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      ‘The Reverend’ Review: A Beer With a Music Chaser

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      Get out of his way. With two decades of sharing worship and making music at a Brooklyn bar, the Rev. Vince Anderson appears to be unstoppable.When singing “Get Out of My Way,” the Rev. Vince Anderson takes no time getting to a growl and a wail. Anderson, the subject of the oft-rousing documentary “The Reverend,” and his band, the Love Choir, have had a 20-year residency at Union Pool, a bar in Williamsburg. And that brassy, organ-banging, sax-honking representative of what Anderson dubs “dirty gospel’’ has been the invocation to Monday evening gatherings.An acolyte of observational filmmaking, the director Nick Canfield follows Anderson as he jams; cooks pastrami at his home in Queens’s Ridgewood neighborhood; works with teen rappers in Bushwick; and barnstorms with Vote Common Good, an evangelical group focused on energizing religiously oriented voters to support progressive candidates during the 2018 midterm elections.Fond of caftans and straw hats, Anderson is a big guy with a burly singing voice but a storytelling cadence when sharing the spiritual journey that took him from a Lutheran childhood in California to New York’s Union Theological Seminary. He planned to become a minister but left. (He has since been ordained.)An early turning point came in college when he crossed a picket line of nuns to see “The Last Temptation of Christ,” with its depiction of “a beautifully human Jesus,” he says.The defining one came at Union when he crossed the street on, yes, Epiphany Sunday, and entered Riverside Church where the day’s sermon was “The Mystery of Christian Vocation.” The message, he recounts, was, “We’re all called to goodness and justice.” He embraced music as his ministry.The arrival of Millicent Souris was a boon. Of their first date, she of the equally splendid caftans said, “He’s got no moves. He’s got nothing.” They married in 2018. There are other amusing and thoughtful interviews (Questlove offers some choice words), as well as musings about grace. Canfield’s debut feature is infused with its own measure of that gentling spirit. It is also blessedly low on piousness.The ReverendNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Old School’ Review: An Impostor Makes the Honor Roll

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      A documentary uses animation and professional actors to tell the story of a once-notorious hoax.“What is a person?” It’s a profound and complicated philosophical question, posed by a man named Stefen during an interview in “My Old School.” Like most of the other people who appear on camera in this brisk, slippery documentary, Stefen has a particular person in mind, a student at Bearsden Academy in the early ’90s known to his classmates as Brandon Lee.Stefen, who is one of the few Black pupils at Bearsden, a school in an affluent section of Glasgow, remembers Brandon fondly as a friend who invited him to parties and protected him from racist bullying. Other Bearsden alums have more ambivalent memories, but they all describe a curly-haired young man who impressed his teachers, charmed his peers and wanted more than anything else to become a doctor.They also agree that their classmate, who showed up as a fifth-year student (roughly the equivalent of a high school junior) after the start of the academic year, could seem a little odd. He looked older than 16 — “he had old skin,” one of them recalls — and alluded to a mysterious and tragic family history. He also had a car and a fondness for ’80s pop music, neither of which was typical among Glaswegian teenagers in 1993.As it turned out, Brandon wasn’t a teenager at all. When Stefen and the others first met him, he was 32 years old, and the name he used was borrowed from a recently deceased celebrity. This isn’t a spoiler, even though “My Old School,” directed by Jono McLeod — a television journalist who was one of Brandon’s classmates — arranges the case into a teasingly suspenseful narrative. The hoax was widely reported in Scotland and beyond, and the news reports and talk-show interviews that McLeod folds into the story may jog dim recollections of a faded media frenzy. There have been so many other grifters and impostors to keep track of in the intervening years.“Brandon,” whose real identity comes out midway through the movie, is given the chance to explain himself, though it can’t quite be said that he reveals himself. The gray-haired, middle-aged man in a drab windbreaker who faces the camera is the actor Alan Cumming, who faultlessly lip-syncs a first-person tale, told in the “real” Brandon’s voice, that is by turns sad, strange and self-serving.The movie, in the end, doesn’t quite know what to make of it all, perhaps because of the director’s barely mentioned personal stake. In flashbacks, Brandon and his classmates are represented in brightly colored, simply drawn animation that evokes the MTV cartoons of the era. Some of their adolescent voices belong to actors and pop singers, emphasizing the gap between them and their grown-up, live-action selves.There’s a disjunction between the jaunty, can-you-believe-this tone of “My Old School” (which ends with a peppy cover of the Steely Dan song of the same name) and the darker implications of its story. The people who knew Brandon look back mostly with incredulity and amusement at his imposture and extend him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his motives. The film takes his words at face value — even though it doesn’t show his face — and takes for granted that his deceit was benign, motivated by his ambition to study medicine and overcome adversity.At the same time, surely there is something creepy about a grown man socializing with children half his age, not only in the halls of Bearsden but also at parties where he served them alcohol, and on a vacation he took with a few of them to Spain. The movie glances toward this moral gray area but mostly looks elsewhere, practicing a troubling kind of access journalism and falling back on a dubious epistemological relativism. Its fascination with Brandon becomes a kind of credulity, a willingness to accept uncritically the mystifications of a proven liar.My Old SchoolNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Donkey, My Lover & I’ Review: Three’s a Crowd

