Movies

After the success of the movie, he established a brand for writing Hollywood movies about inspiring episodes in Black history.Gregory Allen Howard, who wrote the scripts of several Hollywood movies about inspiring episodes in Black history, most famously “Remember the Titans,” died on Friday in Miami. He was a day shy of his 71st birthday.His death, at a hospital, was caused by heart failure, his spokesman, Jeff Sanderson, said.“Remember the Titans” (2000) has joined the list of American films that find social significance in sports triumphs. Denzel Washington stars as Herman Boone, a Black coach leading a high school football team during its first season after racial integration. With the help of a white assistant, played by Will Patton, along with Black and white high school players who become devoted to each other, Mr. Boone launches the team on a glorious season, culminating in the state championship.The movie was an immediate sensation, premiering at the Rose Bowl and the White House. President Bill Clinton led people involved with the production in a school chant. Just a year later, The New York Times was calling it “one of the most successful sports films of all time” and a leading exemplar of “a genre that could be called the macho weepie.”On Nov. 4, 2008, after Barack Obama ended his presidential victory speech in Chicago with the words “May God bless America,” he was answered by the swelling, uplifting horns of the “Remember the Titans” instrumental theme.Mr. Howard was the prime force behind the movie. After moving to Alexandria, Va., he found himself struck by a prevailing atmosphere of racial harmony there. When he asked around about its source, he was continually told about the football team of T.C. Williams High School, which became integrated in 1971 and went on that year to win the state championship. He began buying life rights, including those of the real Herman Boone, and working on a screenplay.Mr. Howard at the premiere of “Harriet” in 2019. He said he had spent 25 years fighting to make the movie.Leon Bennett/WireImage, via Getty ImagesIn a review, the Times film critic A.O. Scott described “Remember the Titans” as “corny,” adding that it was “unabashedly, even generously so.” The movie is widely reported to have earned more than $100 million worldwide over its roughly $30 million budget.Mr. Howard continued working in the vein of inspirational Black history. He wrote the story for “Ali,” which had four other screenwriters. It premiered in 2001 and starred Will Smith as Muhammad Ali. In a review in The Times, Elvis Mitchell called “Ali” a “near great movie.” But despite hype, it lost money at the box office. Beginning in 1994, Mr. Howard tried to get a movie made out of a screenplay he wrote on the life of Harriet Tubman. In 2019, A.O. Scott described the final product, “Harriet,” as “accessible, emotionally direct and artfully simplified.”In an essay for The Los Angeles Times that year, Mr. Howard described the release of the film as the culmination of an “epic 25-year journey.” He said that he could not list “the number of doors slammed in my face, the number of passes, the number of unreturned phone calls, canceled meetings, abandonments, racist rejections, the number of producing partners who bailed.”But over time the movie industry became more interested in a Tubman biopic, he continued: “#OscarsSoWhite, DiversityHollywood and the other pushes and protests for inclusion and diverse storytelling had moved the needle: The climate had changed,” he wrote.Michael Bentt, left, and Will Smith in the movie “Ali.” Mr. Howard wrote the story for the film.Peter Brandt/Getty ImagesGregory Allen Howard was born on Jan. 28, 1952, in Norfolk, Va. He was raised by his mother, Narcissus (Cole) Henley, and his stepfather, Lenard Henley, a chief petty officer in the Navy. (His father was Lowry Howard.)From the time he was 5 to 15, his family moved 10 times, finally settling in Vallejo, Calif. In 1974, he graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in American history. In later years, he frequently referred to his studies in college as inspiring the historical subject matter of his screenplays.After briefly working on Wall Street, Mr. Howard moved to Los Angeles and tried to become a screenwriter. He did not have much success and moved to Alexandria, wondering if a change in scenery might help while also contemplating giving up and studying to become a teacher.“When you hear no that much, you just begin to think, ‘I guess they’re right,’” he told The Times in 2000.After being inspired by the story of T.C. Williams High School, he pitched “every financing entity in the movie business,” he told The Times, until the producer Jerry Bruckheimer finally took on the project.In the mid-2010s, Mr. Howard’s website reflected a sense that his career had stalled. “The sad truth is it’s almost impossible to get movies made,” he wrote. “It’s a miracle that I’ve been involved in two, ‘Ali’ and ‘Titans.’”But by 2020, things had changed, with “Harriet” released the previous year and Mr. Howard working on several new projects also related to African American history and culture, he told The Washington Post.Mr. Howard is survived by a half sister, Lynette Henley, and a half brother, Michael Henley. Herman Boone died in 2019.Mr. Howard, who was an offensive lineman on his own high school varsity football team, attributed the success of “Remember the Titans” to the popularity of the sport and the place it holds in the memories of American men.“You’re talking about millions of guys,” he told The Times in 2001. “It’s a bonding experience like you can’t believe, and for a lot of men it was the last time they were important or heroic. It touches a nerve of a time when I was last innocent.” More

