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      ‘The Whale’ Review: Body Issues

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      Brendan Fraser plays an obese writing instructor reckoning with grief and regret in Darren Aronofsky’s latest film.Charlie is a college writing instructor who never leaves his apartment. He conducts his classes online, disabling his laptop camera so the students can’t see him. The movie camera, guided by Darren Aronofsky and his go-to cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, also stays indoors most of the time. Occasionally you get an exterior view of the drab low-rise building where Charlie lives, or a breath of fresh air on the landing outside his front door. But these respites only emphasize a pervasive sense of confinement.Based on a play by Samuel D. Hunter (who wrote the script), “The Whale” is an exercise in claustrophobia. Rather than open up a stage-bound text, as a less confident film director might, Aronofsky intensifies the stasis, the calamitous sense of stuckness that defines Charlie’s existence. Charlie is trapped — in his rooms, in a life that has run off the rails, and above all in his own body. He was always a big guy, he says, but after the suicide of his lover, his eating “just got out of control.” Now his blood pressure is spiking, his heart is failing, and the simple physical exertions of standing up and sitting down require enormous effort and mechanical assistance.Charlie’s size is the movie’s governing symbol and principal special effect. Encased in prosthetic flesh, Brendan Fraser, who plays Charlie, gives a performance that is sometimes disarmingly graceful. He uses his voice and his big, sad eyes to convey a delicacy at odds with the character’s corporeal grossness. But nearly everything about Charlie — the sound of his breathing, the way he eats, moves and perspires — underlines his abjection, to an extent that starts to feel cruel and voyeuristic.“The Whale” unfolds over the course of a week, during which Charlie receives a series of visits: from his friend and informal caretaker, Liz (Hong Chau); from Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young missionary who wants to save his soul; from his estranged teenage daughter, Ellie (Sadie Sink), and embittered ex-wife, Mary (Samantha Morton). There is also a pizza delivery guy (Sathya Sridharan), and a bird that occasionally shows up outside Charlie’s window. I’m not an ornithologist, but my guidebook identifies it as a Common Western Metaphor.Speaking of which, Charlie is not the only whale in “The Whale.” His most prized possession is a student paper on “Moby-Dick,” the authorship of which is revealed at the movie’s end. It’s a fine piece of naïve literary criticism — maybe the best writing in the movie — about how Ishmael’s troubles compelled the author to think about “my own life.”Perhaps Charlie’s troubles are meant to have the same effect. He becomes the nodal point in a web of trauma and regret, variously the agent, victim and witness of someone else’s unhappiness. He left Mary when he fell in love with a male student, Alan, who was Liz’s brother and had been raised in the church that Thomas represents. Mary, a heavy drinker, has kept Charlie away from Ellie, who has grown into a seething adolescent.All this drama bursts out in freshets of stagy verbiage and blubbering. The script overwhelms narrative logic while demanding extra credit for emotional honesty. But the working out of the various issues involves a lot of blame-shifting and ethical evasion. Everyone and no one is responsible; actions do and don’t have consequences. Real-world topics like sexuality, addiction and religious intolerance float around untethered to any credible sense of social reality. The moral that bubbles up through the shouting (and the strenuous nerve-pumping of Robert Simonsen’s score) is that people are incapable of not caring about one another.Maybe? Herman Melville and Walt Whitman provide some literary ballast for this idea, but as an exploration of — and argument for — the power of human sympathy, “The Whale” is undone by simplistic psychologizing and intellectual fuzziness.Aronofsky has a tendency to misjudge his own strengths as a filmmaker. He is a brilliant manipulator of moods and a formidable director of actors, specializing in characters fighting their way through anguish and delusion toward something like transcendence. Mickey Rourke did that in “The Wrestler,” Natalie Portman in “Black Swan,” Russell Crowe in “Noah” and Jennifer Lawrence in “Mother!” Fraser makes a bid to join their company — Chau is also excellent — but “The Whale,” like some of Aronofsky’s other projects, is swamped by its grand and vague ambitions. It’s overwrought and also strangely insubstantial.The WhaleRated R for abjection. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Is Sight and Sound’s List of 100 Greatest Films Too Tasteful?