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      In this idiosyncratic comedy from France, a besotted schoolteacher crashes her married lover’s hiking trip and befriends a deeply opinionated donkey.“My Donkey, My Lover & I” is yet another story about a woman who ventures out into the wild and finds herself. But to the writer and director Caroline Vignal’s credit, this low-key romantic French comedy proves friskier and more idiosyncratic than its reliance on this trope of feminist empowerment would suggest.For one, there’s a donkey who is a kind of life coach, bellowing every time one particularly toxic man comes near.Laure Calamy, from the series “Call My Agent!,” plays Antoinette, a foolhardy and hopelessly romantic schoolteacher, whom we first see leading her students in a strangely committed group performance. They’re singing a love ballad, and, unbeknown to the kids and (most of) the audience members, the number doubles as a secret serenade to Antoinette’s lover, Vladimir (Benjamin Lavernhe), the married father of one of her pupils.Too bad Vlad the family man has to cancel the lovers’ retreat they had planned when his wife supposedly drags him on a weeklong hike through the Cévennes National Park. Antoinette responds by chasing after him, booking the same arduous trek in the hope of “stumbling” into her man — no matter her inexperience at hiking or her preference for heels.Like Vladimir, Antoinette rents a donkey, Patrick, whose name you won’t forget — our heroine screams it about a hundred times. Though Patrick initially refuses to walk, he turns out to be an excellent listener and judge of character.Delusionally ga-ga, but also girlishly naïve and sympathetic thanks to Calamy’s grounded performance, Antoinette encounters various kinds of people on her journey — angry moralizers, hiking know-it-alls, bored checkpoint employees who encourage her folly — and she eventually does manage an actual roll in the hay with Vlad.The film — and its blindly determined heroine — has more in common with “Legally Blonde” than it does with something like “Wild,” though its bright, beautifully craggy scenery and meandering rhythm creates an overall more chilled-out tone. Despite Vignal’s intentions, the drama feels less effective as a result — as do the bouts of physical comedy. No matter, sometimes simply pleasant journeys have their charms.My Donkey, My Lover & INot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Quidditch Becomes ‘Quadball,’ Leaving J.K. Rowling Behind

