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      ‘Fremont’ Review: Rapid Transit

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      This dry, understated film follows a young Afghan refugee looking for connection in her new home, the San Francisco Bay Area.“Fremont” takes its title from the Bay Area city of the same name. Often called Little Kabul, it’s home to one of the largest enclaves of Afghans in the United States, with many immigrants gravitating toward it for a sense of community. That’s what Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is searching for: Community. Connection. Love. These are difficult pursuits for anyone in these atomized times, but especially for Donya, a young refugee and former translator for the American military.Being in Fremont, living among other Afghans, isn’t a huge comfort for Donya. Perhaps because her memories of home aren’t cozy — in fact, they fill her with dread and guilt. The details of what she left behind aren’t the focus here. It’s enough to know that they keep her awake at night; that she prefers the lightly numbing, Zenlike routine of her unglamorous job at a fortune-cookie factory in San Francisco.The British Iranian filmmaker Babak Jalali captures Donya’s existential plight with the dry, contemplative mood of a film by Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismaki, both masters of deadpan dramedies infused with melancholia. Shooting in milky black-and-white, Jalali situates Donya in a world of outcasts and loners — people disaffected and worn out yet also capable of compassion and change. Salim (Siddique Ahmed), a fellow insomniac who lives in Donya’s apartment complex, gives her his slot with a psychiatrist, Dr. Anthony (Gregg Turkington), who sees him pro bono.An appointment isn’t like a movie ticket that you can just hand over to a friend, Dr. Anthony explains, fussing over protocol. Donya persuades him to take her on anyway, beginning a series of droll (if not exactly helpful) consultations. After Donya is promoted to fortune writer at the factory, her boss’s vengeful wife (Jennifer McKay) discovers that Donya has written her phone number on the paper in one cookie. She calls for Donya’s firing. Her husband (Eddie Tang) sees it differently: If anything, Donya’s attempt to reach out to another lost soul makes her precisely the kind of person who should be inventing dreamy maxims.Jalali and his co-writer, Carolina Cavalli, point to the ways in which bureaucratic rigidity and cutthroat capitalism can cripple us. They stop short of reducing the film to a story about social injustices while deftly steering clear of an overly cutesy tone and messaging about our shared humanity, or whatever. Expressionistic interludes — shadows mingling on a stairwell wall, a globe spinning at a blurred speed — capture the uncanny nature of social interactions among the displaced and disoriented.Jalali complements this wistful mood with a jazzy score from Mahmood Schricker, which, driven by sitar and low-pitched horn, seems to cut through the dead air of Donya’s impassive encounters. If the humor in these moments doesn’t always click, it’s because there’s only so much awkward-giggle mileage in Jalali’s drawn-out takes of two people talking face-to-face.A first-time actor who fled Afghanistan in 2021, Wali Zada emits a natural warmth and poignancy as she delivers intentionally vacant line readings. This flattens some of the wryer scenes but makes Donya’s measured expressions of longing and hopefulness sing. She’s what makes the final act — which features a solitary mechanic played by Jeremy Allen White (of “The Bear”) — so moving and romantic. Jalali maintains a mysterious ambiguity, but Wali Zada conveys what matters: Donya has found somewhere she wants to be.FremontNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Choose Love’ Review: Pick Your Own Cliché

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      This interactive Netflix rom-com lets viewers make choices on behalf of the main character, changing the story. But each path is banal.Netflix’s latest interactive movie, “Choose Love,” is an attempt to apply a dating simulator experience to a standard-issue rom-com. Its choose-your-own-adventure interface — like the one in the 2019 “Black Mirror” movie “Bandersnatch,” another Netflix production — allows viewers to make decisions for Cami Conway (Laura Marano), a young woman who suddenly finds herself having to choose between three suitors. The choices that viewers select with the click of a button (Should Cami kiss this man or dodge his advances? Should she wear this dress or that one?) will ultimately inform which guy she ends up with.Except, there’s not as much choice left to the viewer as meets the eye. The movie’s opening scene is a tarot reading where you get to help Cami decide whether she wants “good news” or “bad news” first. But either way, it’s the same set of cards. After a pleasant but banal double-date night with her long-term boyfriend, Paul (Scott Michael Foster), she runs into an erstwhile high school heartthrob, Jack (Jordi Webber), while dropping her niece off at school, learning that he’s now a professional photographer with humanitarian priorities. He takes pictures of children for charity.She meets her third suitor, a famous pop musician named Rex Galier (Avan Jogia), when he rents out space at the recording studio where she