In a career that began in the 1950s, she had roles that ranged from the lead in the movie “Teenage Bad Girl” to Margaret Thatcher and the Queen Mother.Sylvia Syms, a British actress whose many roles in a career of more than 60 years included Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Queen Mother, died on Friday in London. She was 89.Her death, at Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors and entertainers, was announced by her family.Sylvia May Laura Syms was born in London on Jan. 6, 1934, to Edwin and Daisy (Hale) Syms. She was educated at convent schools and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began her acting career onstage in the George Bernard Shaw play “The Apple Cart” in 1953.She became a stalwart of the British cinema soon after she played the title role in the 1956 movie “Teenage Bad Girl.” Among the many films in which she appeared in the late 1950s were the World War II adventure “Ice Cold in Alex” (1958), starring John Mills, in which she played an army nurse, and “Expresso Bongo” (1959), a satire of the music business. In that movie she portrayed the stripper girlfriend of a sleazy talent manager played by Laurence Harvey.In 1961 she was the wife of a closeted lawyer played by Dirk Bogarde — a role several other actresses had turned down — in the thriller “Victim,” the first British film to deal openly with homosexuality.Ms. Syms never achieved the level of stardom that some had predicted for her. One reason is that she rarely worked in Hollywood (although she did have a prominent role in Blake Edwards’s 1974 Cold War drama “The Tamarind Seed”). Another, according to The Daily Telegraph, is that her ability to disappear into the roles she played kept her from being, in her words, “instantly recognizable as me.” But she remained busy well into her 80s.Her notable later roles included Margaret Thatcher — in the 1991 television film “Thatcher: The Final Days” and later on both TV and stage in “Margaret Thatcher: Half the Picture” — and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in Stephen Frears’s Academy Award-winning 2006 film “The Queen.” In that movie Helen Mirren played her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II.The next year, Ms. Syms was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire by the real Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.From 2007 to 2010, Ms. Syms had a recurring role as a dressmaker on the long-running BBC soap opera “EastEnders.” Her last role was in an episode of the historical drama series “Gentleman Jack,” a BBC-HBO co-production, in 2019.Ms. Syms’ marriage to Alan Edney ended in divorce in 1989 after 33 years. She is survived by her daughter, the actress Beatie Edney, and her son, Ben Edney.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

The video of Memphis police beating Tyre Nichols challenges public complacency — and complicity. What are our duties as citizens and as human beings?Do you have a civic duty to watch, or a moral obligation not to?Some version of that question has confronted us since the body- and pole-camera footage of Memphis police officers beating Tyre Nichols was released on Friday evening. The argument isn’t necessarily about whether the Police Department should have posted the roughly hourlong, four-part, lightly redacted video online for everyone to see.The legal and political reasons for doing so, at the urging of Mr. Nichols’s family, seem obvious and cogent. Too often, the worst abuses of power are allowed to fester in secrecy, shrouded in lies, bureaucratic language and partial information. Raw video offers clarity, transparency and perhaps accountability — a chance for citizens to understand the unvarnished truth about what happened on the night of Jan. 7.That is the hope, in any case: that concerned Americans will become witnesses after the fact, our senses shocked and our consciences awakened by the sight of uniformed officers repeatedly kicking and punching Mr. Nichols, who would die from his injuries three days later. “I expect you to feel what the Nichols family feels,” Cerelyn Davis, the Memphis police chief, said in anticipation of the video’s impact. Her appeal to common humanity expressed faith in the power of even the most horrific images to foster empathy and community — and faith in the human capacity to experience outrage and compassion when shown such images.That faith provides a strong argument for the importance of looking. To turn away in circumstances like this would not merely be to succumb to a loss of nerve, but to risk a loss of heart. In insisting that the world see what had been done to her son, RowVaughn Wells, Mr. Nichols’s mother, recalled Mamie Till-Mobley, who in 1955 placed the disfigured body of her murdered son, Emmett, in an open coffin so that the viciousness of the