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      Citing trademark concerns and objections to the author’s views on transgender issues, the sport’s leading groups officially distanced themselves from their “Harry Potter” roots.Quidditch, the sport of boarding school wizards riding broomsticks in “Harry Potter,” will become “Quadball” to the humans who play the game in real life, its leading organizations said on Tuesday.The groups cited financial obstacles imposed by Warner Bros., the producer of the movie series, holding the trademark to Quidditch, as well as a wish to “distance themselves” from J.K. Rowling, the author of the books, and what they called her “anti-trans positions,” referring to her contentious statements on gender identity made in recent years.“This is a bold move, and for me personally there is definitely some nostalgia to the original name,” Alex Benepe, who helped found the real-life sport in 2005, said in a statement. “But from a long-term development perspective I feel confident this is a smart decision for the future that will allow the sport to grow without limits.”The path to the decision started in December, when U.S. Quidditch and Major League Quidditch — the youth and professional wings of the sport — announced their intention to choose and trademark a new name. Their statement emphasized “sponsorship and broadcast opportunities” that were missed because of licensing issues.In a 2017 interview with The Quidditch Post, a news site devoted to the sport, Mr. Benepe praised Warner Bros. for being “remarkably permissive” in allowing a league to operate and sell tickets under the name.He added, however, that Warner Bros. had prohibited the sale of merchandise that used the word “Quidditch” and that the sport had been forced to sacrifice major business opportunities. Mr. Benepe argued at the time — before the latest political controversy with Ms. Rowling — for a name change.“I love Harry Potter and always will, but if our sport needs Harry Potter to survive it must not be that great — and I believe that it is great and I think our players do too,” he said.Nevertheless, on Tuesday the International Quidditch Association, the sport’s top governing body, listed Ms. Rowling’s “anti-trans positions” as its primary motive for changing the sport’s name.“We’ve tried to be clear that it’s both reasons,” Jack McGovern, a spokesman for U.S. Quidditch and Major League Quidditch, said in an interview. “We did not intend to give a value judgment about which reason was more important than the other.”Quidditch matches frequently appeared as scenes in the Harry Potter books and movies. The real-life version of it includes many elements taken from Ms. Rowling’s imagination of the game: the riding of brooms, hurling balls through hoops and the need to evade bludgers, and eventually catch the Golden Snitch. In real life a bludger is a rubber dodgeball, rather than a flying ball of iron, and the snitch is a tennis ball attached to a person, as in flag football.Thousands of people play the game in more than 40 countries, according to the International Quidditch Association.After her comments about transgender issues on Twitter drew widespread attention, Ms. Rowling published an essay in 2020 that raised concerns about “pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender” and the rise in gender transition among young people.Many advocates for transgender rights have called Ms. Rowling’s comments transphobic, and some fans have struggled to reconcile their love of “Harry Potter” with their objections to her views.Ms. Rowling’s representatives at The Blair Partnership said there would be no comment on the decision but said that the various Quidditch leagues had never been endorsed or licensed by her.“Quadball,” according to the International Quidditch Association, refers to the number of positions in the sport (a keeper, chaser, beater and seeker) and the number of balls (two bludgers, a quaffle and the snitch).Mr. McGovern said that the association of Quidditch with Ms. Rowling had become an obstacle in recruiting new players, and he said he did not know how much the official bodies of the sport would refer to “Harry Potter” in the future.His first exposure to real-life Quidditch, he said, came in 2010 when he was in middle school. He persuaded one of his parents to drive him from Philadelphia to New York City to see a Quidditch World Cup. He said that he was struck by the “energy and life and forward momentum” of the game, and that he was a “fan of obscure sports more generally.”Almost as an afterthought, he added, “I had been reading ‘Harry Potter’ at the time.” Asked to what extent his love for the books had motivated that early interest in the sport, Mr. McGovern replied: “It’s hard. I don’t want to say more now.” More

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      In a New Take on ‘Gaslight,’ a Heroine Finds Her Own Way