works as a sound engineer. Rex asks for her advice on a new track he’s producing, and — whether or not you pick “lie and say it’s good” or “brutal honesty” — he takes a liking to her expertise and asks her to record with him. Cami’s longtime dream of a singing career is reawakened, and she finds herself faced with three potential life paths: play it safe, reconnect with the one who got away or chase stardom with a famous beau.The interactive features in “Choose Love” more or less boil down to two or three pivotal scenes that determine which man Cami will spend her life with — and of course, as the credits roll, Netflix encourages you to go back and click a different button for an alternative ending. If only the film were compelling enough to warrant that.While “Bandersnatch” and Netflix’s other attempts at interactive storytelling, like the “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” special “Kimmy vs. The Reverend,” were not without their flaws, their unpredictability — whether through dystopian thrills or comedic timing — kept the gimmick somewhat afloat. But the main selling point of “Choose Love,” directed by Stuart McDonald, seems to be that viewers get to pick which stale rom-com trope they see play out onscreen. Predictability aside, “Choose Love” resembles less of a comforting rom-com than it does the forgone conclusion to streaming’s algorithm-powered media: a series of disconnected, shallow interactions, each leading to a different predetermined cliché.Choose LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Mountain’ Review: Stone-Faced in Nature’s Splendors

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      In this drama directed by and starring Thomas Salvador, an urbanite plunges into treacherous conditions.Thomas Salvador’s “The Mountain” is a lightweight parable about a man who abandons modernity to connect with the earth. On impulse, a Parisian robotics engineer named Pierre (Salvador, who also wrote the script with Naïla Guiguet), extends a work trip to scale France’s snow-capped Mont Blanc. “I can’t resist,” he says, and for a while the film plays like a silent comedy about a transcendence junkie itching for a fix. Pierre’s cable car is too crowded, his new ice crampons look silly alongside other tourists in tees, his scenic glacier-top tent is hemmed-in by more tents. Nevertheless, he prefers not to rejoin civilization — he’s Bartleby the Backpacker, holding out for something he can’t explain.Though this is a story about an urbanite plunging into treacherous conditions, the camping itself appears easy. Pierre looks impressive scaling cliffs. “A change from the climbing gym,” he says placidly. It’s equally incredible that, when the weeks begin to blur, he maintains his neat goatee without ever appearing to shave — and even catches the eye of a quixotic resort chef (Louise Bourgoin) despite having the conversational skills of a rock.Truly communing with nature, however, proves difficult. That is, until the film’s one surprise, a hallucinatory twist which comes so long after the audience has been lulled into the quiet contemplation of snow and clouds that it almost feels like we, too, might be low on oxygen. Some might see the final act as body horror. To the director, it’s a metaphysical sacrament — and all along, his camera has hinted that mankind must commit to the planet before it’s too late.The MountainNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Venice Film Festival Finds Drama Without Zendaya

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      Day 1 brought challenges but not “Challengers,” the film that had been scheduled to open this usually starry event until it was delayed by the strikes.The sky in Venice wept on Wednesday, for there were no pictures to be taken of Zendaya in couture clambering from a speedboat.No? Too much? Well, it’s hard not to sound melodramatic at a film festival where the movies are big but the mood swings are even bigger. Let me clear my throat, take a swig of this Aperol spritz, and start again …The 80th edition of the Venice Film Festival kicked off on this rainy Wednesday with several big-name auteurs in attendance but few of the stars that this event has come to count on. With dual strikes by the writers and actors guilds forcing a Hollywood shutdown, and the actors forbidden from promoting studio films during the labor action, Venice will inaugurate a fall film season that is still in significant flux.The first day was meant to be turbocharged by the presence of Zendaya, who turned heads here two years ago in a series of stunning dresses while publicizing the first installment of “Dune.” But the shutdown cost Venice the new film she stars in, Luca Guadagnino’s “Challengers,” in which she plays a tennis pro who has to make a romantic choice between two best friends, played by Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist (the cheeky marketing materials tease that on at least one night, she chooses both).Without its lead available to support the film, MGM delayed the release of “Challengers” to spring 2024 and yanked it from the Venice lineup. Taking its place as the festival’s opening-night film was “Comandante,” a World War II film told from the point of view of Italian submariners. While it’s well-shot and full of suspenseful battle sequences, “Comandante” features exactly zero tennis hotties contemplating a threesome, which