racists who killed him could not be denied.A delicate ethical line separates witness — an active, morally engaged state of attention — from the more passive, less demanding condition of spectatorship. The spectacle of violence has a way of turning even sensitive souls into gawkers and voyeurs. Violence, very much including the actions of the police, is a fixture of popular culture, and has been since long before the invention of video. For much of human history, public executions have been a form of entertainment. The history of lynching in the United States is in part a history of public spectacle, in which the mutilation and murder of Black men brought out white crowds to stare, cheer and take photographs.I’m not saying that looking at the video of Mr. Nichols’s beating is equivalent to joining in one of those crowds, but rather that Black suffering in America has often been either relegated to invisibility or subjected to exploitation and commodification. That is the dilemma that Ms. Wells and others in her position have faced, even as she challenges the public to acknowledge her son’s full humanity.We don’t automatically recoil from violence. We can just as easily respond with indifference, morbid fascination — or worse. Images are powerful, but not powerful enough to compensate for a society’s failures of decency or judgment, or to overcome its commitment to denying truths that should be self-evident. Mr. Nichols’s case can’t help but recall the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991, captured on video by a neighbor. The officers in that case were acquitted, and unrest swept the city.On Friday, not long before the Memphis videos were posted, a police body-cam clip was released showing part of the Oct. 28 assault on former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, at his home in San Francisco. That attack, carried out by an apparent right-wing extremist, had been the subject of grotesque jokes and lurid, baseless speculations from some of his wife’s political enemies. While the video seems to refute all such claims, it is unlikely to stem the tide of conspiracism and fantasy in some right-wing precincts. The assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, also involved extremists hunting for Ms. Pelosi, and in spite of abundant documentation has been treated by partisans as a tangle of mystery, indeterminacy and through-the-looking-glass distortion.A clip from the attack on Paul Pelosi at his home in San Francisco.San Francisco Police Department, via Associated PressVideo may not lie, but people do. The fact that even the plainest images are open to interpretation, manipulation and mischaracterization places an ethical burden on the viewer. The cost of looking is thinking about what we see. Video is a tool, not a shortcut or a solution. Three decades after the Rodney King beating, Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering George Floyd, and a bystander’s video of his killing galvanized a global protest movement. What we do with the images is what matters.What do we do with these images that come from official sources, and that exist partly because of the impulse to keep a closer eye on law enforcement? In the Memphis videos what is perhaps most heartbreaking, and most chilling, is the casual indifference of the officers to Mr. Nichols’s anguish — and to the cameras that recorded it.In the pole-camera video, which is the longest of the four segments and has no sound, you see him crumpled against the side of a patrol car and collapsing onto the ground as his assailants and an ever-increasing number of their colleagues mill around, mostly ignoring him. Someone lights a cigarette. Someone fiddles with a clipboard. Because of the silence of the soundtrack and the immobility of the camera, time seems to slow down, and action mutates into abstraction. A human catastrophe is playing out under a ruthlessly impersonal eye looking down from above.The body-cam footage puts viewers in the position of the police officers.Memphis Police Department, via Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe body-cam adds sound and movement. You feel the frenzy of the chase and the impact of bodies as Mr. Nichols is taken down. Then you hear his anguished, pleading, desperate cries. You also hear the officers complaining that he made them run after him and made them pepper-spray one another, insisting that he must be “on something” and embroidering a story — which they may well believe — about how he took a swing at one and grabbed for another’s gun.After a while, the drama of the traffic stop, the chase and the beating fades into the routine tedium of the job. The semi-intelligible voices on the radio, the blend of jargon and profanity in the officers’ conversation, their mixture of weariness and bravado — all of this is familiar. We’ve seen this before, not only in real life but also, perhaps most of all, in movies and on television. And of course in first-person games, which the body-cam footage uncannily and unnervingly replicates. We see the violence from the point of view of a perpetrator. We aren’t bearing witness so much as experiencing our own complicity, and taking account of that is perhaps where the work of watching these videos should begin. More

