Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)’ Review: Indelible Images by Design

      by

      Anton Corbijn’s documentary shares anecdotes from the British design studio that devised some of the most famous album covers of the 1970s.The album cover for Pink Floyd’s “Animals” is a collage that shows a pig flying over Battersea Power Station in London. Originally, it was intended to be a photograph, but controlling an inflatable pig at that height was not easy (in fact, it floated into an area where flights approach Heathrow Airport). Nor was it easy to have a man stand still after he had been set on fire, something that was done to create an image for the band’s preceding album, “Wish You Were Here.” Nor was arranging for a restless sheep to lounge on a psychiatrist’s couch in the Hawaiian surf — a photograph that ultimately constituted only a small inset on the original cover for the 10cc album “Look Hear?”These are among the anecdotes shared in “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis),” a documentary from Anton Corbijn (“Control”) on Hipgnosis, a British design studio that, over roughly 15 years starting in 1968, devised some of the strangest and most innovative art ever put on records. (The name is a portmanteau of “hip” and “gnostic” pronounced like “hypnosis.”)“Squaring the Circle” has the feel of an official portrait. Aubrey Powell, known as Po, who founded Hipgnosis with Storm Thorgerson, holds the center of gravity among the interviewees, who include many of his friends and colleagues. The visuals — sharp black-and-white present-day footage; lots of photographs from Hipgnosis’s heyday — are predictably striking.Structurally, this movie defaults to recounting the genesis of one idea and collaboration after another. (“When you get a call from a Beatle, it was a bit like a call from God,” Powell says of Paul McCartney.) “Squaring the Circle” is slick and enjoyable enough, but it is also, like the company it chronicles, something of a boutique item, and the reminiscences grow faintly monotonous after a while.Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares’ Review: The Man Behind Freddy Krueger

      by

      In a new documentary, Robert Englund wants you to know he’s more than the face of Freddy Krueger.Like a 10-page diner menu, an excessive determination is at play in “Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story,” a vexing documentary about Robert Englund, who even horror haters will recognize as the guy who played Freddy Krueger in the “Nightmare on Elm Street” films.What the directors Gary Smart and Christopher Griffiths made is a documentary in spirit. But it’s really more of an annotated oral history of Englund’s entire, extensive IMDb page — almost film by film, in chronological order, for more than two hours. It’s exhausting.And it’s a shame, because Englund comes across as a dedicated professional and a total ham (and horndog) deserving of a meaty documentary. Watching Englund be such a goof in his early movies is a treat, like when he wrestles a fake alligator in Tobe Hooper’s “Eaten Alive” from 1976.Englund’s career skyrocketed when Wes Craven cast him as Freddy in 1984. As the horror director Eli Roth points out in the documentary, unlike actors who played Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees, Englund was called on to act by moving and speaking menacingly. Englund did so splendidly, one reason Freddy’s popularity endures.Hardcore “Nightmare on Elm Street” fans — and really, that’s the audience here — might think this movie’s a dream. But like a recent documentary about the Chucky franchise, the material would be more palatable re-edited as Blu-ray extras.Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund StoryNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. Streaming on Screambox and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Can HBO’s ‘The Idol’ Revive 1980s Erotic Thriller Sleaze?