may hinder its ultimate appeal with a Venice audience that was promised starry romantic high jinks.Though the festival’s artistic director, Alberto Barbera, admitted at a news conference on Wednesday that the likes of Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) and Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) will not be attending Venice because of the strike, other actors who hail from more independent productions have managed to secure guild waivers, including “Ferrari” star Adam Driver, “Memory” lead Jessica Chastain, and the cast of Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla.” They’re expected to show up on the Lido this week alongside a posse of high-powered directors that includes David Fincher (“The Killer”), Ava DuVernay (“Origin”) and Richard Linklater (“Hit Man”).Still, the strikes loom large. At Barbera’s news conference, the jury president, the filmmaker Damien Chazelle (“La La Land”), dressed for maximum solidarity, donning a “Writers Guild on Strike!” shirt and a similar button on the lapel of his sport coat. He noted that as of Wednesday, the writers had been on strike for 121 days, with the actors joining them for the last 48 days, and he called on studios to compensate those artists fairly.“I think there’s a basic idea that each work of art has value unto itself, that it’s not just a piece of content, to use Hollywood’s favorite word right now,” Chazelle told reporters, adding that that idea “has been eroded quite a bit over the past 10 years. There’s many issues on the table with the strikes, but to me, that’s the core issue.”Chazelle was joined by the directors Martin McDonagh and Laura Poitras, who both wore shirts supporting the Writers Guild. They are part of a jury that includes the filmmakers Jane Campion and Mia Hansen-Love, among others.“I’m not sure I entirely deserve this spot, but I will do my best to live up to it,” Chazelle said. “I thank Mr. Barbera for his foolishness in letting me try it out.”Though Chazelle has been to Venice a few times before, to debut “La La Land” and his follow-up, “First Man,” he said he still found the place quite surreal. “That fact that you take a boat to a screening, it’s silly,” Chazelle said. “Cinema, to me, is a waking dream and that, to me, is Venice.”See what I said about melodrama? When you’re in Venice, where even the paint peels in the most picturesque way, you just can’t help yourself from indulging. That’s how your columnist felt last night in the rain, mulling over two of the worst disasters to hit Italy in quite some time: St. Mark’s Square was flooded, and there was no Zendaya. But at least the sun will come out tomorrow here, as will the new films by Michael Mann and Wes Anderson. More

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      Documentaries to Stream Now: ‘Primary,’ ‘4 Little Girls’ and More

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      This month’s picks include a look back at a presidential primary, a remembrance of the victims of a hate crime and an intriguing visit to a Northwest Atlantic island.The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.‘Primary’ (1960)Stream it on the Criterion Channel and Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.The run-up to the presidential primary season is (somehow, already) underway. To see how different the nominating process once was, get a look at Robert Drew’s pioneering documentary.The film has to be watched through the prism of its time. Doubly disorienting, it is a chronicle of the 1960 Democratic presidential primary in Wisconsin at a point when the majority of states did not yet hold primaries; it is also a fly-on-the-wall documentary from a moment when that form — made possible by the increased portability of cameras and sound equipment — was brand-new. While sitting in the room with John F. Kennedy, then the junior senator from Massachusetts, as he receives news of election returns may seem like the sort of sight you could easily catch on TV today, in 1960 it was an innovative, close-range portrait, offering “an intimate view of the candidates themselves,” as the film’s opening narration puts it.Kennedy ran against his fellow senator Hubert H. Humphrey, of Minnesota, who during the events of “Primary” was campaigning only one state away from his home turf. His advantage is said to be with rural voters; Kennedy has strength in cities. The barnstorming seems oddly wholesome and congenial by today’s standards. The film shows Humphrey pitching a room of farmers on how the Senate votes he’s taken aren’t popular in Boston or New York. Elsewhere, cheering crowds greet Kennedy and sing along with his campaign song, a reworked version of Frank Sinatra’s “High Hopes.” And although much of “Primary” consists of speeches and handshaking, it gives the sense of having captured the national conversation in microcosm. Some voters express the fear that Kennedy’s Catholicism would influence his politics. One woman says she favors him precisely because he is Catholic.Drew, who takes a “conceived & produced” credit as opposed to calling himself a director, went on to make other films with Kennedy, such as “Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment,” which followed the Kennedy administration’s actions to support the integration of the University of Alabama in 1963. “Primary” may end with its two candidates on roughly even national standing from where they started, but it inaugurated the direct-cinema movement. People who worked on it — including Albert Maysles and D.A. Pennebaker as cameramen — went on to make groundbreaking documentaries of their own.