Other prizes go to “Scrapper,” about a British girl and her estranged father, and “The Eternal Memory,” about a Chilean couple coping with Alzheimer’s.A mother-son drama and a documentary about the pioneering poet Nikki Giovanni won grand jury prizes at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.Taking the top honor in the U.S. dramatic competition, “A Thousand and One,” the debut feature of A.V. Rockwell, stars the singer and dancer Teyana Taylor as an ex-con who kidnaps her boy from foster care. The festival jury — made up of Jeremy O. Harris, Eliza Hittman and Marlee Matlin — described it as “work that is real, full of pain, and fearless in its rigorous commitment to emotional truth born of oppressive circumstances.”The U.S. nonfiction award went to “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” from the directors Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson. The jury (W. Kamau Bell, Ramona Diaz and Carla Gutierrez) described Giovanni, now 79, as “a singular, unapologetic voice,” and said the film’s “strong directorial vision illuminates the joy and the raw reality of the Black experience.”In the world cinema dramatic competition, the top award was given to the British film “Scrapper,” Charlotte Regan’s tale of a smart 12-year-old (Lola Campbell) on her own after the death of her mother and the return of a father (Harris Dickinson of “Triangle of Sadness”) she barely knows. “A charming and empathetic film full of integrity and life,” the jurors Shozo Ichiyama, Annemarie Jacir and Funa Maduka wrote, adding, “‘Scrapper’ is a poignant study on grief.”The Chilean documentary “The Eternal Memory” took the world cinema nonfiction prize. Directed by Maite Alberdi (“The Mole Agent”), the film follows a husband and wife as they deal with his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Augusto Góngora is a well-known Chilean TV presenter, and his wife, Paulina Urrutia, an actress-director who once served as the country’s culture minister, is now caring for him. “This film opened our hearts by bringing us closer to the meaning of life and death,” the jurors Karim Amer, Petra Costa and Alexander Nanau wrote.The Festival Favorite Award, voted on by audiences, went to Christopher Zalla’s “Radical,” starring Eugenio Derbez as an elementary school teacher along the U.S. border. Other Audience Awards went to the documentaries “Beyond Utopia” (from Madeleine Gavin, about North Koreans trying to defect); “20 Days in Mariupol” (Mstyslav Chernov’s account of being trapped with other Ukrainian journalists during the Russian invasion); and “Kokomo City” (D. Smith’s look at Black transgender sex workers).Two films about Iranians abroad also won over audiences: “The Persian Version,” Maryam Keshavarz’s comedy-drama set amid a family reunion in New York, and “Shayda,” Noora Niasari’s drama about a mother and her abusive husband in Australia.The festival concludes Sunday. More

At 31, Lukas Dhont already has two art-house hits to his name. The Belgian director’s latest film, “Close,” shows his skill at eliciting intense performances from young actors.As a child growing up in Dikkelvenne, a quiet, quaint village near the city of Ghent, Belgium, the movie director Lukas Dhont often felt like an outsider. Other boys saw him as too feminine and mocked his interest in dance, except one named Félicien, with whom he shared a close friendship. But as the two approached puberty, Dhont felt social pressures pulling them apart.“In that moment, that tenderness started to become looked at through the lens of sexuality,” Dhont, now 31, said in a recent interview. “People were divided into groups and boxes, and we were confronted with the idea of labels.” As they became fearful of being ostracized, their friendship evaporated, and Dhont, who is gay, was fiercely bullied for the rest of his school days.That experience as a young person struggling with expectations around gender and sexuality has shaped both of Dhont’s acclaimed feature films: “Girl,” his 2018 movie about a transgender ballerina, and “Close,” a devastating portrait of a friendship between two young boys in the Belgian countryside, which won the Grand Prix award, the equivalent to second place, at the Cannes Film Festival last year.From left: Gustav De Waele and Eden Dambrine in a scene from “Close,” and Victor Polster in a scene from “Girl.”A24; Netflix“Close” is being distributed by A24 in the United States and is being released in theaters on Friday. It further establishes Dhont as a phenom of global art house cinema and one of its most observant chroniclers of adolescence. And it cements his reputation as a filmmaker who is exceptionally skilled at eliciting intensely emotional performances from young, often untrained actors.Dhont, who employs loose scripts and encourages his actors to improvise dialogue, said his method resembled that “of a choreographer, introducing movements.” He said his relatively open approach allowed young actors “to bring so much of themselves” to the films. “I create characters for them to hide in,” he said. “They are like co-authors.”That strategy helped him to coax out two astonishing central performances for “Close,” a slow-burn drama about two 13-year-old boys named Léo and Rémi (played by newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele) whose close bond elicits scrutiny when classmates suspect they are a couple. After a skittish Léo begins distancing himself from Rémi, a series of slights build to tragedy.