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      NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ontario — Nobody is coming to rescue Bella Manningham. And that’s a good thing.Bella, the damsel in seemingly self-inflicted distress at the center of “Gaslight,” has been a source of pity among theater and film audiences for more than 80 years. But when Johnna Wright and Patty Jamieson dusted off the 1938 Patrick Hamilton melodrama, set in 1880, for this year’s Shaw Festival, they envisioned a very different fate for their heroine.“We didn’t want to change the rules of Victorian society and how they affected women,” Wright said. “Our question was: Is there a way for her to play by these rules and win?”And so they embarked on an ambitious reboot of the play, keeping the spooky setting (a Victorian sitting room) and the basic premise (is Bella losing her mind?), but jettisoning one major character. Gone is Detective Rough, the canny inspector who sets everything straight and explains it all to poor, poor Bella. The result is a total overhaul, complete with a nifty Act I curtain that forces audiences to spill into the lobby, sputtering, “What should she do now?”Ingrid Bergman as a wife pushed to the verge of madness, with Joseph Cotten as the London detective who solves the case, in George Cukor’s 1944 film version of “Gaslight.”Warner Bros. Those smothering rules weren’t confined to the action onstage, said the “Gaslight” director Kelli Fox. “I think the play was originally written for an audience who still expected that demure version of womanhood,” she said. “They wanted a story about a male hero coming to the rescue.”To some degree, current events have made “Gaslight” more topical but also more predictable. Its very title gives an indication of just how much trust the audience should put in Jack, Bella’s ever-solicitous husband. In fact, the term “gaslighting” — psychologically manipulating people into questioning their own sanity — draws its origins from the play, in which the household’s gas lights flicker and dim on the evenings when Bella is alone, causing her to question her own sanity.The concept lived on in psychological circles for decades but only burbled into mainstream society in recent years, to the point where the American Dialect Society honored the word as “most useful/likely to succeed” in 2016.“The weird thing,” Wright said, “is that we started writing this before ‘gaslighting’ became a big thing in the news. Maybe we sensed it was coming.”In her review of the play for The Toronto Star, Karen Fricker called it “a very satisfying piece of theatrical reinvention,” suggesting that theatergoers “bring a smart friend to this show to share the fun afterwards of combing through what happened, picking up cues and evidence in retrospect.”“Gaslight” is one of a handful of plays at the Shaw Festival, held in this bucolic town 20 miles north of Niagara Falls in honor of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, to grapple with the idea of gender and femininity this year.Also at the Royal George Theater is Rabindranath Tagore’s one-act “Chitra,” based on a tale from the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, about a warrior princess who temporarily sheds her “manly” tendencies to attract a world-renowned archer. And the festival will expand to its full 11-show repertory next month to include one of August Wilson’s century cycle plays, “Gem of the Ocean,” which features the matriarch to end all matriarchs: the 285-year-old Aunt Ester Tyler. All three works will then run through early October.For Kimberley Rampersad, who both directed and choreographed “Chitra,” the 1892 play (translated into English from the original Sanskrit in 1913) was a natural fit for the festival: “Shaw and Tagore were both polymaths, and you can feel their politics coursing through their words,” she said. But it is also a reminder that such fits can be found outside the Western canon. “I picked this not to be disrespectful but to prove a point,” she said.Chitra’s gender fluidity had resonated with Rampersad since she was a young girl: “My parents call me their ‘boy child’ — I know, I know — and my father told me, ‘There is a play about you.’” (In the sort of dizzying cross-casting that is common at the Shaw Festival, Rampersad is also playing the decidedly and eternally feminine Lola in “Damn Yankees,” which also features Jamieson, the “Gaslight” co-writer, in its cast.)Gabriella Sundar Singh, center, as Chitra, with members of the corps in “Chitra.”David CooperFor “Gaslight,” Jamieson and Wright said they had originally planned to simply diverge from Hamilton’s play here and there, but soon realized that a gut renovation was needed to tell the story they wanted to tell. “I don’t know if there’s any original dialogue left in our version,” Wright said.Another modification involved adding some shadings of good and evil among the play’s female characters. One of the day-to-day stresses that Bella faces is a “new girl,” a housekeeper who is at the very least impertinent and lazy — and possibly a good bit worse.“It’s pretty boring to make this just a battle of the sexes,” Wright said.That battle was central to several works by Shaw, who is considered the first major playwright to depict what became known as the New Woman. (Rampersad said her initial exposure to his works came from reading “Mrs. Warren’s Profession,” which takes a sympathetic view toward sex work. She remembers thinking, “A man wrote this?”)Much has been made of the Shaw Festival’s evolving “mandate,” which originally confined its repertory to Shaw and works written during his (usefully long) lifetime. The mandate then expanded to newer works set during Shaw’s life, then grew again to include essentially any play that Shaw might have liked.As it happens, “Chitra” and “Gaslight” both qualified under the original parameters. (Shaw died in 1950.) But Fox, who spent many years in the Shaw Festival acting ensemble before shifting her focus to directing, remembers feeling hamstrung by many of the roles she was offered here and elsewhere. “There was a time in my mid-30s when I said, ‘I would like to stop playing a naïve child now. Can I be a woman?’”As it happens, one such part was out there. It just hadn’t been rewritten yet. More