      by

      Over-the-top locations and characters bathed in red light recall an all but dead genre that was once a staple of late-night cable: the erotic thriller.A slick executive drives a cherry red convertible.A nightclub owner carries a coke spoon and wears his hair in a rat tail.A troubled pop star masturbates while choking herself.Those images might have come from an erotic thriller made by Brian De Palma, Paul Verhoeven or Adrian Lyne, directors who were prominent in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to movies like “Body Double” (Mr. De Palma), “Basic Instinct” (Mr. Verhoeven) and “9 ½ Weeks” (Mr. Lyne).But those scenes were actually part of “The Idol,” the HBO series that made its debut on Sunday with the apparent intention of reviving an all but dead genre.Filled with close-up shots of luxury goods and body parts, “The Idol” also recalled the works of lesser filmmakers whose R-rated creations populated the late-night lineups of HBO and its rivals long before the advent of prestige television.It was a style that died out over the years — the death blow might have been Mr. Verhoeven’s infamous “Showgirls,” an expensive 1995 flop — and seemed highly unlikely to make a return to the cultural stage amid the #MeToo movement.As Karina Longworth, the creator of the film-history podcast “You Must Remember This,” recently observed, today’s films are so devoid of steamy sex scenes that they “would pass the sexual standard set by the strict censorship of the Production Code of the 1930s.”Gina Gershon, left, and Elizabeth Berkley, who is in the cast of “The Idol,” in the much-maligned 1995 film “Showgirls.”Murray Close/United ArtistsSharon Stone in “Basic Instinct,” a film referred to in “The Idol.”Rialto PicturesThe old aesthetic was on full display in the first moments of “The Idol,” a series created by Sam Levinson, Abel Tesfaye (known as the Weeknd) and Reza Fahim, three men who came of age when flipping through cable channels late at night was a frequent pastime for adolescent boys.The first episode begins with the pop star Jocelyn, played by Lily-Rose Depp, baring her breasts during a photo shoot as a team of handlers, crew members and an ineffectual intimacy coordinator look on.Later, Ms. Depp’s character smokes in a sauna, rides in the back of a Rolls-Royce convertible and rubs up against a man she has just met (a club owner portrayed by Mr. Tesfaye) on a dance floor bathed in smoky red light. There will be no flannel PJs for Joss; a pair of wake-up scenes make it clear to viewers that she sleeps in a thong.It isn’t only the show’s gratuitous nudity that harks back to Mr. Lyne and company, but the overall look and mood, which recall a louche glamour from the time of boxy Armani suits and cocaine nights. A main setting is a $70 million mansion in Bel Air that looks like something out of Mr. De Palma’s “Scarface” but is in fact Mr. Tesfaye’s real-life home.A number of young viewers have said they find sex scenes embarrassing, but Mr. Levinson, who created the HBO drama “Euphoria,” and his fellow producers have made no secret of their desire to pay homage to the heyday of Cinemax (when it had the nickname Skinemax).A wink to viewers comes when Joss, in the darkness of her private screening room, watches “Basic Instinct.” And then there is the pulsating score, which seems to conjure Tangerine Dream, the German electronic group who scored the sex scene on a train in “Risky Business.” In another nod to the show’s influences, the cast includes Elizabeth Berkley, the star of “Showgirls.”While it may seem like an outlier, “The Idol” has seemingly tapped into a cultural moment that would have seemed unthinkable just a few years ago: Ms. Longworth recently devoted a season of her film-history podcast to the “Erotic ’80s”; no less a tastemaker than the Criterion Channel has recently presented a series on erotic thrillers from the same time period; and last month in Los Angeles, the American Cinematheque held a screening of “Basic Instinct.”“The Idol” also has a close competitor in the world of streaming: “Fatal Attraction,” a 1987 hit for Mr. Lyne, has been rebooted as a series on Paramount+.Mr. Tesfaye and Lily-Rose Depp in a scene from the first episode of “The Idol.”Eddy Chen/HBOStephanie Zacharek, the film critic for Time, suggested that the return of such fare may have arisen from the yearslong glut of comic book movies, along with the lack of a certain kind of R-rated film that was once all the rage for adult viewers.“In the ’80s, that’s almost all there was in the multiplex,” Ms. Zacharek said. “Grown-ups went to see those movies. Now we don’t even have that many movies for grown-ups, period.”Ms. Zacharek slammed “The Idol” in her review and in a phone interview — “It feels like it was made by someone who has never had sex,” she said — but she said she was a fan of “Body Double” (and even “Showgirls”) and laments the disappearance of that kind of thing.“I always enjoyed those films, even when I thought they were sexist or ridiculous,” Ms. Zacharek said. “They do have a certain element of glamour to them.”It is a distinct possibility that the idea of reviving this particular genre may appeal more to Mr. Levinson and his colleagues than audiences and critics.After a two-decade absence from big-budget productions, Mr. Lyne attempted a comeback last year with “Deep Water,” an erotic thriller starring Ana de Armas and Ben Affleck. Mr. Levinson was one of the film’s writers.“Deep Water,” which streamed on Hulu upon its release, was never shown in theaters. It drew a 36 percent approval score from critics and a 24 percent audience score on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes.“The Idol” has fared both better and worse: A mere 24 percent of critics have given it a thumbs-up, and 63 percent of audience members have weighed in favorably. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      The Film Story of the Stereotype-Busting International Male Catalog