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      To our chief critics, news that “Jeanne Dielman” topped the magazine poll was a welcome jolt. If only there had been more room for the weird and messy.Last week, the British film magazine Sight and Sound released the results of its decennial poll of what it calls “the greatest films of all time.” In 1952, the first year the magazine conducted its survey, Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist classic “Bicycle Thieves” was voted No. 1. Ten years later, it was supplanted by Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane,” which held that position until 2012, when it was knocked from its berth by Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” This year, Chantal Akerman’s 1975 tour de force, “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” supplanted “Vertigo,” shocking the world (OK, some movie people). The Times’s chief film critics discussed the poll and what it means.A.O. SCOTT Before the poll results were published, I was prepared to let loose with a rant about the nullity of list-making, the barbarism of conducting criticism by vote and the utter emptiness of the idea that one movie could be the best of all time.Don’t get me wrong: I still believe all those things. (And also, less high-mindedly, I’ve always been a little hurt that Sight and Sound never asked for my 10-best list.) But the ascension of “Jeanne Dielman” to the top spot was a welcome jolt to the critical system.MANOHLA DARGIS I never expected that Akerman’s brilliant, formally austere, intellectually uncompromising, three-hour-and-21-minute slow burn about an alienated Belgian housewife who turns tricks — which Akerman directed when she was 25 — would have more support than the usual old-school favorites. I mean, wow!Still, I wonder what Akerman, who died in 2015, would have made of this. It’s worth noting that she didn’t contribute to the previous poll. The day that this latest one hit, Isabel Stevens, Sight and Sound’s managing editor, tweeted that when the magazine asked Akerman to contribute to a different survey in 2014, she replied, “I don’t really like the idea, it is just like at school.” Akerman said she’d think about it but didn’t understand this desire to classify everything, adding, “It is tiring and not really necessary to do these kinds of things.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.It almost feels insulting to include Akerman in this exercise, and yet human beings are invested in creating and maintaining hierarchies, so canon formation feels inevitable.SCOTT We do love to rank and sort! This year, Sight and Sound expanded its reach, soliciting ballots from more than 1,600 critics, almost twice as many as in 2012. (The directors’ poll is a separate undertaking, in which Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” captured the top spot.) As with some of the recent Oscar victories, you can see evidence of generational and other demographic shifts. There were two films directed by women on the 2012 list, and only one by a Black director. This time around there were nine women — including two films each from Akerman and Agnés Varda — as well as seven by African and African American filmmakers, including Spike Lee, Charles Burnett, Barry Jenkins and Djibril Diop Mambéty.Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” topped the directors’ poll conducted by Sight and Sound.Warner Bros., via Associated PressThere has been some predictable grumbling about how this inclusiveness must be a sign that political concerns have overtaken aesthetic judgment, a claim that indicates either bad faith or proud ignorance about the social bearings of art. The bigger shock to me is that it took so long for the greatness — and the influence — of movies like “Jeanne Dielman,” Varda’s “Cléo From 5 to 7,” Barbara Loden’s “Wanda,” Burnett’s “Killer of Sheep” and Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” to be recognized in this forum.To me, and to many of the voters, I suspect, those movies clearly belong in the company of more established classics like “Citizen Kane,” “Vertigo” and Yasujiro Ozu’s “Tokyo Story.” But the presence of newly consecrated masterworks also changes our understanding of the old ones, refreshing them with new meaning. You see new patterns and affiliations when the poignant household observations of “Tokyo Story” are in conversation with the rigorous attention to domestic alienation in “Jeanne Dielman.”DARGIS I think that’s exactly right. Akerman and Ozu and Renoir and Burnett are all giants. That said, I think the overall list is too narrowly shaped by respectable, consensus favorites from two familiar traditions: Hollywood and the art film. That pretty much defines my selections, too (I’ll share them below), and I wish I’d made room for weird, messy, disreputable movies, for a genre masterwork like George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” a movie that is forever lodged in my being, and for more avant-garde filmmakers.Much of this is about the creation of taste and how films are categorized and elevated, packaged and sold, and how and when they cycle in and out of favor. “Citizen Kane” dominated for so long not simply because it’s a masterwork, but also because Welles was a film martyr who legendarily fought Hollywood, and he was a ubiquitous cultural presence as film studies were becoming institutionalized. Importantly, “Kane” was repeatedly shown on broadcast television, and it was a repertory-house staple. Availability also may help explain why “Vertigo” — which was restored in 1996 to wide acclaim — rose to the top in 2012.I assume that availability at least partly clarifies why there is just one silent movie on the critics’ Top 10: Dziga Vertov’s 1929 “Man With a Movie Camera.” Scandalously, there are only nine silent movies total on the entire list of 100 films, none made before the 1920s. If this list looks different than it did 10, 20, 30 years ago, it’s less because critics and directors are now hewing to some phantom politically correct agenda; it’s because of factors like the decline in rep houses, the rise of film festivals, shifts in home entertainment, changes in the industry and in film schools. The mainstreaming of feminist film theory helped “Jeanne Dielman,” but surely so did the fact that it’s now streaming, including via the Criterion Collection.I also assume that D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance” (which tied for 93rd place in 2012) fell off the list not because the poll’s contributors are in P.C. lock step or worried about rebuke. Rather, the kind of spurious formalism that long dominated film discourse — and which insisted that the racism in Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” was less important than his artistry — is no longer tenable to many of us. There are, after all, many other filmmakers to celebrate instead. It’s notable that for this poll, only the directors showed love for Roman Polanski, choosing “Chinatown” as the 72nd greatest — it hasn’t changed in 10 years, but everything else has.Anne Wiazemsky in “Au Hasard Balthazar,” directed by Robert Bresson. Cinema VenturesSCOTT Back in 1952, when the first Sight and Sound poll was published — heavy on silent films, by the way, since the other kind had only been around for 25 years or so — the academic discipline of film studies did not exist. Like literature before it, film has in the decades since been partly annexed by classroom study. I suspect that many critics under 40 first encountered a lot of these movies that way, including “Jeanne Dielman,” which is a staple of the syllabus in courses on feminist film, European art cinema and the tradition of the avant-garde.One thing that hasn’t changed, at least among critics, is the tenacity of the auteur idea: the assumption that film is above all a director’s art. The canon of auteurs has expanded beyond the certified Old Masters of classical Hollywood, Japanese and European cinema. Some of those guys have at least for now been pushed into exile — we miss you, Howard Hawks — to make room for new consensus figures like Akerman, Varda, Wong Kar-wai and David Lynch. But the auteur principle remains durable, perhaps partly as a protest against the hegemony of I.P.-driven corporate “cinema.”The directors’ list is in some ways more populist, with more room for genre. The critics are still a bit wary of horror, science fiction, comedy and animation, which is represented for the first time with two films by the great Hayao Miyazaki. It does seem strange, though, to contemplate a survey of all of film history that leaves out Walt Disney and Chuck Jones.DARGIS I wish that Jones had made the cut, though Warners, his old studio, continues to keep him alive in some fashion, just as Disney makes sure that Walt maintains a grip on our hearts, minds and wallets. The industry takes care of those it can exploit, another reason I contributed to the poll: I want people to discover other movies. So, while I share Chris Marker’s 1992 reservation about the poll partly because favorites change (though mind you, he did single out “Vertigo”), here are my current 10 beloveds in order: “Au Hasard Balthazar” (Robert Bresson), “The Godfather” (Francis Ford Coppola), “Jeanne Dielman,” “Flowers of Shanghai” (Hou Hsiao-Hsien), “The Gleaners and I” (Varda), “Tokyo Story,” “Killer of Sheep,” “Little Stabs at Happiness” (Ken Jacobs), “There Will Be Blood” (Paul Thomas Anderson) and “Shoes” (Lois Weber).So, Tony, what would you have submitted?SCOTT I thought you’d never ask! Picking just 10 movies is a brutal discipline, and I’ll try to pretend that I’m voting before knowing how everybody else did. Here’s a list I might have submitted, in chronological order: “The Gold Rush” (Charlie Chaplin); “La Terra Trema” (Luchino Visconti); “What’s Opera, Doc?” (Chuck Jones); “Big Deal on Madonna Street” (Mario Monicelli); “La Dolce Vita” (Federico Fellini); “Cléo From 5 to 7” (Varda); “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One” (William Greaves); “Do the Right Thing” (Spike Lee); “Paris Is Burning” (Jennie Livingston); “Happy as Lazzaro” (Alice Rohrwacher).Let’s check back in 2032 and see how it all holds up. More

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      Sundance Unveils 2023 Film Festival Lineup

