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      Drew Barrymore Drops Out of Hosting MTV Awards Show Over Writers’ Strike

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      Just days before the show was scheduled to air, the actress and talk-show host said she would pick up her hosting duties next year.Drew Barrymore will no longer host the MTV Movie & TV Awards on Sunday, announcing that she would step down in support of the writers’ strike in Hollywood that has seen late-night comedy shows go dark and thousands of television and movie writers take to picket lines.Ms. Barrymore’s decision, which was announced Thursday, was the latest blow to the awards show, which has also canceled its red carpet and may see other talent withdraw, according to Variety.“I have listened to the writers, and in order to truly respect them, I will pivot from hosting the MTV Movie & TV Awards live in solidarity with the strike,” Ms. Barrymore said in a statement to the publication. “Everything we celebrate and honor about movies and television is born out of their creation.”Ms. Barrymore said on Instagram she would return to host the show next year and was still planning to watch the show on Sunday. Representatives for Ms. Barrymore and for MTV could not immediately be reached Friday morning.Bruce Gillmer, a president at Paramount Global and an executive producer of the MTV Movie & TV Awards, told Variety that the show would go on without a host.It’s unclear which celebrity presenters and guests are still planning to attend, including Jennifer Coolidge, who is being honored.The MTV Movie & TV Awards has handled sudden shifts before, postponing and ultimately canceling its show in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic. A special, hosted by the actress Vanessa Hudgens, aired later that year.Thousands of screenwriters went on strike on Tuesday, after 15 years of relative labor peace in Hollywood.Some of the most immediate effects were seen on talk shows and sketch shows. New episodes from late-night shows hosted by Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel have been suspended. “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers” have aired reruns while the hosts of those shows and NBC have agreed to extend staff pay for a short period, according to Deadline.“Saturday Night Live” canceled a new episode scheduled for this weekend, and NBC said it would “air repeats until further notice.”Writers have said that their compensation has remained the same even as television production has grown over the past decade. The unions representing the writers, the East and West branches of the Writers Guild of America, said “the companies’ behavior has created a gig economy inside a union work force, and their immovable stance in this negotiation has betrayed a commitment to further devaluing the profession of writing.”W.G.A. leaders said that the survival of writing as a profession was at stake during the negotiations.The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood companies, said in a statement before the strikes began this week that its offer included “generous increases in compensation for writers.” More

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      ‘The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons’ Review

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      A new documentary explores the artist’s sly conceptual works, and what it means when white people try to own something Black.The title of this new documentary about the artist David Hammons is a mouthful: “The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons.” It’s playing at Film Forum, and I don’t envy whoever has to make it fit the marquee. But they should figure that out because the title feels crucial to the aim of this movie, a sly, toasty, piquant consideration of Hammons’s conceptual art, the way it mocks and eludes easy ownership. Which is to say: the way his art is aware of — the way it’s often about — the stakes for Black people navigating the straits of the market.The movie has all the trappings of a serious nonfiction assessment: scholars, critics, curators and luminous comrades speaking to the humor, funk, atmosphere and texture of the Hammons experience, the acid and ingenuity, the bang of it. The way only he, seemingly, could tile whole telephone poles with bottle caps and affix a backboard and a basketball hoop atop each one, and then plant them, as he did in 1986 with “Higher Goals,” outside a courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, where they took on a tribal, sky-scraping, palm-tree majesty that winked at the long odds of reaching the N.B.A.’s summit. That piece is like a lot of Hammons’s work: tragicomic. A small forward would need to pole-vault up to those baskets.Maybe it would’ve been enough for this film, which Harold Crooks directed with the critic and journalist Judd Tully, to get into Hammons’s gift for withering, radiant transfiguration of everyday materials (Black hair, chicken bones, liquor bottles, those caps, fur coats, jelly beans, a hoodie’s hood), of the public’s opinion of art, of status. (In 2017, at the Museum of Modern Art, he hung a drawing by one of his mentors, the