      by

      The catalog was more than a place to peruse the latest fashions. It reshaped society’s definitions of masculinity.One of the most famous “Seinfeld” episodes involves Jerry wearing a flamboyant “puffy shirt” — which was pretty much a copy of the “ultimate poet’s shirt” sold by International Male. The piece of apparel might be a pop culture footnote now, but for a while the mail-order catalog that inspired it meant quite a lot, as evidenced by Bryan Darling and Jesse Finley Reed’s documentary.In the early 1970s, Gene Burkard, a gay former airman turned entrepreneur, slightly retooled a medical garment called a suspensory into a “jock sock.” Its mail-order success eventually led to Burkard’s launching International Male, whose catalog peddled unabashedly outlandish men’s clothing modeled by unabashedly sexy hunks.Narrated by Matt Bomer, the doc breezily chronicles International Male’s rise and fall from the 1970s to the mid-00s. As the fashion commentator Simon Doonan argues in the film, International Male documented — and reinvented — gay and straight men’s shared fetishization of masculinity. Casting aside the cloaking devices known as dark suits and white shirts, the catalog displayed butch specimens lounging in hot pants, crop tops and thongs, with color schemes running a retina-searing gamut from coral and lime to prints like purple zebra stripes. Anticipating Instagram, the company turned clothing into lifestyle, while also providing a coded fantasy outlet for gay men around the country.Admittedly, the film is more dutiful than artful, ticking one box after another, a tendency that is especially obvious when it ventures to the dark side of paradise (the ravages of AIDS on employees and customers, the lack of diversity among the catalog models). Then it’s right back to knights in white satin and the realization that men’s gauze harem pants were once an instrument of liberation.All Man: The International Male StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Book Review: ‘Pageboy: A Memoir,’ by Elliot Page