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      Veterans like Nicole Holofcener and Ira Sachs and first-timer filmmakers like Randall Park made the cut, as did films about Ukraine.Nothing has been easy for the Sundance Film Festival. It’s been thwarted by pandemic complications, management upheaval and a business that is undergoing an identity crisis. But the confab will finally return to the snowy mining town of Park City, Utah, in January for the first time in three years with a slate of films it hopes will announce to both Hollywood and the rest of the world that independent filmmaking is back.Culled from a record 4,061 feature submissions, Sundance 2023, set to begin Jan. 19, will be filled with veteran filmmakers and those just starting out, subjects big and small, and a host of urgent topics. Stalwarts like Nicole Holofcener and Ira Sachs are returning to their roots with new films, while studios will unveil their fare.A24 is premiering “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” from the director Raven Jackson and producers Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski, among others. Searchlight is screening “Rye Lane” from Raine Allen-Miller. Amazon has “Cassandro,” the documentarian Roger Ross Williams’s first foray into fiction filmmaking, and Focus Features is showing A.V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One” in the U.S. dramatic competition.Brooke Shields (Disney), Judy Blume (Amazon), Michael J. Fox (Apple) Willie Nelson and Little Richard are all getting the documentary treatment, while subjects like the Ukrainian war and films both by and about Iranian women are being explored via multiple entries in multiple genres.“A lot of the filmmakers are looking at relationships: family, work, institutions — things we often look to for stability in unstable times,” said John Nein, Sundance’s senior programmer and director of strategic initiatives. “In the program, there is a reflection of an age of anxiety in terms of the relationships we have with traditional institutions. There are all these ways of exploring just how tenuous those relationships can be.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.Indeed, Daisy Ridley plays a woman obsessed with her mortality in one of several films opening the festival, “Sometimes I Think About Dying”; Jonathan Majors stars as an amateur bodybuilder struggling to find human connection in “Magazine Dreams”; and Susanna Fogel directs Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun in “Cat Person,” based on the popular New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian.With anxiety comes antiheroes, who abound in films this year, the programmers say. These include Randall Park’s directorial debut, “Shortcomings,” about a cynical 20-something (Justin H. Min of “After Yang”) who traverses the country with two buddies looking for the ideal connection, and Sachs’s “Passages,” which challenges audiences with the terrible decisions made by the lead character (played by Franz Rogowski). Holofcener, who often traffics in the world of anxiety, has reteamed with Julia Louis-Dreyfus for “You Hurt My Feelings,” the story of a novelist whose long marriage is upended when she overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) giving his honest reaction to her latest book. It also hails from A24.Among documentaries, the filmmaker Luke Lorentzen follows an aspiring hospital chaplain on a yearlong residency in “A Still Small Voice,” which the director of programming Kim Yutani called “one of the more fascinating journeys I saw this year.”It’s all happening at a time of transition for Sundance. The institute’s chief executive, Joana Vicente, only joined the group in September 2021, a few months before the festival was rocked for the second year in a row by Covid-19 and was forced to shift in January to a virtual format in light of the rise of the Omicron variant. Five months later, the festival director Tabitha Jackson announced her departure after just two years at the helm. She has since been replaced by the former New York Film Festival executive director Eugene Hernandez, who stepped into the role in November but will not oversee the event until 2024, the organization’s 40th anniversary.“It was less than ideal,” Vicente said. “But I actually look at these past two years as incredibly successful festivals where we launched incredible films, some of which went on to win the Academy Awards,” she said, referring to “CODA,” the 2022 best picture winner. “We reached audiences in ways that we had not reached before, people who could not afford to come to Sundance, who thought Sundance maybe was not for them: film lovers, film students were able to connect and to discover these films.”Sundance’s virtual platform allowed patrons from all around the country to access films that previously had been available only to those who trekked to the snowy mountain town of Park City. The 2022 festival received some 818,000 unique visitors to its online portal during its 10-day run. For 2023, of the 101 features screening at the festival, 75 percent will be made available to view remotely.“We’re definitely prioritizing the in-person experience,” Vicente added. “But we are also continuing to build on what digital affords us in terms of reach and accessibility.”Similar to 2022, when Sundance screened films on a pressing news topic — a documentary and a feature film on the pre-Roe underground abortion network the Jane Collective — this year, the programmers added three films made by Iranian women and two that chronicle the conflict in Ukraine, ripped-from-the-headlines subjects that are likely to prompt heady conversations.In the U.S. dramatic competition, “The Persian Version” tells the screenwriter-director-producer Maryam Keshavarz’s story about a large Iranian American family that gathers for the patriarch’s heart transplant, only to have a family secret uncovered. “Shayda,” produced by Cate Blanchett’s company Dirty Films, is Noora Niasari’s feature debut about an Iranian mother who finds refuge in an Australian women’s shelter with her daughter when her estranged husband returns. And “Joonam,” competing in the U.S. documentary competition, tracks director Sierra Urich’s investigation into her mother and grandmother’s complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity.In the world documentary competition, Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol,” from “Frontline” and the Associated Press, chronicles a team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged town and their struggle to document the atrocities. “Iron Butterflies,” from the director Roman Liubyi, investigates the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people. Three men with ties to Russian security services were convicted of murder by a Dutch court, but they are unlikely to be arrested.“The excitement I have around this program is significant,” Yutani said. “I think the offerings take a viewer on a complete roller coaster. There are a lot of films that are going to really strike people in a personal way and touch them. I also think there are some real thrills. So I encourage people who are coming to the festival to take chances.” More

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      The Best Actors of 2022

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      Welcome to our portfolio of paradoxes. The first is that artists emblematic of great acting in moving images have been captured in still photographs. Another involves the state of the art itself. We chose 10 performances and could easily have doubled that tally, yet all of that talent finds itself in an iffy place. There are no guarantees for a screen actor anymore. There are no guarantees for a screen actor’s audience. We’re not even sure what we mean by “screen.” Read More

      We walked into “The Woman King” intrigued (what, exactly, would a machete-and-sandal melodrama starring Viola Davis look like?) and left astonished. A great performance can amount to something in addition to craft — personality, zeal, observation, lunacy, exactitude, risk, freedom. And that movie had all of those right there in almost every performance. Davis, for instance, did her usual bruising work — an actor at peak intensity. But not only did the film showcase and redouble the might of an established star; it also made one out of Thuso Mbedu, who plays Davis’s — well, just treat yourself.