crucial, visionary Charles White, across from one Leonardo da Vinci made, which the British royal family owns.) It would have been enough to behold the assortment of thrilling footage of Hammons at work, in conversation and, in one contentious encounter, under interrogation by a group of students. And, for a long, satisfying stretch, that happens here. This is a substantial, patiently made, entertaining portrait, with a percussive, rhythmic jazz score by Ramachandra Borcar and some emphatic spoken word courtesy of Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets.But eventually, the rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process starts to vanish. Most of the critics, scholars and fellow artists go bye-bye, which means so long to the bulk of its Black participants. In come the gallerists, collectors and dealers. The money. This is where “The Melt Goes On Forever” seems like it wants to play Hammons’s game. It’s up to something that has to do with whether a Hammons can ever be owned and what it means for work whose foremost concerns are a kind of in-the-wild presentation to be for sale. Suddenly, it feels like Crooks and Tully have stopped making a straight-ahead documentary and started making … a piece.This was probably the case from the film’s outset. In 1983, Hammons created several dozen snowballs (out of real snow, big as a softball, small as a melon ball). He put them on a rug and sold them in the cold, near the corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place. Bliz-aard balls, he called them. The movie opens with a moony story from a woman who remembers, as a girl, buying one of the snowballs for about a dollar. (Hammons — in a roomy overcoat, kempt beard, ascot and winter fedora — seemed homeless to her.) She turns out to be a gallerist, and her story is a prelude of the movie’s big market-bound dismount, at the end of which is a separate childhood memory, from the dealer Adam Sheffer, of encountering Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale and the impact it had on him. (He remembers being afraid at the sight of Hammons out there that day.)Sheffer tells the filmmakers that, as an adult, he wound up working with and befriending Hammons’s daughter Carmen. To her bewilderment, Sheffer wanted to purchase a snowball for $1 million (a commission, presumably; the movie doesn’t ask him to clarify) and tried, tried, tried to line up an insurer first — but alas. Thwarted, he whips up an email to Carmen (“if you come across any other interesting Hammons …”) that her mischievous father prints, frames and displays alongside a permanent snowball for a rare retrospective at the Mnuchin Gallery on the Upper East Side, seven years ago. Sheffer says he tried to buy that, too.Someone else — someone who collects Hammons’s work, we’re told — makes a substantial offer on the same piece. And Hammons decides to — well, this movie really is worth seeing; and if you’re unfamiliar with his witty solution, you deserve to hear it from the film itself.But tales like these are where the movie gets that title. It comes from the artist Halsey Rodman, who, in an interview, is clever about the inherent conundrum of Hammons’s snowy ephemera. The work is incomplete, he surmises, because, in memory as much as in one’s hands, the melt goes on forever. A proverb that does the work of parody.An animated scene from the documentary shows Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale from 1983, when he offered snowballs for purchase near the corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place.Tynesha Foreman/Greenwich EntertainmentThis feels especially true once the movie ends in that blitz of auctions, acquisitions and shows: the sale of Hammons’s “African American Flag”; the Mnuchin event; the eviction of the late writer and assembler of interesting people Steve Cannon from his gathering spot and home. It’s a home one otherwise supportive gallerist calls “pretty cruddy,” a home where, on one of its walls, Hammons painted what he called “Flight Fantasy.”The film’s emphasis on possession and dispossession (Cannon’s story needs its own proper telling) becomes so strong that it kind of topples over the movie’s sense of scholarship. And without the intellectual rigor of a Bridget R. Cooks or Kellie Jones or Betye Saar or Suzanne Jackson or Robert Farris Thompson or Henry Taylor to continue guiding us (and the filmmakers, honestly), things get murky.With each alacritous tale of somebody trying to tame or take a Hammons, a kind of pungency set in. And all I wanted was to be in a clearer, cleaner, happier movie about white people trying to own something Black. I wanted to be in the movie about the time Nike wooed Michael Jordan. I wanted to be in “Air.” Both that and “The Melt Goes On Forever” are honest, in their ways, about the stakes of ownership and the racial eternity of this dilemma. I just think the people who made the Jordan movie are better storytellers. I left that movie high. It knows capitalism is an emotion. It knows the thorny racial transaction that makes this country run. And I know Nike doesn’t own Jordan or even his skill, just a symbol of them, his silhouette. Indeed, he’s never depicted in “Air” as more than a back of the head. And Hammons, here, never sits for an interview. (He’ll be 80 this year.)This movie’s homestretch should make me just as happy. Hammons seems like the victor in his attempt to satirize not so much the transaction of art for dollars but the covetous, oblivious, entitled nature of certain transactors. In “Air,” Jordan knows his worth — well, his mother does. When the white folks at Nike meet her demands, corporate justice is served. But that’s a fantasy that “The Melt Goes On Forever” scrubs raw.Maybe Crooks and Tully are actually better than I think at doing what Hammons’s art does and letting the gallerists’ and dealers’ values speak for themselves. Their movie’s not telling me what to feel at all. I’m just feeling it, feeling baffled, dismayed, leveled with, winked at. But I’d also like to know if these gallery folks know how anti-Hammons their aims are, how they’re losing at his game while excelling at their own. (What does Carmen Hammons think?!) The movie’s right. It’s a grand folly. The melt really does go on forever. But do these people get it? That’s not how the game works, of course. Obviously, Hammons knows that. And so, I suppose, do the people who keep trying to beat him at it.The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David HammonsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Oliver!’ Review: Tunes, Glorious Tunes, in a Grimly Cheerful Revival

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      The Encores! production, directed by Lear deBessonet, looks to deepen and darken a musical that resists the change. But it’s still delightful.Though the orphan boys at the workhouse are beaten regularly and fed only gruel, the sign looming above them reads “God Is Love.”That grim irony, underlining the practice of child labor in the supposedly advanced society of 19th-century London, is echoed in the spooky sounds you hear as the Encores! production of “Oliver!” begins: brass murk, woodwind rasps and stringy insectlike buzzing. Has Lionel Bart’s musical, based on the Dickens novel “Oliver Twist” and first seen on Broadway in 1963, been turned into “Sweeney Todd”?The version that opened a two-week run at City Center on Wednesday, directed by Lear deBessonet, is certainly grimmer than any “Oliver!” I’ve seen, which isn’t many; it’s seldom done professionally, for both casting and structural reasons. But the underlying high spirits of Bart’s adaptation, stuffed with tunes that are merry even when they’re sad, cannot long lie dormant. Soon the boys — a wonderfully uncloying ensemble — are bursting with mirth as they sing and dance to “Food, Glorious Food,” a number so irrepressible (with choreography by Lorin Latarro) that even a heavy concept can’t weigh it down.Which is not to say a serious approach is unwarranted. Recall that Dickens, who was himself sent to work in a boot polish factory when he was 12, refers to Oliver in the first sentence of the novel as an “item of mortality” — more a death-in-progress than a life. And Bart, at least in his lyrics, does not stint on bleakness; even the bouncy title song is violent, proposing various ugly fates for the boy who dares to ask for more food.“What will he do when he’s turned black and blue?” Mr. Bumble, the workhouse beadle, asks gleefully, in six-eight rhythm.Foreground from left: Lilli Cooper, Raúl Esparza and Pajak deliver terrific turns in Lear deBessonet’s production, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut deBessonet’s entertaining and beautifully sung production, featuring terrific turns by Lilli Cooper as the proud doxy Nancy and Raúl Esparza as the criminal den leader Fagin — as well as a touching one by Benjamin Pajak in the title role — is at this point still too muddy to be convincing as sociology, let alone drama.Partly that’s the result of the extremely short Encores! rehearsal period, which compresses what probably needs months into 12 days. The staging is sloppy in places, and the violent bits involving Bill Sikes (Tam Mutu), which in a rethinking like this should be shocking, aren’t. Spoiler alert: It appears that Nancy’s dress, not Nancy herself, is bludgeoned to death at the end.The other difficulty in reframing “Oliver!” for 2023 is built into the material. Like many musicals made from doorstop novels, it cherry-picks the plot so vigorously that what’s left can hardly support the songs. (The Encores! production uses a further abbreviated script.) Oliver’s transit from the workhouse to an undertaker’s establishment to Fagin’s hide-out, spread across eight chapters in the Dickens, takes what seems like a blink of an eye here. It becomes thin gruel indeed.And the songs themselves are problematic. Though there is barely a dud in the score, and many (like “I’d Do Anything” and “Oom-Pah-Pah”) are so hummable that the audience joins in almost subliminally, they are not so much dramatizations of the action as ditties vaguely suggested by it. “Consider Yourself,” the number in which Fagin’s pickpockets, led by the Artful Dodger (Julian Lerner), welcome Oliver to the gang, opens out illogically into a full-company number featuring buskers, laborers, flower girls and 20 extras — children from New York City schools — in a way that screams unreconstructed musical comedy.Julian Lerner, center left, as the Artful Dodger in a number with Pajak, other cast members and students.