      by

      In the “brutally honest” memoir “Pageboy,” the actor recounts the fears and obstacles to gender transition, and the hard-won happiness that’s followed.PAGEBOY: A Memoir, by Elliot PageThere’s a scene in the third season of Netflix’s hugely popular “The Umbrella Academy” where Elliot Page’s character, sporting a new, short haircut, walks up to the other members of the titular superhero team to suggest a plan.There’s a derisive response from one of them: “Who elected you, Vanya?”Page glances around, slightly tentative. “It’s, uh, Viktor.”“Who’s Viktor?”The subtitles describe “dramatic music playing” as members of the group eye one another. Page hesitates for a second. “I am. It’s who I’ve always been.” Another beat. “Uh, is that an issue for anyone?”There’s little hesitation: “Nah, I’m good with it.” “Yeah, me too.” “Cool.”And thus plays out what might be the most mundane — and yet quietly empowering — depiction of gender transition in popular culture I’ve ever seen. Were Page’s real-life journey to transition only as simple, straightforward or well received.Instead, as he details in a brutally honest memoir, “Pageboy,” his life story was marked by fear, self-doubt, U-turns, guilt and shame, before he ultimately seized control of his own narrative.A child actor from Canada who burst onto the scene at the age of 20 with a breakout performance in the title role of “Juno” in 2007, Page went on to take roles in films that ranged from indie (“Whip It,” “Freeheld”) to blockbusters (“Inception,” “X-Men: Days of Future Past”).But fame didn’t free him to explore his identity; instead it trapped him into a role studios wanted him to play, offscreen as well as on, as an attractive young starlet.Much of the memoir — told in non-sequential flashbacks and flash-forwards — centers on Page’s path to understand who he really was, against a backdrop of bullying, eating disorders, stalking, sexual harassment and assault. Page grew up in Nova Scotia, the child of divorced parents — a less than loving father and a mother hoping against hope for a more conventional child than the gender outlaw she seemed to be raising.“Can I be a boy?” Page asked his mother at the age of 6. He found escape in solitary play and a rich fantasy life that ultimately blossomed into a career as an actor.The nonlinear structure makes following a clear narrative difficult, but that’s less important than seeing, through his eyes, how Page slowly pieces together a clear sense of himself. In that, it follows a tradition of trans memoirs, from Jennifer Finney Boylan’s “She’s Not There” to Janet Mock’s “Redefining Realness” to Thomas Page McBee’s “Man Alive,” among others, that explore how we explore our identities.From furtive, closeted relationships — he relates how he held hands under a blanket with his then-partner as they were bused from location to location while working on a film together — to coming out as gay in 2014 (“more a necessity than a decision,” he writes), Page flirted with, but backed away several times from, the notion that he might be trans.“My shoulders opened, my heart was bare, I could be in the world in ways that felt impossible before,” he writes of coming out as gay. “But deep down an emptiness lurked. That undertone. Its whisper still ripe and in my ear.”It’s in that tortured, contradictory internal monologue — familiar to other trans people as we contemplate what seems to be an extraordinary, unimaginable truth — that “Pageboy” is most powerful. Page doesn’t really delve into questions of masculinity, or what it means to be a man, but he brings to life the visceral sense of gender dysphoria, or at least one type of dysphoria: the sense that your body is betraying you. It’s an utterly alien sensation for those who haven’t experienced it:Imagine the most uncomfortable, mortifying thing you could wear. You squirm in your skin. It’s tight, you want to peel it from your body, tear it off, but you can’t. Day in and day out. And if people are to learn what is underneath, who you are without all that pain, the shame would come flooding out, too much to hold. The voice was right, you deserve the humiliation. You are an abomination. You are too emotional. You are not real.Moments of joy pierce “Pageboy” as well: his first real queer kiss; scenes of passionate sex; the blossoming of his relationship with his mother after he came out; the reflection of his flat chest in the mirror.Page disclosed his transition in December 2020, a few weeks before I did the same. I suspect he, like me, had been prepared for a future where trans lives would be broadly accepted, or at least tolerated, albeit with sporadic incidents of hate. Both of us inhabit left-leaning spaces (media, movies) where the appearance of support is de rigueur.How could we have expected instead the tidal wave of anti-trans animus that is surging across the right, with hundreds of bills proposed — and some passed — in state legislatures that would in some cases bar adults from accessing trans care; undermine private insurance; allow medical personnel to discriminate against transgender patients; and restrict performances by drag performers and trans people, including possibly Page.Trans men and women are attacked in very different ways. Trans women are demonized as sexual predators; trans men, when people think of them at all, are portrayed as misguided and misled girls and women, confused and unable to understand their own identity. “When I came out in 2014, the vast majority of people believed me, they did not ask for proof,” Page writes. “But the hate and backlash I received were nothing compared to now.”It was an unwelcome regression to a time studios controlled his public persona: “I am sick of the creepy focus on my body and compulsion to infantilize (which I have always experienced, but nothing like this). And it isn’t just people online, or on the street, or strangers at a party, but good acquaintances and friends.”Still, Page has no shortage of fans as well, vociferous defenders of possibly the most famous trans man in the world, and one whose onscreen portrayal of a superhero offers an alternative conception of masculinity rooted in inner strength and sensitivity rather than brawn and muscles.His character’s arc from Vanya to Viktor offers hope, too, of a world where transition is matter-of-fact, accepted — and incidental. “Truly happy for you, Viktor,” another “Umbrella Academy” member concludes.Page and the showrunner Steven Blackman were at pains to ensure his character’s journey reflected the nuances of real trans lives, not least that being trans was a character trait, not the defining one. They brought in McBee to weave an authentic narrative into what was then an already tightly packed and carefully scripted season.In the memoir, Page reflects on his complex relationship with store windows, and his image in them — a reminder, pre-transition, of a body and identity he saw but did not want to inhabit. McBee crafted that memory into another telling “Umbrella Academy” scene, where Page’s Viktor pauses in front of a storefront and is asked what he sees.“Me.” A smile and a shrug. “Just me.”Truly happy for you, Elliot.Gina Chua is the executive editor at Semafor.PAGEBOY: A Memoir | By Elliot Page | 271 pp. | Flatiron Books | $29.99 More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Actors Authorize Potential Strike With Hollywood Writers Still Picketing