      Here is someone whom we moviegoers deserve to get to know for years to come. But in what kinds of movies? As what sorts of people? Mbedu can act. But there just isn’t the variety of movies that could sustain all the acting she and many of the performers in the portfolio that follows could do — names you may not know, like Freddie Gibbs and Frankie Corio and, loosely, Vicky Krieps — but who once upon a time would have had a few chances to show what else they’re made of.

      Those chances feel imperiled. And not for the old reasons (for being a woman, for not being white) — although there’s still some of that. The peril is industrial shortsightedness. There’s diminished interest in the human scale of storytelling, particularly in American movies, which increasingly feel the need to go big or risk the audience’s staying home. Perhaps that’s why we’ve turned, along with many an actor, to television, where the ground feels more fertile. Maybe to the point of feeling overgrown.

      And that may be yet another paradox: a state of wild abundance that can seem a lot like scarcity. Talk of the “golden age” of television has receded in the face of the streaming gold rush. There are so many characters and narratives to keep track of. In an economy of scale, the aesthetics of scale can get out of whack. Stories that might have filled out a feature are stretched into six episodes. Eight-episode limited series flop into multiseason epics.

      Yet, somehow, acting thrives in this environment. Mediocre shows and films are often made watchable by the gift and grit of performers (George Clooney and Julia Roberts in “Ticket to Paradise”; Adrien Brody and Rob Morgan in “Winning Time”). There is enough outstanding work on television alone to fill a portfolio twice or three times the size of this one. To that end, we enfolded limited series into the survey and collided with Jon Bernthal, who, on “We Own This City,” managed to turn crooked-cop work into a feat of appalling macho cheer; and were blown away by Toni Collette on “The Staircase,” for which, despite centuries of actors’ simulating death, she invented at least four new and distressing ways to perform dying.

      But there is still, in the midst of all of that, the special lure and allure of the movies, which haven’t actually gone anywhere. Yes, you can stream “The Woman King” at home, but you would miss the bubbling joy of the families with kids — daughters and sons alike — when Davis and Mbedu get in each other’s faces and then join forces to purge their land of slavers.

      Or you would miss the sound of a stranger in the next seat sobbing into his mask during the final shot of “Aftersun,” Charlotte Wells’s memory film about a father and his daughter on holiday in Turkey. All you’re looking at is Corio, playing an 11-year-old Scottish sprite named Sophie, mugging for the camera that her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), is holding as she prepares to board a flight home from their vacation. It’s a jumpy, grainy amateur image (the film takes place in a not-so-distant pre-smartphone past), but it’s also cinema in the most exalted sense.

      Obviously, we hunger for what an actor can do for a movie: for the gruff poetry of Brendan Gleeson in “The Banshees of Inisherin”; for the salty sibling rivalry of Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya in “Nope”; for the pizazz and poignancy of Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans.” The year’s biggest hit stars Tom Cruise, and its staggering popularity is emphatic proof of what his stardom continues to mean to us. Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, playing a problematic maestro in “Tár,” matched and perhaps even exceeded the character’s mastery. Forget about the multiplex: That’s a performance fit for a concert hall.

      So now that we’ve poured one out for movie-industry scarcity and rebattened the hatches for gushingly abundant TV, what is our true task here? It can’t be lamentation. We’re worried — it’s a critic’s job to be worried — but not yet woebegone. We want to applaud, marvel at and salute the achievement of screen acting, the increasing miracle of it in challenging and confusing circumstances. Because to watch the 10 artists here is to sense that acting remains in fine shape; to watch them is both life-giving and life-affirming. In one montage in “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” time warps everything around Michelle Yeoh except the astonishment on her face. Her surprise — which inspires our own — is proof of the beautiful mystery of the art form, and a reason to reconsider a longtime star’s endurance. How — how — did she pull that off?

      This issue of the magazine is testament to our inability to answer that question. Every great performance is a unique amalgam of training, talent, collaboration and luck. In the end, we don’t know how they do it. What we do know is that we can’t stop watching. More

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      A Trans Icon of the 20th Century Revived by Trans Stars of the 21st Century