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYou wouldn’t want to prevent that; there’s too much pleasure to be reaped. Bart was an untrained tune savant, a latter-day Irving Berlin; if the songs are so hummable it’s probably because his composition method was built on humming them to an amanuensis.For “Oliver!” that meant delightful numbers even where a modern musical would say none was needed. “I Shall Scream!,” served up with raucous good humor by Brad Oscar and Mary Testa as Mr. Bumble and Widow Corney, is utterly beside the point, as is “That’s Your Funeral,” a similarly bouncy number for Mr. Sowerberry and his wife (Thom Sesma and Rashidra Scott) even though they are funeral directors.However inapt as drama, and however much real estate they steal from the development of a richer plot, such songs serve an important function, like the witty prose of the novel. They make the darkness of the tale bearable, almost literally — bearing you through the story.Nor is it just the music that has that effect, though it’s always jaunty. (Except when, in songs like “Boy for Sale,” “Where Is Love?,” “Who Will Buy?” and “As Long as He Needs Me,” it’s show-stoppingly lovely.) The lyrics do similar uplifting work. Though deBessonet has referred to them as “harrowing,” that quality is often undermined by the intricate rhymes, many built on cockney pronunciations (uppity/cup o’ tea) that can’t help but produce a smile.That makes the project of darkening the show difficult. Though the busily atmospheric orchestrations by William David Brohn, created for a 1994 production at the London Palladium, expand the number of musicians to 21 from 12, I’m not sure that the originals, with more of a music-hall than a symphonic quality, didn’t match the material better. Likewise, the overlay of deBessonet’s vision sometimes obscures more than it reveals.But perhaps we do not need “Oliver!” to be a Gesamtkunstwerk. Dickens intended the tale, after all, as popular entertainment, serialized over the course of two years and highly indulgent of gaudy melodrama.Also, of course, in its presentation of Fagin, indulgent of antisemitism. Compulsively referred to as “the Jew” in the novel and often played with a prosthetic nose and a Yiddish accent in earlier productions, Fagin is an awful caricature even though Bart, born Lionel Begleiter, was Jewish.Esparza — sallow-eyed, greasy-haired and perpetually sniffly, but without prosthetics — dials that down almost to zero, though the music still bears traces of Fagin’s religion in the klezmerlike violin-and-clarinet accompaniment to the song “Reviewing the Situation” with which deBessonet thoughtfully ends this production.The song asks: “Can somebody change?” Fagin’s doubtful answer is “S’possible.”I too am doubtful about the possibility of change, at least for musicals like “Oliver!” (And keep in mind that in the Dickens, Fagin is eventually executed.) They can’t all be “Sweeney”; they don’t have the bones for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth reinvesting in what made them meaningful in the first place, if dividends of delight keep coming. For that, I’d do anything.Oliver!Through May 14 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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      ‘Queens of the Qing Dynasty’ Review: Secret Soul Mates

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      When a young woman hospitalized after a suicide attempt forms a bond with an international student, they create a different kind of relationship.The wonderfully bizarre Canadian drama “Queens of the Qing Dynasty” understands queerness the way that bell hooks did: as a “self that is at odds with everything around it.” Directed by Ashley McKenzie like a dream — or a bout of dissociation — the film is a love story, absent sex or romance, about a teenage psychiatric patient in Nova Scotia, Star (Sarah Walker), and a Shanghainese exchange student volunteering at the hospital, An (Ziyin Zheng). The pair make an odd couple, and yet their bond is intuitive, electric.The story kicks off in the aftermath of Star’s suicide attempt, the film’s tone at once bleakly clinical and deadpan absurd. Star, a neurodivergent foster kid with a sardonic sense of humor, clearly doesn’t register the gravity of her actions. Eyes glazed, she seems out of touch with her own body, and she’s not one for rules, like when she’s kicked out of an apartment for opening it to partiers. Eventually, she is institutionalized.Walker, captivatingly raw, makes Star both charming and frustrating in her aloofness. The cinematographer Scott Moore shoots in close-ups that blur at the edges, while the eerie sound design by Andreas Mendritzki gives the frosty Cape Breton location the feel of life on Mars, approximating Star’s dazed point of view.An, a poised international student with bladelike long nails, dreams of transitioning, and — through a kind of buddy system — connects with Star, regaling her with stories of ancient Chinese courtesans, scheming, glamorous dames who never have