      by

      The NewsThe union that represents more than 160,000 film and television actors voted on Monday night to authorize a strike, two days before it is to begin negotiations on a new labor deal with the Hollywood studios. The result from members of the SAG-AFTRA union, with 98 percent authorizing a strike, was expected, and it came during the sixth week of a strike by Hollywood writers and just a day after the Directors Guild of America tentatively agreed to a new contract.“Together we lock elbows, and in unity we build a new contract that honors our contributions in this remarkable industry, reflects the new digital and streaming business model and brings ALL our concerns for protections and benefits into the now!” Fran Drescher, the president of the actors’ union, said in a statement.About 65,000 members cast ballots, or 48 percent of eligible voters. The actors’ current agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, expires on June 30.Members of SAG-AFTRA supported the striking Writers Guild of America at a rally last month outside Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, Calif.Chris Pizzello/Associated PressWhy It Matters: The actors have the same worries as the writers.Many of the actors’ concerns echo what the Writers Guild of America is fighting for: higher wages; increased residual payments for their work, specifically for content on streaming services; and protections against using actors’ likenesses without permission as part of the enhanced abilities of artificial intelligence. According to the writers, the studios offered little more than “annual meetings to discuss” artificial intelligence, and they refused to bargain over limits on the technology.The Directors Guild, in contrast, said on Sunday that it had reached a “groundbreaking agreement confirming that A.I. is not a person and that generative A.I. cannot replace the duties performed by members.” Details about what that meant were not revealed.Background: It has been a long time since the last actors’ strike.The last time the actors went on strike was in 2000, in a dispute over commercial pay. The strike lasted close to six months.What’s Next: Negotiations begin on Wednesday.With negotiations expected to begin on Wednesday, SAG-AFTRA is bullish about what this strike authorization means. “We’re obviously coming in from a position of strength, but we’re not looking to strike,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s chief negotiator. “We’re here to make a deal.” He added: “But we’re also not going to accept anything less than what our members deserve. If a strike is necessary to achieve that, we’re prepared.”The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said in a statement that “we are approaching these negotiations with the goal of achieving a new agreement that is beneficial to SAG-AFTRA members and the industry overall.” More

    • 188 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Review: In ‘Days of Wine and Roses,’ Two Souls Lost in an Ocean of Booze

      by

      In Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s jazzy new musical, Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James are a glamorous couple succumbing to alcoholism.If not for the unbridled drinking, it might easily have been a screwball comedy. Just look at them: Kirsten, blondly beautiful with a tolerant smile and a quick riposte; Joe, curly-haired cute but too arrogant to grasp that he’ll have to up his game to win this woman.Within moments of their meeting in 1950 in New York City, he bursts suavely into song — some presumptuous romantic blather about the two of them together under “a chapel of stars.” Whereupon she teases him right back down to earth.“Wow,” she says. “Who are you wooing? It can’t be me; you don’t know me.”This is the addiction-canon classic “Days of Wine and Roses,” though, so some of us already know them. In JP Miller’s luridly frank 1958 teleplay, starring Piper Laurie and Cliff Robertson, and in Miller’s somewhat defanged 1962 film adaptation, starring Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon, Kirsten and Joe are the attractive pair who make a harrowing, hand-in-hand descent into self-destruction by way of alcohol.In Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s jazzy, aching musical based on the teleplay and the film, Kelli O’Hara and Brian d’Arcy James are an awfully glamorous Kirsten and Joe — O’Hara, in exquisite voice, singing 14 of the show’s 18 numbers, seven of them solos. Directed in its world premiere by Michael Greif for Atlantic Theater Company, this “Days of Wine and Roses” fills the old Gothic Revival parish house that is the Linda Gross Theater with glorious sound.“Two people stranded at sea,” Kirsten and Joe sing sparely, hauntingly, in the brief and perfect prologue. “Two people stranded are we.”So they are. But when they first meet, at a party on a yacht in the East River, Kirsten is a nondrinker primly uninterested in alcohol, while Joe is determined that she indulge, because then she can be his drinking buddy. That she acquiesces and then falls so far makes him her corruptor, or so her taciturn father (a wonderfully gruff Byron Jennings) will always believe.“Get rid of him, Kirs,” he tells her when it is already too late. And anyway it’s the oceans of booze in their relationship that really need to go.Lucas and Guettel, who mined the same midcentury period to great success in their 2005 Broadway musical, “The Light in the Piazza,” in which O’Hara also starred, have each spoken publicly of past personal struggles with substance abuse. Excising the heavy-handedness of previous versions of “Days of Wine and Roses,” and softening the details of Joe’s degradation, they go deeper into the heart-rending familial fallout of addiction.Lucas (book) and Guettel (music and lyrics) occasionally presume the audience’s familiarity with the plot, or steer so far clear of melodrama that they veer into emotional aridity. But they also capture unmistakably the bliss that Kirsten and Joe feel inside their bubble of a threesome: just the two of them and alcohol, throwing a private party that goes on and on.The high that makes sobriety so unthinkable: James and O’Hara as a couple whose lives disintegrate.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesNot for these reveling lovers the swelling strings of Henry Mancini, who scored the film; in the cocktail-mixing song “Evanesce,” Guettel gives them bright, fast music, frenetic and danceable — and when they do a bit of soft-shoe in salt spilled on the floor, there’s a playful heedlessness to their sandpaper percussion. (Choreography is by Sergio Trujillo and Karla Puno Garcia.) This is the high that makes sobriety so unthinkable for Kirsten and Joe, even as their lives disintegrate.Which they do, alarmingly, despite their love for each other and for their hyper-capable daughter, Lila (Ella Dane Morgan), who learns very young to look after herself, and to lie to cover for her parents. It’s Joe who finds the strength, eventually, to choose their child over alcohol, and Kirsten who feels abandoned by her husband, as she clings to what was their private world.Affecting as O’Hara is, Kirsten is less fully drawn than Joe, whose back story makes him a recently returned veteran of the Korean War. (The combat flashback Joe suffers during one drunken binge feels gratuitous.)Kirsten gets no such context, and consequently seems oddly contemporary, which makes the show, for all its ’50s design flourishes, feel unrooted in time. (Sets are by Lizzie Clachan, costumes by Dede Ayite.) Kirsten is aware of the sexism that pervades her era — she makes snappy reference to the minuscule number of female senators — but the show doesn’t entirely seem to be. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.)There is no sense of the opprobrium that would greet a female alcoholic in the 1950s, let alone one who leaves her child, or the severe judgment that would be passed on a married woman who sleeps with strange men when she’s on a bender. Or how any of that would contribute to Kirsten’s own self-loathing.Still, this “Days of Wine and Roses” has wells of compassion for her thrall to alcohol.“Don’t give up on me,” Kirsten writes to her daughter. She might even mean it when she adds: “I’ll be home soon.”Days of Wine and RosesThrough July 16 at the Linda Gross Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Apes Together Strong’ Review: Rooting for the Small Investors