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      The documentary “Framing Agnes” uses transcripts to tell the story of an anonymous woman who became the subject of a series of landmark interviews.LOS ANGELES — In 2017, while sifting through boxes of notes and research materials left behind by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel, who had died six years earlier, the filmmaker Chase Joynt came upon a filing cabinet that had become rusted shut. When he opened it, Joynt discovered a long-lost trove of interviews Garfinkel had conducted with eight transgender individuals at the University of California, Los Angeles, between 1959 and 1963.“We immediately knew we had found something extraordinary,” said Joynt, who came upon the files alongside the University of Chicago sociologist Kristen Schilt.One of the interviewees, Agnes (all of the subjects were anonymized), had already become a focus of Garfinkel’s published research, and was, Schilt said, widely understood to be the first sociological case study of a transitioning person in history. But the interviews of the other seven had never been seen before.“It’s quite rare to find first-person accounts of trans people like these, particularly in a high-stakes situation, like an encounter with a researcher,” said Jules Gill-Peterson, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Histories of the Transgender Child.”Not long after the discovery, Joynt, who co-directed “No Ordinary Man” (2020), a documentary about the transgender jazz musician Billy Tipton, knew he had to do something with the materials, maybe a book or a film or a digital archive.Joynt decided to make a documentary, but not one with your typical re-enactments and talking heads. In “Framing Agnes,” now in theaters, viewers not only hear the stories of Garfinkel’s subjects, but also the stories and reactions of the trans actors playing them, who include Angelica Ross (“Pose,” “American Horror Story: 1984”) and Jen Richards (“Better Things,” “Mrs. Fletcher”).Joynt pored over the transcripts of the U.C.L.A. interviews, in which the subjects were asked about everything from their childhoods and past lovers to whether they knew other people “like you.”Michelle Felix/Kino LorberThrough stylized re-enactments of period interview shows, the film also turns the camera’s unblinking gaze back on Garfinkel and other interrogators who have made a study or a spectacle of transness over the years. “The questions being asked by people in the 1950s were the same questions that were coming out of the mouths of Jerry Springer and Sally Jessy Raphael in the ’80s and ’90s,” Joynt said.The format was, in many ways, prompted by the sheer lack of source materials, which consisted of typewritten transcripts of anonymous subjects conducted decades ago. There were no interviewees to catch up with, no family or friends to add context and color. “The flip to the talk show, our desires to play and re-enact and embody in this way, are born of the limitations of the archive itself,” Joynt said. And besides, Joynt noted, no amount of archival information would allow a documentarian to capture a person in their entirety. “One of the things I love about Agnes is that she does not want to be found,” he said. “I think there’s a beautiful power in that kind of opacity and resistance.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.“Framing Agnes” premiered at Sundance last January, where it won the audience and innovator awards in the festival’s Next category, and went on to garner rave reviews; Ms. Magazine praised its “surprisingly gripping format,” while The New Yorker called it “a film of quiet but decisive radicality.”On a recent morning, at his offices in the Chinatown district of Los Angeles, Joynt talked about poring through the transcripts page by page. The eight interviewees, who were whittled down to six for the documentary, were asked about everything from their childhoods and past lovers to whether they knew other people “like you.”Garfinkel’s questions felt very familiar to the actors tasked with playing the interviewees. “Yesterday, a doctor, who wasn’t my regular doctor, had a lot of prurient questions for me that didn’t have anything to do with why I was there,” said the activist and filmmaker Zackary Drucker, who plays Agnes.Drucker, who met Joynt in 2013 when both were screening short films at Outfest Los Angeles, jumped at the chance to play Agnes, who had gone to U.C.L.A. at 19 with the sole purpose of seeking gender confirmation surgery. To gain access to the treatment, Agnes claimed to be intersex, but years later confessed to one of Garfinkel’s colleagues that she had actually been taking her mother’s estrogen tablets since age 12.“I love how wily she was,” Drucker said. “I’ve been in that situation, all trans people have, of needing to convince a doctor that you are trans enough to get hormones. Many of the structures that Agnes was navigating 60 years ago remain intact.”Drucker, left, with Joynt, played the title character in re-enactments. “I love how wily she was,” Drucker said.Michelle Felix/Kino LorberTo play Georgia, a trans woman who was raised in the South by an evangelical minister, Ross drew from her memories. “It literally is from my own experience growing up with women in the church, understanding that you don’t wear pants to choir rehearsal, you don’t step foot inside the sanctuary without a dress on,” she said.Ross, who became the first openly trans woman to play a leading role on Broadway (starring as Roxie Hart in “Chicago”), can understand why Agnes, a blond woman with a “peaches-and-cream complexion,” became part of Garfinkel’s published research, while Georgia and the others did not.“It’s just like Caitlyn Jenner was on the cover of Vanity Fair and not Angelica Ross,” Ross said with a laugh. “As a society, we sometimes choose whose stories are worth telling and whose aren’t. And a lot of that involves race and class.”The interviews were filmed in Los Angeles over 10 days. Gill-Peterson was then called in to review the footage and serve as the documentary’s narrator and resident expert on transgender history.“When I walked on set and looked out at the team, I was like, Oh! It’s all queer and trans people,” Gill-Peterson said. “Your shoulders relax a bit. You’re less on guard.”The decades-old stories, Gill-Peterson said, are emerging at a time when people are more aware of trans issues than ever before. “But it’s also an era,” she noted,” in which trans people face heightened scrutiny, heightened danger, higher rates of political attacks and violence.”All of which made Gill-Peterson and Joynt question the nature and limitations of the project itself. Is trans visibility always a good, particularly if attacks and violence follow in its wake? Is there an advantage in being Georgia, who got to fade into obscurity, as opposed to Agnes, who became something of a trans icon?“I think especially for trans women of color like myself, sometimes our biggest wish is just to disappear, just to be left alone a little, to not wear that visibility so intensely,” Gill-Peterson said.Joynt wondered, “What does it mean to make things visible?” He added, “Those kinds of tensions and troubles are fertile ground from which to build a documentary project. So let’s not shy away from them. Let’s actually try to hang out and spend some time there.” More

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      10 Stages and Screens Where I Saw Connection