to work. The two communicate by text: An sends singing videos with their face prettified by a filter; Star, a stream-of-consciousness barrage of messages and voice mail messages that usually go unacknowledged. She doesn’t seem to mind and An isn’t driven away by them, either. They part and reunite and part again.Estranged from their communities, the two embody a different kind of relationship, and McKenzie doesn’t rely on the usual uplifting messaging and strained empowerment arc to humanize An and Star. In one beautifully uncanny scene, the duo stop by a virtual reality gaming studio and, equipped with headsets, plug into the fantasy, playing as flying sorcerers as they shoot the breeze. Their friendship remains mysterious, yet the film, as if by witchcraft, makes their connection feel palpable and true.Queens of the Qing DynastyNot rated. In English, Mandarin and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hour 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Review: ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It?’ Probably a Lot

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      Two childhood friends navigate cultural differences in this pleasantly uncontentious romantic comedy.A glossy lesson in how to pour nontraditional content into a traditional rom-com mold, Shekhar Kapur’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” shapes competing notions of happily-ever-after into comfort food. And in case we’re unclear about its middle-of-the-road ambitions, Kapur also gives us a film-within-the-film whose title is “Love Contractually.” Accordingly, anyone who takes longer than 10 minutes to forecast the ending simply doesn’t get out of the house enough.Moving between graceful London locations and a vibrant celebration in Lahore, Pakistan, the story centers on Zoe (Lily James), an English documentary filmmaker, and her childhood friend, Kazim (Shazad Latif), a British-Pakistani doctor. She is a chronic right-swiper on disappointing men; he considers love at first sight a mental health issue and has opted for an arranged marriage to a shy Pakistani beauty (a wonderfully nimble Sajal Ali). Kazim’s journey to the altar, Zoe decides, will make a perfect topic for her new documentary.Written by Jemima Khan, channeling some of her own experiences as the former wife of a Pakistani prime minister, “What’s Love” bundles its perky-sweet tale in Kapur’s signature visual sumptuousness (courtesy of the cinematographer Remi Adefarasin). Bland conversations about love and longing, and a mostly sunny tone, neuter potential conflict in a movie that neither promotes nor disparages arranged marriage. Sadly, its most divisive feature is a grating turn by Emma Thompson as Zoe’s attention-hogging mother, whose behavior is often embarrassing and usually inappropriate.By contrast, the lovely Shabana Azmi gives Kazim’s mother a droll, knowing dignity. “Not too dark,” she warns, instructing a matchmaker on her daughter-in-law preferences. Apparently the filmmakers made the same choice.What’s Love Got to Do With it?Rated PG-13. No sex, they’re British. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘You Can Live Forever’ Review: Do You Love Me Now?

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      Religion comes between two girls falling in love in the 1990s in this sweet coming-of-age film bathed in grunge hues.In “You Can Live Forever,” Jaime and Marike do many things teenagers in love do, like looking soulfully into each other’s eyes and making out in a car’s back seat. They also knock on doors to proselytize for the Jehovah’s Witnesses.Yeah, that last one is going to be a problem for budding lesbians.Complicating matters further, Jaime (Anwen O’Driscoll) is a recent transplant to their small Quebec town and goes along for the religious ride only to be with Marike (June Laporte), a believer who was raised in “the Truth.”The intersection of homosexuality and faith has been explored in film before — Sebastián Lelio’s “Disobedience,” set among the Orthodox Jewish community, is a high-profile recent example — and Mark Slutsky and Sarah Watts’s story benefits from being rooted in Watts’s own experience growing up gay in the 1990s. As if to underline that the film is set in that decade, Jaime never seems to take off her flannel and beanie, and kisses Marike to the sound of the Breeders; Gayle Ye’s cinematography is also a nice washed-up hue, as if bleached of bold colors — very true to the grunge sensibility.Otherwise “You Can Live Forever” sticks to a fairly common coming-of-age trajectory. There is a sense of a missed opportunity in that we see the action through the eyes of Jaime, who is more accepting of her sexuality from the start, leaving Marike a tantalizing blank. She initiates every move with Jaime, only to segue into Bible study or a double date with boys. How does Marike rationalize this new love and her faith? Even the Breeders don’t have a song for that.You Can Live ForeverNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Riceboy Sleeps’ Review: Motherhood and Boyhood in a New Home