‘4 Little Girls’ (1997)Stream it on Max. Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.A memorial plaque honoring the subjects of Spike Lee’s documentary “4 Little Girls.”David Lee/HBONext month will mark 60 years since the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., an act of terrorism that killed four girls. Their deaths, Walter Cronkite says in an interview in Spike Lee’s moving documentary, became an “awakening” for Americans who had, until that point, failed to understand “the real nature of the hate that was preventing integration.”Lee’s documentary, edited by Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”), leads by honoring the victims. The film opens with Joan Baez singing “Birmingham Sunday,” written in response to the bombing, over images of the graves and faces of the four girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Rosamond Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. We then hear recollections from friends and family members who knew them. McNair’s parents, Maxine and Chris, recall how painful it was to explain to Denise, at around age 6 (she died at 11), why she wasn’t allowed to order from a lunch counter. A friend of Wesley’s, Dr. Freeman A. Hrabowski III, remembers Wesley’s sense of humor and kindness, and how they parted with the words “see you Monday,” not knowing what that Sunday would bring.“4 Little Girls” also features interviews with civil rights leaders like the Rev. Andrew Young and the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who walks viewers through how he barely survived another bombing in 1956. (The commentators, billed as “witnesses” in the credits, include Howell Raines, the executive editor of The New York Times from 2001 to 2003, who wrote extensively about the events.)But almost unavoidably, Lee’s most memorable interview is with the former Alabama governor George Wallace, a proud segregationist who now claims that his “best friend is a Black friend.” He insists on bringing his aide, Eddie Holcey, before the camera. “Ed come over here, just one minute,” he says. “Here’s one of my best friends right here.” Holcey, whom Wallace barely seems to look at directly, and who glances offscreen to make a sort of eyeroll, appears profoundly irritated at how Wallace is using him.‘Geographies of Solitude’ (2023)Rent it on Apple TV, Google Play and Vudu.The naturalist Zoe Lucas first visited Sable Island — a beachy strip that is less than one mile wide, and that lies 100 miles off the coast of mainland Nova Scotia — in 1971. Since then, she has become a tireless and largely solitary cataloger of life on the island: its hundreds of wild horses, its invertebrates and its seabirds, among other animals. She is heard discussing the possibility of finding species that don’t exist anywhere else. The diets of the birds, who have a tendency to eat plastic, are one indicator of levels of pollution in the ocean, another trend that Lucas tracks.In “Geographies of Solitude,” the filmmaker Jacquelyn Mills, while not a naturalist (to be fair, she is credited as director, editor, cinematographer, sound recordist and producer), takes an approach to this documentary that is, in its way, similar to Lucas’s. Both women see boundless possibilities in the island’s treasures. Mills draws on natural elements to make cameraless short films that wouldn’t be out of place in a Stan Brakhage retrospective. With a contact microphone, she and Zoe record the sounds made by the wood of a decaying A-frame on the island. She finds out what happens to film stock when it is buried in horse dung. She hand-processes film in seaweed and electronically renders music out of the crawling of a Sable ant.Mills’s work is interspersed throughout the movie, which becomes a striking combination of environmental documentary and profile. It’s also a landscape film that makes a real effort to attune viewers to sights and sounds, and that gently dips its toe into the avant-garde. Late in the film, Lucas says it appears that her life is Sable Island — “that’s all I have, that’s all I do, all the time,” she notes, adding, with a hint of regret, “I lost track of everything else.” “Geographies of Solitude” isn’t quite immersive enough to make that happen. But it captures a world where cameras seldom go. More

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      Venice Film Festival 2023: What to Watch For