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      ‘The Beta Test,’ ‘Closet Monster’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Put this selection of off-the-radar movies in your queue.​​This month’s off-the-grid recommendations at your subscription streaming services run the gamut from a tender coming-of-age story to a pair of pitch-black comedies to an unexpectedly affectionate action picture, plus three documentaries concerning influential artistes of fashion, music and sleaze.‘The Beta Test’ (2021)Stream it on Hulu.The writer, director and actor Jim Cummings established his onscreen persona (a fumbling, insecure but ultimately big-hearted Everyman) in his breakthrough film “Thunder Road,” and moved the character into genre territory in “The Wolf of Snow Hollow.” For this third feature — working this time with PJ McCabe, his co-writer and co-director — Cummings takes that character into a decidedly darker direction, playing a hotshot Hollywood agent whose career (and impending nuptials) are put into jeopardy when someone makes him a sexual offer he can’t refuse. Cummings and McCabe slip into darker corners than you might expect, yet the comic and thriller aspects commingle with ease, and the results are thrillingly unpredictable.‘Closet Monster’ (2016)Stream it on Netflix.This Canadian coming-of-age drama about the perils of growing up gay was released around the same time as “Moonlight,” and was certainly overshadowed in comparison. But “Closet Monster” is firmly its own thing — an earnest, lived-in portrait of the very real stigmas and fears of being a queer kid, and the kinds of adolescent insecurities that manifest as a result. Connor Jessup is quietly affecting as Oscar, a teenager trying desperately to shake the psychic scars inflicted by his homophobic dad (a chilling Aaron Abrams) after his parents’ divorce. The writer-director Stephen Dunn was only 26 when the film had its debut, and his proximity to youth is a real virtue. This is a filmmaker who remembers the electricity of a first kiss, the fumbling of a first sexual encounter and the satisfaction of breaking free from toxic influences.‘Thoroughbreds’ (2018)Stream it on HBO Max.Before “The Queen’s Gambit” made her a star, Anya Taylor-Joy fronted this delectably dark comedy from the writer and director Cory Finley (who would follow it up with the similarly merciless “Bad Education”). Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke (“Sound of Metal”) play childhood friends, reunited in young adulthood, whose wistful, wishful conversations about murdering one’s stepfather veer into non-hypothetical territory. Taylor-Joy and Cooke are a delight to watch, their two-scenes a cascade of dry wit and deadpan underplaying, and Finley’s stylish direction pinpoints the right combination of dry humor and to-the-rafters theatrics.‘Hysteria’ (2012)Stream it on Hulu.You’ve seen plenty of Victorian-era serio-comic dramas, many featuring much of this prestige cast, which includes Hugh Dancy, Rupert Everett, Felicity Jones, Gemma Jones and Jonathan Pryce. But this is no starchy tale of class conflict or simmering romance — no, this is the story of how Dr. Mortimer Granville (Dancy), while pursuing treatments for “hysteria” (the female orgasm), invented the vibrator. The director Tanya Wexler and her stiff-upper-lip cast clearly get a kick out of their randy subject matter and adjust their playing accordingly, while Maggie Gyllenhaal delights as a proto-feminist who seizes on this development and the power it contains.‘Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning’ (2012)Stream it on HBO Max.The first-person-POV dramatization of a brutal home invasion that opens this bruising action picture is so visceral and upsetting, it feels more like the kickoff to a Gaspar Noé button-pusher than the third sequel to a ’90s shoot-‘em-up. From there, the director John Hyams rarely lets up; he’s less interested in cheap thrills or fan service than in nightmare imagery and haunting portraiture of overwhelming grief. Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, series regulars, are on hand, but the focus is on a new protagonist (played by the direct-to-video action favorite Scott Adkins), whom Hyams follows on a neon-soaked, strobe-lit plunge into death and despair. The fight scenes deliver a no-punches-pulled intensity, with a darkness that borders on nihilism, turning this would-be throwaway into an interrogation of what we want — and expect — from action movies.‘The Gospel According to André’ (2018)Stream it on Amazon and Hulu.When the journalist and stylist André Leon Talley died this year, accolades poured in from some of the most influential figures in the fashion world. Those not quite in the know couldn’t ask for a better summary of his life and achievements than this energetic and entertaining documentary from the director Kate Novack. Talley’s story is a fascinating one, of a poor kid from the segregated South who used fashion magazines as a form of fantasy and escape, and went on to fill those pages with his distinctive words and inimitable style. The archival footage is delightful and the interviews with his contemporaries are insightful, but Talley’s own commentary is the real draw — he is, as he always was, trenchant, funny and fabulous.‘Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World’ (2017)Stream it on Netflix.The genealogy of rock music has always been of keen interest to historians and performers, who’ve tended to agree on the influence of gospel, blues, soul and country styles on the formative early recordings of the 1950s. This documentary by Catherine Bainbridge and Alfonso Maiorana shines a light on a less-acknowledged source: North American Indigenous musicians. Exploring both the music itself and the trials and triumphs of several of its practitioners, “Rumble” is a welcome round of archaeology and an overdue bit of credit — and the music is, unsurprisingly, wonderful.‘Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie’ (2013)Stream it on Amazon.When it aired in the late 1980s — for only two seasons — “The Morton Downey Jr. Show” was condemned in all corners as lowest common denominator television, a “talk show” that used its “Oprah”-style panel format primarily to provoke, and to provide fodder for its trash-talking, chain-smoking host. This thoughtful and well-assembled documentary snapshot of that host, and of the pop culture ubiquity he briefly enjoyed, was released at a time when the show’s influence on subsequent “end of civilization” fare like “The Jerry Springer Show” and “Maury” was clear; from our vantage point, we can also see how it both affected and represented the slowly turning tides of confrontational political discourse. More