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Dambrine, a French student at a dance academy in Belgium, had never acted before Dhont spotted him on a train in 2018 and approached him about auditioning for the lead role in “Close.” Dhont explained that he when he saw the then-11-year-old, he was struck by his “angelic and androgynous” features and “very big eyes.”Eden Dambrine in a scene from “Close.” Dambrine was a student at a dance academy when Dhont approached him on a train and asked him to audition for the movie.A24In a video call, Dambrine, who is now 15, explained that it had been a “boyhood dream” to act in a movie, and that he had gotten the impression that acting could be fun from watching the blooper reels from “Avengers” films. (He added that when he called his mother to tell her that a stranger had approached him about starring in a movie, she had responded: “Get off the train! Get off the train!”)His mother ultimately accompanied him throughout the shoot, which lasted two months, in Belgium and the Netherlands. Among other challenges, the film required Dambrine to act out several intensely emotional moments in long, silent close-up. After he nailed a scene, in the first take, in which his character has a breakdown in a doctor’s office, much of the crew began weeping, Dhont recalled.Dambrine’s mother, whose name is France, said Dhont’s talent for working with young actors was partly a function of his youth. “He is not that far from being a teen,” she said, adding that Dhont’s emphasis on fostering bonds between crew and cast members before shooting, and his openness to improvisation, allowed her son to feel comfortable so he could focus on the emotional elements of his performance.She also noted that Dhont and Dambrine shared the experience of having been raised by single mothers “who had to figure out how to raise their kids.” The director, she said, “has a lot of empathy.”“When you’re young, you want to belong to a group, but there are people for whom that doesn’t work,” Dhont said. Kevin Faingnaert for The New York TimesDhont recalled that he had first become interested in film as a child, amid his parents’ divorce, when his mother returned home one night from seeing “Titanic,” James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster. “My mom had been gloomy, and seeing her come back, telling me how beautiful it was,” he said, “I became obsessed with the film, and the feeling that a film could change someone.”His interest in making movies was bolstered at age 12, when an incident led him to give up his childhood dream of being a dancer. Dhont said that after performing a dance to the song “Fighter,” by Christina Aguilera, at a school talent show, his classmates mocked him even more mercilessly. “I felt so ashamed that I told myself I will not dance publicly anymore,” he recalled.Shortly after graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Ghent, where he studied film, he began making his first feature, “Girl,” at age 26. Partly inspired by Dhont’s own youthful experiences and the true story of Nora Monsecour, a transgender ballerina, the film won several awards, including the Caméra d’Or, at Cannes, but also drew a backlash from transgender people.Some were angered by the casting in the lead role of Victor Polster, a male actor who won an acting award at Cannes for his performance, while others argued that a climactic incident of self-inflicted violence in the film was exploitative. Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, the trans critic Oliver Whitney argued that “Girl” invited “the audience to react with disgust” at the main character’s body.“I just create characters for them to hide in,” Dhont said of the actors he works with. “They are like co-authors.”Kevin Faingnaert for The New York TimesThe blowback to the movie, Dhont said, was “emotionally challenging.” He added that “now, if I made a film with a trans character as the lead, I would make it differently,” but declined to get into the specifics of what he would change. “I can’t go back in time,” he said.Dhont said that his films thus far had been about the period in a person’s youth when they are “confronted with society for the first time” and “performing types of identities or stereotypes of identities.”“When you’re young, you want to belong to a group, but there are people for whom that doesn’t work,” Dhont said. “My films are about showing the world from that perspective.” More