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      New films from David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay and Michael Mann will make up for the absence of stars kept away by the Hollywood strikes.A year ago, the Venice Film Festival had enough star power to put even celebrity-worshiping Cannes on notice. Highlights were quickly beamed all over the world, including the notorious “Don’t Worry Darling” kickoff that fueled endless speculation about the film’s director, Olivia Wilde, and her stars Florence Pugh and Harry Styles; the news conference where an unexpectedly sagacious Timothée Chalamet predicted imminent societal collapse; and the tearful Brendan Fraser comeback that began on the Lido and culminated in his best actor Oscar win.But without all of those celebrities, can Venice still go viral?The 80th edition of the festival, which begins on Wednesday, will be significantly affected by continuing strikes by the Screen Actors Guild (or SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America, since the actors’ union has instructed its members not to do press for any studio movies until the strike against those companies is resolved. That puts Venice in a bind, as it’s regarded as one of the best places for Hollywood to unveil starry awards-season titles. Few major actors will even be permitted to attend this year.The actors’ strike has already cost Venice its original opening-night film, Luca Guadagnino’s sexy tennis romance, “Challengers,” since MGM delayed it from September to spring in the hopes that its lead, Zendaya, will be allowed to promote it several months from now when the strikes might be resolved. (A low-profile Italian film is opening instead.) And I’ve heard of a few more starry fall films that were earmarked for Venice but opted for the Telluride Film Festival instead, since that event is less driven by the photo ops and news conferences that are no longer feasible in Italy.Despite some of those trims, the Venice lineup is still enticing, with an auteur-heavy list featuring directors nearly as famous as their leads. And Venice has proved before that it can adapt to unfavorable limitations: Amid the pandemic in August 2020, the festival opted for a smaller, partly open-air edition that still went on to premiere the eventual winner of the best picture Oscar, “Nomadland.”Emma Stone, left, and Mark Ruffalo in “Poor Things,” from Yorgos Lanthimos. Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressThis year’s program includes two films about assassins-for-hire: David Fincher’s new thriller, “The Killer,” stars Michael Fassbender, while Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” features the “Top Gun: Maverick” breakout Glen Powell, who also served as a co-writer. I’m curious about the off-kilter comedy “Poor Things,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”) and starring Emma Stone as a sexually curious Frankenstein’s monster. Ditto “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s second directorial effort, after “A Star Is Born.” He’s cast himself as the composer Leonard Bernstein, opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia, and his decision to wear a prosthetic nose has already set off controversy.Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” was a big hit last year, but what will that story look like through Sofia Coppola’s lens? The “Lost in Translation” and “Marie Antoinette” director puts her spotlight on Elvis Presley’s wife with “Priscilla,” featuring Cailee Spaeny as teen bride Priscilla Presley and the “Euphoria” star Jacob Elordi as the singer. Ava DuVernay has adapted the Isabel Wilkerson book “Caste” for her new film, “Origin,” which stars the Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis in an examination of racism and systemic oppression. And though Michael Mann has secured a guild exemption that would allow the cast of “Ferrari” to promote it in Venice, I’m curious whether his new film’s press-shy lead, Adam Driver (as the racer-turned-car-magnate Enzo Ferrari), is willing to do a full-blown media blitz for the movie, which the hot indie studio Neon is releasing in theaters on Christmas Day.Two years after the release of his Oscar-winning breakthrough “Drive My Car,” the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi returns to the festival circuit with “Evil Does Not Exist,” which originated as a dialogue-free short and became a feature-length film about ecological collapse. And two months after releasing his feature-length “Asteroid City,” the director Wes Anderson is opting for something shorter with “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” a 37-minute Roald Dahl adaptation for Netflix.Harmony Korine premiered his biggest film, “Spring Breakers,” at Venice back in 2012, and he’ll return with the mysterious “Aggro Dr1ft,” which stars the rapper Travis Scott and was shot solely using infrared photography. He’s not the only director taking chances: Pablo Larraín, the director of “Jackie” and “Spencer,” has set the divas aside for a moment to make “El Conde,” a black-and-white supernatural fable that reimagines the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a bloodsucking vampire.And then there are the chances that Venice itself is taking when it comes to three auteurs: It is premiering “Dogman” from Luc Besson, who was accused of sexual assault but cleared by prosecutors; “The Palace” from Roman Polanski, who was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor but fled before he could be sentenced; and “Coup de Chance” from Woody Allen, who has denied sexual abuse accusations by Dylan Farrow, his adopted daughter.Venice will also serve as an elegy of sorts for the director William Friedkin, who died earlier this month and whose final film, the naval drama “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” will premiere posthumously on the Lido. Adapted by Friedkin from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk, it stars Jake Lacy and Kiefer Sutherland. More

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      Nicholas Hitchon, Who Aged 7 Years at a Time in ‘Up’ Films, Dies at 65