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      ‘A Dark, Dark Man’ Review: Murder and Corruption in Kazakhstan

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      This exceptionally grim police procedural recalls films like Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.”“A Dark, Dark Man” is set in a stretch of Kazakhstan where few people seem to live, yet corruption pervades every corner.When this police procedural, directed by Adilkhan Yerzhanov (“Yellow Cat”), premiered in 2019, it was a regular feature film. Its distributor has carved it into three episodes for streaming purposes. That’s unfortunate, because its pacing and visual style — much of the action unfolds in long shot — are clearly designed for big-screen immersion.Its methods and themes also recall such acclaimed art-house titles as Bruno Dumont’s “Humanité,” Bong Joon Ho’s “Memories of Murder” and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia,” even if it stands in those pictures’ shadows.For its first third, “A Dark, Dark Man” issues grim revelations with breathtaking rapidity. Poukuar (Teoman Khos), a gullible local, is coerced by a mysterious man into providing evidence that will be used to frame him for the rape and murder of an orphan boy. (We later learn that the boy is the fourth such victim.) Bekzat (Daniyar Alshinov), the detective antihero, arrives at the scene to investigate what now looks like an open-and-shut case.In this district, suspects have a tendency to be found dead before trials. Bekzat can’t stage Poukuar’s suicide so easily, though, after a journalist, Ariana (Dinara Baktybayeva), turns up to accompany Bekzat on the investigation. She might even push him to pursue the lurking serial killer in earnest.The mystery aspect is handled obliquely. The film is more of a mood piece, and much of its pitch-black humor derives from the contrast between the barren landscape and the sheer number of horrors it contains. (When Bekzat and Ariana arrive in a village, an old woman greets him: “You killed my son. Two years ago. During questioning.”) Only the closing moments seem less nervy.A Dark, Dark ManNot rated. In Kazakh and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. Watch on MHz Choice. More

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      ‘Aftershock’ Review: A Moving Ode to the Black Family

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      Black mothers are dying from childbirth at alarming rates. A new documentary explains why.There’s no getting around just how terribly sad it feels watching “Aftershock,” the new documentary from the directors Paula Eiselt (“93Queen”) and Tonya Lewis Lee. After all, it spotlights the tragic deaths of two Black mothers in New York City who died from childbirth-related complications — Shamony Gibson, in 2019, and Amber Isaac, in 2020 — leaving behind young children, partners, families and communities gutted by grief.But alongside the despair, there is also light in this documentary. Gibson’s partner, Omari Maynard, and her mother, Shawnee Benton Gibson, a medical social worker with a background in reproductive justice activism, had been mourning their loss for a year and a half when Maynard reached out to the newly bereaved partner of Isaac, Bruce McIntyre. The two men soon banded together with Benton Gibson and others to organize for change.Eiselt and Lee successfully put a human face on the now widely reported crisis of Black maternal deaths, which allows them to unpack the underlying factors that have led to the crisis without bogging down the narrative in a deluge of statistics. Yet scenes with the main subjects sometimes feel more staged than vérité, and the audience walks away wishing we knew them better as people.Still, the images of Maynard and McIntyre parenting their children in the midst of grief and outrage, and expressing vulnerability as well as strength, act as a powerful counternarrative to pervasive stereotypes about absentee Black fathers. “Aftershock” is a moving ode to Black families in a society where too many forces work to tear them apart.AftershockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More