In this thriller, a French diplomat takes to the road after being falsely imprisoned by Russian authorities.The French thriller “Kompromat” dramatizes the true story of Yoann Barbereau, a Frenchman living abroad in Russia who escaped the country in 2017 after being imprisoned under false charges. In the fictionalized version of events, Mathieu (Gilles Lellouche) works at a French cultural institution in Irkutsk, one of the largest cities in Russian Siberia. In his joie de vivre, Mathieu hosts a ballet as a show of diplomatic good will. But the erotic nature of the ballet runs him afoul of local authorities, including agents in the Russian Federal Security Service, known for continuing the practices of the once dreaded K.G.B.Suddenly, Mathieu is arrested under fabricated accusations of child pornography and abuse. Mathieu is assigned an attorney who negotiates his release from prison into house arrest. Trapped at home, he awaits trial with dwindling hopes of intervention from the French government. Mathieu’s desperation grows, and this thriller takes a turn toward action when he acquires a phone from a friendly contact and takes to the road, staying in safe houses en route to the French embassy in Moscow. But there, Mathieu finds little support for his release, and so he looks again to escape, this time with the European border in mind.The director Jérôme Salle shows interest in the realpolitik of Mathieu’s situation, and his film scopes out the grim safe rooms and fluorescent meeting halls where Russian political schemes and French political failures take place. But Salle’s approach leaves the physical details of Mathieu’s escape foggy. It’s not always clear how long Mathieu spends in hiding, or how he acquires the tools needed to sustain his flight. The politics confound the film’s sense of action; the camera sticks to the diplomats even after the protagonist has escaped from a back door.KompromatNot rated. In French and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

This film, featuring a captivating performance from David Strathairn as the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski, is a straightforward adaptation of the play of the same name.Last fall, David Strathairn captivated Brooklyn theatergoers with his solo performance in “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” depicting the Polish resistance fighter’s harrowing journey through exile during World War II. Originally produced by Theater for a New Audience as part of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, “Remember This” took inspiration from the documentaries in which the real-life Karski appeared — 1985’s “Shoah” and 2010’s “The Karski Report” — along with Karski’s own writings and lectures from his decades as a Georgetown professor. The result was a stark, minimalist set in which Strathairn recreated the horrors that Karski, who died in 2000 at age 86, endured using nothing more than a table, two chairs and a suit jacket.The film version of “Remember This,” opening this Friday at the Quad Cinema, in Manhattan, adapts the stage play with little change in its presentation. Derek Goldman returns as director alongside Jeff Hutchens, and Strathairn is once again a one-man tour de force. Now with the benefit of editing, his transitions between the devastating and triumphant scenes of Karski’s life are punctuated with camera tilts upward into dramatic lighting cues, allowing for subtle cuts in what still resembles a one-take performance.Despite this, “Remember This” is, quite literally, a filmed play, and Goldman and Hutchens don’t make any attempts to define or elevate itself outside the confines of the stage. That can start to feel claustrophobic at 90 minutes long, but perhaps the directors saw that as a necessary trade-off, as Karski’s numerous and poignant monologues performed to the camera — on the nature of evil, on Holocaust denial, on how one chooses to retell the truth — would have felt out of stylistically place in a cinematic version. As it is, they’re the element most likely to be remembered.Remember ThisNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

Mormon teenagers travel to Finland for missionary service in this documentary that struggles to offer new insights.American Mormon adolescents trek to Finland for missionary service in the pallid documentary “The Mission.” Directed by Tania Anderson, the film opens with its young subjects preparing for their travels, and then tracks their two-year journeys and the challenges that attend the substantial undertaking.One hopes that such access to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints would yield new insights into the religion. But as the events unspool, the film struggles to crystallize more than a handful of compelling points.The documentary spends time with four missionaries in particular: Sister Bills, Sister Field, Elder Davis and Elder Pauole. (The Church frowns upon the use of first names.) The young women are sunny. The young men are stolid. Beyond their general dispositions and their aptitude for Finnish, which each of them are asked to study, the film fails to bring them to life as individuals.Upon arrival in Finland, the missionaries receive companions who serve as their roommates and proselytizing partners. The kids are instructed not to leave one another’s sight, a rule that we later learn is meant to prime the adolescents for marriage, which awaits them at home. This vital detail is obscured, however, by our surface-level time with the pairs. We see them pray side by side and knock on Finns’ doors, but before the camera, the companions default to reticence.Being a teenager is tough enough, and living for years in a foreign city must add stress to the usual malaise. Unfortunately, Anderson’s camera feels like an outsider to this unease, less a window into a demanding time than an obstacle to our understanding.The MissionNot rated. In English and Finnish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More