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      For our critic-at-large, “Fat Ham,” “Severance,” “A Strange Loop” and “Sandman” were some of the places she found truth and transcendence.I never venture too far from a theater, but when I did have some time away from New York stages, I was watching TV and movies. In so many of my favorites of 2022, there’s a sense of humanity to the work, whether that means it featured people connecting or simply being honest with themselves and others. Here are the plays, musicals, shows and films that stuck with me this year.‘Cost of Living’That Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 play is written with such gut-busting empathy and humanity shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who’s read the script or seen the previous productions. And yet, “Cost of Living” was still surprising — stunning, even — thanks to the four actors (Gregg Mozgala, Katy Sullivan, Kara Young and David Zayas) and their portrayal of caregivers and patients in a story about the ways we look after one another and what that care costs us. Plays about connections can so easily turn into sentimental weep-fests that manipulate you into tears, but the script, cast and Jo Bonney’s compassionate direction made this Broadway gem feel not just tender but true. (Read our review of “Cost of Living.”)Gregg Mozgala and Kara Young in “Cost of Living.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘300 el x 50 el x 30 el’When I try to describe this epic work by the Belgian theater collective FC Bergman, I get bogged down in contradictions: Grotesque yet radiant. Chaotic but woven into coherence by theme and feeling. Depressing, yet steeped with something even more forceful than joy — utter transcendence. Transforming the Harvey Theater into a village, with live animals and a pond, “300 el” drew inspiration from the biblical story of Noah’s ark. A film crew circled the stage, providing interior views to a pigeon homicide, a deadly game of William Tell and a feast where even the furniture is devoured. When the production ends in song and dance — a tameless exaltation of noise and movement — it seemed to leave even the air in the theater tremulous with excitement. (Read our feature on “300 el x 50 el x 30 el.”)‘Fat Ham’More than anything — including James Ijames’s whip-smart writing, Saheem Ali’s vivacious direction and the cast’s delightful performances — what most stood out to me in the Public’s staging of “Fat Ham” was the joy that seemed to emanate from every person in the room. Who knew “Hamlet,” a tragedy rife with revenge and murder, could be expanded to become a work about queerness and Black masculinity — and a funny, smart work at that? Ijames, apparently, and Ali, whose gleaming production ended in what felt like a party where everyone, audience included, was welcome to attend. (Read our review of “Fat Ham.”)‘A Strange Loop’It’s been quite a year for Black queer theater, due in large part to the Broadway debut of Michael R. Jackson’s mind-bending, genre-busting musical “A Strange Loop.” The production, starring an unforgettable Jaquel Spivey, succeeds on multiple levels: It provides trenchant commentary on Black art, the Black body, religion, masculinity and queerness, while also being laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreaking. As for the technical elements, its structure, choreography and score coalesce into a prime example of what Broadway can do at its best. (Read our review of “A Strange Loop.”)Jaquel Spivey stars in the Broadway musical “A Strange Loop.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Oratorio for Living Things’I knew I was seeing something special when I went to Ars Nova’s production of Heather Christian’s “Oratorio,” because I was infected with a desperate urge to see it again — even before I was through seeing it the first time. Having grown up with a Catholic education and Sunday masses, I’ve never felt connected to religious institutions, but Christian’s profound work, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, created a kind of secular mass for nonbelievers and believers alike. The exquisite vocals of the cast were magnified by the miniature amphitheater-style setup of the space, which created an aural experience that — like the text itself — felt both grand and intimate. (Read our review of “Oratorio for Living Things.”)‘English’I’m a sucker for works that examine language — the politics of it, the limitations and freedoms that can be found in words. So I was already onboard for Sanaz Toossi’s play, about a class in Iran where the students are preparing to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl. Under Knud Adams’s direction, the cast draws the audience into its word games, linguistic stumbles and individual struggles to learn and assimilate, whether for work or family or dreams of a life in America. (Read our review of “English.”)‘The Sandman’As a fierce fan of the author Neil Gaiman and owner of his complete “Sandman” graphic novel collection, I was so nervous about Netflix’s adaptation that I asked a friend — a fellow fan — to watch the first episode with me for emotional support. The series does justice to its characters with perfectly cast actors, including a mesmerizing Tom Sturridge, who embodies the brooding, awe-inspiring king of dreams with such finesse and gravitas that it’s as though Morpheus himself has escaped from the comics. It’s not just the characters who are well-matched; the world of “Sandman” is portrayed with sweep, imagination and such respect for the original illustrations that much of the dialogue and panels are replicated. I can’t wait for Season 2. (Read our critic’s notebook on “The Sandman.”)Gwendoline Christie and Tom Sturridge in the Netflix series “Sandman.”Netflix‘Severance’“Severance” may be my new favorite TV series. Perhaps I’m being hyperbolic, still buzzed with enthusiasm even months after my second time binge-watching it. Adam Scott gives a stellar performance as an employee of a shady corporation who elects to have his consciousness split between his work and outside selves. The show has an exquisite eye and ear for terror, wit and mundane interactions, so that it manages to be both otherworldly and eerily familiar. As for the script — the dialogue’s so fantastic that it makes me want to be a better writer. (Read our review of “Severance.”)‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’I’ve often wondered, in our age of multiversal franchises, what a multiverse narrative would look like if the story were driven by the characters’ emotional development and interpersonal relationships rather than just battle scenes, Easter eggs, and routes to spinoffs and sequels. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was my answer. It contained the unpredictability and boundary-expanding possibilities of the multiverse while staying grounded in the story of a family. Every moment of the film held a new delight. (Read our review of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”)‘Oresteia’When I think back to Robert Icke’s production of “Oresteia,” Aeschylus’ trilogy of Greek tragedies about a family that eats itself from the inside out, I think of one moment. Klytemnestra is grieving after her husband Agamemnon has killed their daughter Iphigenia because of a prophecy that the act would grant his army “fair winds” in war. After the deed, the winds sweep in, the doors to the house are flung open, ethereal white light streams in, and Klytemnestra is caught in a frenzy of flying papers. But what made the production so memorable wasn’t just the special effects but Anastasia Hille’s electrifying performance as Klytemnestra, a woman who folds in to grief and lets it fuel her revenge. (Read our review of “Oresteia.”) More

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      11 Ways I Escaped Reality This Year