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      He was one of the original children profiled in “Seven Up!,” a 1964 British documentary, and reappeared in subsequent installments for more than a half-century.Nicholas Hitchon, whose life was chronicled in the acclaimed “Up” series of British documentaries, beginning when he was a boy in the English countryside in 1964 and continuing through the decades as he grew to become a researcher and professor at the University of Wisconsin, died on July 23 in Madison, Wis. He was 65.A posting on the university’s website announced his death, from throat cancer. In the most recent installment of the series, “63 Up,” in 2019, he described his struggles with the disease.Professor Hitchon was a student in a one-room primary school in Littondale, north of Manchester, when a researcher working on a Granada Television project came looking for a 7-year-old willing to participate in what was originally viewed as a one-shot TV special. Young Nick was only 6, but he was talkative and unintimidated by cameras, so he was signed up as one of 14 youngsters to be profiled.The idea was to get a cross-section of children from Britain’s economic classes, look at their schooling and other experiences and capture their perspectives on the adult world. Nick represented the rural child. He endeared himself to that original television audience with his response to an interviewer who, clearly fishing for cuteness, asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”“I don’t want to answer that,” Nick said. “I don’t answer those kind of questions.”The 1964 film, a simple effort titled “Seven Up!,” directed by Paul Almond, began to transform into documentary greatness when one of his researchers, Michael Apted, picked up the thread at the end of the decade and made a follow-up, “7 Plus Seven,” interviewing the same children.Mr. Apted, who died in 2019 at 79, directed that and all the subsequent installments, which were made at seven-year intervals. They became a fascinating portrait of ordinary people growing up, changing and reflecting on their lives.“What I had seen as a significant statement about the English class system was in fact a humanistic document about the real issues of life,” Mr. Apted wrote in 2000.Over the years, Professor Hitchon expressed both admiration for what the series was accomplishing and discomfort with being a part of it and with the way it was edited.“I’ve learnt that the stupider the thing I say, the more likely it is to get in,” he told The Independent of Britain in 2012, when “56 Up” was released. “You’re asked to discuss every intimate part of your life. You feel like you’re just a specimen pinned on the board. It’s totally dehumanizing.”He also thought the filmmakers had a tendency to play up stereotypes of British society, something he said he felt even as a boy in the early installments, when crew members would chase sheep into the camera’s view while filming him.“These people thought that I was all about sheep,” he told The Chronicle of Higher Education in 2005. “I’m quite fond of sheep, but I was more interested in other things.”If the series seemed too intent on demonstrating that economic class was a determining factor throughout life, Professor Hitchon — who went from a one-room rural schoolhouse to a Ph.D. and a life of academic accomplishment — proved to be an exception.“He’s one of the success stories,” Mr. Apted told the education journal in 2005.Professor Hitchon teaching a class in electromagnetism and conductivity at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He said the director Michael Apted would sometimes ask him about his work. “When I try to explain,” he said, “his eyes glaze over.”Michael Forster Rothbart/UW-MadisonWilliam Nicholas Guy Hitchon was born on Oct. 22, 1957, to Guy and Iona (Hall) Hitchon, who had a farm in Littondale. He studied physics at Oxford University, earning a bachelor’s degree there in 1978, a master’s in 1979 and a Ph.D. in engineering science in 1981. Soon after, he left for the United States to teach at the University of Wisconsin, a move that he thought “28 Up” (1984) had wrongly portrayed as abandoning his home country in pursuit of money.“He took us out to West Towne” — a Madison mall — “and had us walk around over and over again,” Professor Hitchon told The Capital Times of Madison in 1987, speaking of Mr. Apted. “Then he did a voice-over where he talked about that I’d come to America for a salary of $30,000.”Professor Hitchon pursued research on nuclear fusion, then switched to computational plasma physics. Once in a while, Mr. Apted would ask him about his work.“When I try to explain,” Professor Hitchon told Physics Today in 2000, “his eyes glaze over.”He published more than 100 journal articles and three books, the university’s posting said. He retired in 2022.His first marriage, to Jacqueline Bush, ended in divorce. He married C. Cryss Brunner in 2001. She survives him, along with a son from his first marriage, Adam; and two brothers, Andrew and Chris.If Professor Hitchon was sometimes uncomfortable with the “Up” project, he stuck with it, while a few of the other original participants dropped out. In “42 Up” (1998), he even joked about its role in his life.“My ambition as a scientist is to be more famous for doing science than for being in this film,” he told Mr. Apted on camera. “Unfortunately, Michael, it’s not going to happen.” More