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      This intimate drama gives a moving, if imperfect, look at a Korean immigrant mother’s struggle to raise her son in 1990s Canada.A few minutes into “Riceboy Sleeps,” an imperfect but ultimately moving drama written and directed by Anthony Shim, the film falls into that dreaded trope of immigrant stories: the smelly lunchbox moment. The experience comes for young Dong-hyun (Dohyun Noel Hwang) when he opens the Korean meal his mom packed him and is taunted by elementary school classmates.Later, he asks his single mother, So-young (Choi Seung-yoon), who emigrated from Korea to Canada with Dong-hyun after the father died by suicide, to pack him a less conspicuous lunch. It’s one of a few ways that Shim’s film, which eventually flashes forward to track So-young’s struggle to raise and connect with her son during his teenage years (when he is played by Ethan Hwang), emphasizes in an almost perfunctory way the racism and hardship the pair faces in a new country in the ‘90s.Even while it’s hampered by these rough edges, the movie is terrifically scored and beautifully shot. (Though the cinematographer Christopher Lew’s astute camerawork is too often left to do heavy emotional lifting that the writing can’t.) Most of all, the film is elevated by Choi, who naturally communicates the strength, tenderness and pain of So-young’s life.It’s not until the spectacular third act of the film, when mother and son travel to Korea, that everything clicks more fully into place, as Shim lets the landscape and his actors take over. The camera finally sits still, capturing small moments of connection that further contour unspeakable wounds — giving a window into a past life that So-young could never fully escape.Riceboy SleepsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Slava Ukraini’ Review: Tour of a War-Torn Nation

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      The French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy travels to different parts of Ukraine in this dispatch-documentary, shot in the second half of 2022.The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy does not pretend that “Slava Ukraini,” a war dispatch that he directed with Marc Roussel, is a polished documentary. In his closing narration, he describes it as an “unfinished film that we deliver as such, from the road.”For better and worse, that is how it plays. Lévy’s second documentary on the war in Ukraine (the first, “Why Ukraine,” aired on television in Europe) follows his travels to cities around the battered country in the second half of 2022. He meets with soldiers and civilians to capture the human stakes of the fight, with the goal of rallying the world against complacency in the face of the Russian president Vladimir V. Putin’s aggression.Lévy’s effort demands respect. Public intellectuals in the United States seldom travel through war zones with a camera running. (For that, we have Sean Penn.) They do not head into the center of a still-smoldering Bakhmut as the rumble of combat echoes in the background. Nor do they stand across the Dnipro River from an active Russian military position, in apparent view of a sniper. “For the time being, there is only sporadic fire,” Lévy explains over footage of himself hastening back to a car.It is also facile to dismiss Lévy, as some have, as a conflict-chasing opportunist. He’s been at this long enough. Lévy first wrote as a war correspondent in the early 1970s. His documentary “Peshmerga,” on Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State in Iraqi Kurdistan, and its follow-up, “The Battle of Mosul,” were released here in 2020.Yet Lévy does not make especially cohesive documentaries, and “Slava Ukraini” consists, like the Iraq films, of a disjointed, often insufficiently contextualized collection of interviews and interactions from his travels. It is hard not to wish for a version of “Slava Ukraini” in which Lévy played a less central onscreen role, or at least one without so much obtrusive scoring or voice-over.Occasionally his commentary is poetic. A breathtaking hand-held shot shows him trudging through a trench with soldiers as he reflects in narration “on this archaic habit of men burying themselves so not to die.” Yet more often, at least as subtitled, his words are so florid (“And we walk, under an insolently blue sky, looking for miraculous survivors”) that they risk trivializing his encounters. The camera says a lot without him.But artistic values aren’t really the point, which is to meet Ukrainians and to see different corners of the bombarded country, where residents, Lévy suggests, have in many cases become inured to the sight of a bombed office building or to the sound of warning sirens. “If there’s an evacuation, where will I go?” says a woman making borscht outdoors. Lévy visits a synagogue that sheltered outsiders, an act that he says serves as “a magnificent rebuttal to Putin’s propaganda about the inexpiable war between Ukraine and its Jews.” Survivors in liberated Kherson gather around generators to charge their phones, preparing to call people who may have been killed.Maybe Lévy didn’t need to be the one to put them in a movie. But he’s the one who did.Slava UkrainiNot rated. In French, Ukrainian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More