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      Our critic was haunted, in a good way, by the performances she saw in movies, theater and TV that offered glimpses into other worlds.In a year when so much, including our democracy, felt topsy-turvy, I was drawn to entertainment that took me out of our real world to another realm. Be it the supernatural, the surreal, the spirit world, or just a superb performance: Here’s my list of 11 otherworldly movies, TV series, actors and plays that brought me joy and centeredness amid the chaos.‘Macbeth’In Sam Gold’s take on “Macbeth,” I loved the lustful love story between Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, but is it weird to say that I also really dug the stew? When we entered the theater, the three witches, dressed in sweaters and jeans, were already onstage stirring their pot, and later they utter the lines that seal Macbeth’s fate. But at the end of the play, when everyone in the cast sits together and shares a bowl, this update, along with one of the witches (Bobbi MacKenzie) singing Gaelynn Lea’s ballad “Perfect,” enacted healing. It reminded me that despite the setbacks that befell the cast and our country, being alive and in the community of theater was something to celebrate. (Read our review of “Macbeth.”)‘The Woman King’With “The Old Guard,” the filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood proved she had the chops for a feminist superhero flick. But with the Viola Davis-led “Woman King,” she went epic in scale and story. She wove in the history of the Agojie, the all-female army in the West African kingdom of Dahomey; produced brilliant fight scenes with actors who performed their own stunts; and explored war, sexual assault and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here, prophecy is protection, and though it is never named as such, the Dahomey religious practice of Vodun is a guide for Davis’s character, General Nanisca, as she prepares to take on enemies, foreign and domestic, and confront her own demons. (Read our review of “The Woman King.”)Viola Davis, center, stars in “The Woman King.”Ilze Kitshoff/Sony Pictures‘P-Valley’Set at a strip club in Mississippi, the Starz series “P-Valley” is a “love letter to all women who are scrapping it out, but particularly for the Black women that I think a lot of people thumb their noses at, even Black folks,” according to its creator, Katori Hall. It is a sentiment channeled through the veteran dancer and aspiring gym owner Mercedes (Brandee Evans) and the up-and-coming Keyshawn (Shannon Thornton), who is trapped in her career and abusive marriage. But it is Hoodoo, the spiritual practice introduced to them by the club’s security guard Diamond (Tyler Lepley), that might save them. Based on the Season 2 cliffhanger, I’m hoping Diamond’s efforts worked or that he will be there to ward off evil spirits and people in the future. (Streaming on Starz.)‘Reservation Dogs’A coming-of-age tale told through four Indigenous teenagers — Elora, Bear, Cheese and Willie Jack — in the fictional town of Okern, Okla., “Reservation Dogs” masterfully pokes fun at Hollywood stereotypes and acknowledges the nuances of Native culture. While William “Spirit” Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth) is a bumbling spirit guide who gives Bear unsound advice, he is also the counterpoint to ancestral “spirits” such as Elora’s grandmother or Daniel, a friend of the four teens whose suicide prompts them to leave their reservation (or at least attempt to). In the wonderfully rich ninth episode, Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) seeks advice from her aunt and Daniel’s mother, Hokti, who is incarcerated. After Willie Jack makes an offering of Cheez-Its, Flaming Flamers chips and a Skux energy drink, Hokti (Lily Gladstone) reveals that the many spirits surrounding Willie Jack will help her in time. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘The Piano Lesson’ and ‘Death of a Salesman’Ghosts came in different forms this Broadway season. In her revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “The Piano Lesson,” LaTanya Richardson Jackson decided to literalize the ghost of the white slave owner, Sutter. Though we never see him, his haunting of the Charles family becomes all too real, making the family’s battles over a piano a deeper allegory of race, property and American history. Equally compelling is Miranda Cromwell’s revival of “Death of a Salesman,” whose all-Black family includes Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman and Sharon D Clarke as his wife, Linda. Willy’s older brother, Ben (André De Shields), is not just a ghost but a griot, too. Sporting a white cane, a white suit and bedazzled shoes, Ben plagues Willy with his success while his spirit beckons his younger brother to the other side. This infuses the play with a new sense of ambiguity, never justifying Willy’s final decision but adding a layer of empathy and compassion. (Read our reviews of “The Piano Lesson” and “Death of a Salesman.”)Wendell Pierce, left, as Willy Loman and Andre De Shields as Ben Loman in “Death of a Salesman.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRegina HallRegina Hall showed her versatility this year with two wildly different performances. In Mariama Diallo’s horror movie “Master,” she plays Gail Bishop, who, as the first Black dean of a residence hall at the elite Ancaster College, must constantly contend with racism and its impact on her and on Black students. In Adamma Ebo’s comedy “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul,” she is Trinitie Childs, the wife of a disgraced Southern Baptist pastor (Sterling K. Brown) and a woman obsessed with climbing back to her former state of church glory. The way she evokes Trinitie’s pity, pettiness, petulance and pride gives this film its most memorable and haunting moments. (Read our reviews of “Master” and “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.”)‘Nope’The cinephile in me was pleasantly surprised that Jordan Peele’s “Nope” was a movie about movies. Peele not only pays homage to early film and photography technologies, and the suspense and terror brought on by Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Jaws,” but he also does so while remembering those African Americans whose early contributions to the motion picture industry have been forgotten or ignored. Thanks to Peele’s clever writing, creative directing and smart casting of his frequent collaborator Daniel Kaluuya (“Get Out”) as well as the magnanimous Keke Palmer, this movie about gentrification, U.F.O.s and racial discrimination ended up being just an old-fashioned, feel-good movie, the kind we still desperately need. (Read our review of “Nope.”)‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’It was a bold move to follow up on a sci-fi classic starring David Bowie as an extraterrestrial. Rather than compete with such memorable casting, Showtime’s 10-episode series “The Man Who Fell to Earth” humanized its protagonist, Faraday (Chiwetel Ejiofor), by doubling his outsiderness: He arrives in the United States as both an alien and a Black man. In an electrifying sixth episode on jazz music, Faraday and other characters discover a sound of their shared humanity and a possible key to salvaging both of their planets. (Streaming on Showtime.)Chiwetel Ejiofor stars in the TV series “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”Showtime‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’I can’t stop raving about this movie — the costumes, the makeup, the editing (oh, the editing!). The fight scenes, the I.R.S. scenes. The marvelous Michelle Yeoh, playing the laundromat owner and cosmic warrior Evelyn Wang, and Stephanie Hsu, playing her disenchanted daughter, Joy. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who work under the name Daniels, have said that this is mostly a film about the confusion that arises when its characters believe they are in different movie genres from one another. I also admire how this genre diversity (thriller, sci-fi, martial arts, domestic drama) perfectly captured expansive cultural identities (immigrant narratives, Asian American families, queer children) and the depth of our earliest love story (between mother and daughter) — all of which still seem to be unmined in Hollywood. (Read our review of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”)Brian Tyree HenryThe surreal TV series “Atlanta” started off focused on the Princeton dropout (Donald Glover) who became his rapper cousin’s manager, but in its final season it was mainly about the rapper, Alfred a.k.a. Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), and his journey to define himself beyond the trappings of fame, wealth or the music industry. His textured performance gave Alfred more emotional depth as his character confronted feral hogs, white privilege in hip-hop and his own mortality. Henry’s onscreen brilliance led Lila Neugebauer to rewrite and reshoot key scenes in her debut film, “Causeway,” now on Apple+, devoting more time to the friendship between his character and Jennifer Lawrence’s. The result is a moving portrait of grief and hope, in which Henry lights up the film. (Read our review of “Causeway.”) More

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      Julia Reichert, Documentarian of the Working Class, Dies at 76