      by

      The 2021 “short squeeze” of GameStop was a rare victory for the little guy. This documentary explains why the house — Wall Street wealth, that is — almost always wins.If we accept the proposition that having money is sexy, we should also be able to admit that the most aggressive ways of making lots of money — the banking schemes and strategies that compound the wealth of the already rich — are not. Are they unfair to the working class? Certainly. Possibly criminal? Sure. But sexy, no. Among the more nefarious activities known to capitalism, big investing is particularly dry.In “The Big Short,” a 2015 fictionalized account of the mid-aughts mortgage-market collapse, the director Adam McKay attempted to skirt this dynamic by having attractive performers including Margot Robbie and Selena Gomez explain the details of market manipulation. In the new documentary “Apes Together Strong,” the filmmakers (and twin brothers) Finley Mulligan and Quinn Mulligan, working with a microbudget and no access to movie stars, detail how to short-sell a stock with a rough-hewed sketch involving a bag of sugar that is borrowed, sold and re-bought at a profit — or not.The title of the movie is the motto of the talking simians in the latter-day “Planet of the Apes” film franchise; it was adopted by the retail investors who led the GameStop “short squeeze” of 2021. At that time, small investors succeeded in significantly raising the price of stock in GameStop, a store chain targeted by hedge funds for market assassination.In a fast-paced style derived from Michael Moore or Morgen Spurlock, the Mulligans interview retail-investor comrades and banking pros sympathetic to the small investors’ cause. The villains, both past and present — the Reagan White House with its push to deregulate banking; big finance honchos; hedge fund vultures — are seen in archival footage, mostly.The lessons here are old, and at one point, the filmmakers use the phrase “the house always wins.” But there’s hope, because there’s always hope in such tales. While Dennis M. Kelleher, the chief executive of the nonprofit investor’s advocacy group Better Markets, says, “Wall Street wins largely because they are unopposed,” the movie closes on a rallying cry.Apes Together StrongNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Available to rent or buy on Amazon. More