Lane” finds familiar footing in bespoke rom-coms of years past. There’s Dom and Yas’s symbolic color coordination — his pink shoes match her shoulder bag — that channels the red-and-blue outfit motifs found in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Punch-Drunk Love.” And the whole structure of the two characters walking-and-talking their way through the neighborhood is an obvious nod to Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy. But the film also takes cues from snappier sources, like the British cult hit “Peep Show” or even Edgar Wright’s “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”Fast-paced flashbacks and quippy dialogue — including some true laugh-out-loud one-liners — keep a sense of momentum that carries itself throughout the film. And Allen-Miller isn’t afraid to be stylistically daring, with wide-angle lenses that follow Dom and Yas along city blocks, oddly dressed extras walking in and out of the frame, and eye-popping set designs around every corner. Yas’s memory of her ex-boyfriend’s apartment is very different from the real location we see later on, but both equally resemble a set dresser’s playground, stuffed to the brim with detail.Still, that liveliness wouldn’t feel genuine if not for its setting. The screenwriters of “Rye Lane,” Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, have credited Allen-Miller for the film’s honed-in focus on the neighborhoods of Peckham and Brixton — it was originally going to be set in Camden Market — that show off an eye for style mixed with the comforting. Whether it’s a date at a late-night chicken shop, a neon-lit karaoke bar, a Jamaican auntie’s backyard barbecue or the Peckhamplex movie theater on Rye Lane itself, the environments that Dom and Yas stumble through, and fall in love within, resemble a candy-colored interpretation of daily life in South London. This isn’t the kind of film to watch for in-depth commentary on the area’s rapid gentrification. But its primarily Black cast reflects who has lived in South London for decades, and Allen-Miller depicts the mix of aging residents and young artistic upstarts with the knowingness of someone who’s been in the heart of the melting pot.As Dom and Yas get to know each other over the evening, or several evenings — the film, at a tight 82 minutes, is purposely vague about how much time lapses between scenes — their mission to get back at lost love soon bumps up against an inevitable obstacle: being unable to move on. Setting itself apart from past British rom-coms like “Notting Hill” and “Love, Actually” (the latter of which gets a brief but memorable tribute here), “Rye Lane” isn’t afraid to depict its leads as young, brash and still coming into their own. Post-breakup, Dom has moved back in with his mother, playing video games while she makes him eggs and soldiers for breakfast. Yas, who initially looks like the more mature of the two, has a rude awakening to the fact that hopping on a scooter and riding away from her problems won’t make them vanish.It’s not a spoiler to say that at its conclusion, “Rye Lane” comes together as only the best rom-coms can, with one of those classic payoffs that’s designed to have you cheering at the movie screen. How Allen-Miller chooses to balance those moments with the unconventional is one of the film’s greatest strengths.Rye LaneRated R for raunchy humor and low-res nudes. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Spinning Gold’ Review: For the Records

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      A son’s tribute to the Casablanca Records impresario Neil Bogart gives short shrift to the art and the artists.“Where’s the tingle?” might be the grouse come the end of “Spinning Gold,” a drama about Neil Bogart, the music-business impresario who founded Casablanca Records. Nearly every music biopic has a moment in which the dawn of a hit song stirs us anew. And while the executives often get their minute, they aren’t the main attraction. Not so with this movie, which was written and directed by Timothy Scott Bogart, a son of Neil Bogart. (The elder Bogart died of cancer in 1982, at 39.)Born and raised in Brooklyn, Neil Bogart started out singing pop, then landed a succession of indie-recording-company positions before opening Casablanca in 1973. The Broadway actor Jeremy Jordan has Bogart’s cadence down as he recounts his life to an unseen listener. Everything “is true,” he promises. “Even the parts that aren’t.” The movie begins with Bogart visiting a church to convince the gospel great Edwin Hawkins that “Oh Happy Day” can be a hit. A choir claps and sways.That start reawakens bristling thoughts about white executives and Black talent. The film includes Bogart beneficiaries such as Bill Withers, Donna Summer and the Afrofuturist progenitor George Clinton. The Motown expats Gladys Knight and the Isley Brothers signed with him. It also focuses on Casablanca’s first act, Kiss. But Bogart’s creative affinity for artists, for his collaborators, gets muffled by the spin of the movie, which tries to make him a singular legend.With filial care but a flawed script, the filmmaker delves into what drove Bogart, the man, more than Bogart, the artist: his father’s gambling, his marriage to his first wife, Beth (Michelle Monaghan), and his love affair with Joyce Biawitz (Lyndsy Fonseca), a Kiss co-manager and Bogart’s future spouse.As for that tingle? It arrives not in a studio but on a parked tour bus as Bogart and a sulking, smart Gene Simmons (Casey Likes) talk — just two culture-altering, self-described Jewish boys from New York.Spinning GoldRated R for pervasive language, drug use, nudity and some I-feel-love-I-feel-love-I-feel-love activities. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes. In theaters. More