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      She took home, to Ohio, a 2019 Oscar for “American Factory,” and in a long career teaching and making films, she paid special attention to working women.Julia Reichert, a filmmaker and educator who made a pioneering feminist documentary, “Growing Up Female,” as an undergraduate student and almost a half-century later won an Academy Award for “American Factory,” a documentary feature about the Chinese takeover of a shuttered automobile plant in Dayton, Ohio, died on Thursday at her home in nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was 76.Steven Bognar, her husband and filmmaking partner, confirmed the death. The cause, diagnosed in 2018, was urothelial cancer, which affects the urethra, bladder and other organs. She learned she had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2006.Ms. Reichert, a longtime professor of motion pictures at Wright State University in Dayton, was in the forefront of a new generation of social documentarians who came out of the New Left and feminist movements of the early 1970s with a belief in film as an organizing tool with a social mission. Her films were close to oral history: Eschewing voice-over narration, they were predicated on interviews in which her mainly working-class subjects spoke for themselves.“Growing Up Female” (1971), which she made with her future husband, James Klein, a classmate at Antioch College in Ohio, was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in 2011.Her documentaries “Union Maids” (1976), made with Mr. Klein and Miles Mogelescu, and “Seeing Red” (1983), also made with Mr. Klein, were both nominated for Academy Awards.Both movies mix archival footage with interviews. “Union Maids” profiles three women active in the Chicago labor movement during the Great Depression. “Seeing Red” portrays rank-and-file members of the Communist Party during the 1930s and ’40s.Ms. Reichert was again nominated, in 2010, for the short documentary “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” which she directed with Mr. Bognar, her second husband.“The Last Truck” documented the closing of a an automobile assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, some of it clandestinely filmed by workers inside the plant. The movie served as a prologue to “American Factory,” which Netflix released in conjunction with Barack and Michelle Obama’s fledgling company Higher Ground Productions, and which won the 2019 documentary-feature Oscar.Reviewing the film in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it “complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped, spanning continents as it surveys the past, present and possible future of American labor.”The movie is suffused in ambivalence. Having purchased the same plant documented in “The Last Truck,” a Chinese billionaire converts it into an automobile-glass factory and restores lost jobs while confounding American workers with a new set of attitudes.In 2020, Ms. Reichert and Mr. Bognar were invited by the comedian Dave Chappelle to document one of the outdoor stand-up shows he hosted during the Covid pandemic from a cornfield near his home in Yellow Springs. The two-hour feature “Dave Chappelle: Live in Real Life” had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall as part of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.Although Ms. Reichert addressed a variety of social issues in the documentaries she directed and produced, her enduring interests were labor history and the lives of working women. Her last film, “9to5: The Story of a Movement,” directed with Mr. Bognar, brought those two concerns together, focusing on the organizing of female office workers beginning in the 1970s.Ms. Reichert with Mr. Bognar and Chad Cannon, who composed the score for “American Factory,” at a screening of the film in Los Angeles in 2019.Araya Diaz/Getty ImagesJulia Bell Reichert was born on June 16, 1946, in Bordentown, N.J., a city on the Delaware River about eight miles southeast of Trenton. She was the second of four children of Louis and Dorothy (Bell) Reichert. Her father was a butcher in a neighborhood supermarket, her mother a homemaker who became a nurse.One of the few students from her high school to go to college, Ms. Reichert was attracted to Antioch because of its cooperative work-study program. Her parents were conservative Republicans, but once she was at Antioch Ms. Reichert’s political orientation shifted left. She canvased for the Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, during the 1964 election and hosted a feminist program, “The Single Girl,” on the campus radio station. She later credited her radio experience with honing her documentary skills.“I came out of radio,” she said in an interview with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scientists before winning the 2019 Oscar. “So without having to spend any money, I learned a lot about interviewing and editing and mixing music and how to talk — how to tell a story in a time frame.”Ms. Reichert also took a film course at Antioch with the avant-garde filmmaker David Brooks and organized a documentary workshop with Mr. Klein. After making “Growing Up Female,” which was originally intended for consciousness-raising groups, she and Mr. Klein founded a distribution cooperative, New Day Films, which focused on bringing new documentary films to schools, unions and community groups.The couple also collaborated on the documentary “Methadone: An American Way of Dealing,” in addition to “Union Maids” and “Seeing Reds.”Vincent Canby of The Times, who discovered “Union Maids” in early 1977 on a double bill in a limited run at a downtown Manhattan theater, called it “one of the more moving, more cheering theatrical experiences available in New York this weekend.”He was similarly supportive of “Seeing Red,” which was first shown at the 1983 New York Film Festival, and which is arguably the most sympathetic portrayal of American Communists ever put onscreen. Mr. Canby considered it “a fine, tough companion piece to ‘Union Maids.’” Rather than dogma, he wrote, the subject was “American idealism.”Ms. Reichert started a filmmaking program at Wright State University with Mr. Klein. She also directed a quasi-autobiographical feature film, “Emma and Elvis” (1992), written with Mr. Bognar, about a married documentary filmmaker who becomes involved with a young video artist. Although the film received only limited distribution, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum praised it in The Chicago Reader for “making a filmmaker’s creative/midlife crisis meaningful, engaging and interesting.”Mr. Reichert and Mr. Bognar during the filming of “American Factory.”NetflixMs. Reichert’s most personal film — the first she directed with Mr. Bognar — was “A Lion in the House,” a documentary about children with cancer completed in 2006 after having been in production for close to a decade. It was inspired in part by her adolescent daughter’s struggle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her daughter recovered, but after the film was completed Ms. Reichert was herself diagnosed with cancer.“A Lion in the House” won multiple awards, including a Primetime Emmy, the 2006 Sundance Film Festival grand jury documentary award and the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best documentary.Ms. Reichert’s marriage to Mr. Klein ended in divorce in 1986. She married Mr. Bognar, who survives her, in 1987. She is also survived by her daughter, Lela Klein; three brothers, Louis, Craig and Joseph Reichert; and two grandchildren.Ms. Reichert was very much a regional filmmaker. After graduating from Antioch, she remained in the Dayton area and became a source of inspiration for other Midwestern documentarians, including Michael Moore and Steve James. She also produced a number of films.In an appreciation written for a 2019 retrospective of her work at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich recalled that Ms. Reichert had “defied every stereotype I’d had of independent filmmakers.”“She wasn’t rich, and she wasn’t arrogant or egotistical,” wrote Ms. Ehrenreich, the author, of “Nickel and Dimed” (2001), about the working poor in America. (She died in September.) “The daughter of a butcher and a house cleaner turned registered nurse, she dressed and spoke plainly, usually beaming with enthusiasm, and never abandoned her Midwestern roots.”She might have added that virtually all of Ms. Reichert’s films were explicitly collective enterprises.A scene from “American Factory,” depicting workers at an auto-glass factory in Ohio.Netflix, via Everett CollectionIn an email, Mr. Klein wrote that he and Ms. Reichert “came of age with a sense that it was only through community that the type of work we wanted to see being made could happen.”“And Julia really lived her beliefs,” he added.Despite her politics, Ms. Reichert was by her account less interested in ideology than she was in people. In an interview with Cineaste magazine, she called the subjects of “Seeing Red” “some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever want to meet.”“They made a very positive life choice, despite everything they went through,” she said.“American Factory,” which deals with the mutual culture shock experienced by Chinese and American workers and their reconciliation, was Ms. Reichert’s most ethnically and racially diverse film. The movie, she told an interviewer, “tries to be very fair by listening to everyone’s point of view — that of the chairman” — Cao Dewang, the billionaire Chinese entrepreneur who purchased and reopened the factory — “union people, anti-union people, and workers.”Indeed, Mr. Cao, a product of Communist China who teaches American workers the hard realities of global capitalism, is in many respects the film’s protagonist.Although a fully committed artist, Ms. Reichert wore her politics so lightly that almost no one seemed to notice when she concluded her Oscar acceptance speech for “American Factory” by cheerfully citing the best-known phrase from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “Communist Manifesto.”“We believe that things will get better,” she said, “when the workers of the world unite.”Lyna Bentahar contributed reporting. More