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LOS ANGELES — As self-portraits go, the video “DED” by Martine Syms is a bit masochistic. The artist’s digital avatar strolls across a flat, featureless limbo, enduring several gruesome deaths. Seppuku with a chef’s knife. Crippling, fatal allergies. Diarrhea so explosive she rockets into the sky like a rag doll, then dies from the fall. Then, somehow, she gets up and keeps walking.Syms remembers sending an early clip of the 15-minute piece to a friend. “I still think it’s kind of funny,” she said recently, at a booth at Little Dom’s, a red-sauce, dark wood Italian restaurant in this city’s Los Feliz neighborhood. “But let me be clear that I understand how people do not. They were like, ‘What the [expletive] is this? It’s really violent. I don’t like seeing you dying.’”But that’s the thing, she told me. “There’s always a level of seriousness read into a lot of things that I’m doing that I don’t necessarily connect with.”Especially when race is involved. “I’m using a signifier, Blackness, which for some people can connote serious pain,” she acknowledged. “But I see it as a real space of joy and freedom.”Syms, 34, is the sort of “new media” artist who antiquates the term. Since her days as a film programmer at clubs like the Echo Park Film Center in Los Angeles, she has turned the various lenses of media around to interrogate what society expects of Black women, and Black artists in particular. An early video, “My Only Idol Is Reality,” from 2007, consists of a degraded VHS copy of a heated, unedited dialogue on race between two contestants on “The Real World.” Syms studied cinema at the Art Institute of Chicago, co-founded a book store called Golden Age and started an artist-book imprint called Dominica. She racked up tags: artist, writer, musician, publisher, teacher, filmmaker; D.J., influencer, brand. Throughout her art, her moving images feature avatars of herself that she endows with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.“DED” (2021), a digital video on view in “Martine Syms: Grio College” at CCS Bard’s Hessel Museum of Art. Syms endows avatars of herself, including Teeny, seen above, with a vital mixture of ego and exhaustion, cupidity and love.Olympia Shannon/CCS BardIn the summer of 2017, Syms graduated with an M.F.A. from Bard College; that fall, she began a year as faculty at the California Institute of the Arts. In the interim, she produced a solo show at MoMA — a purple-tinged installation including photographs, furniture and a feature-length video.This fall brings her a triad of institutional coups, and a movie in theaters. Each stars dramatized, extrapolated versions of Syms. A new, open-ended video play fed by machine-learning algorithms anchors “Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. And a gonzo sitcom called “She Mad,” 2015-2021, in which Syms often stars, appears at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago until February 2023. The most recent episode routes the artist’s real-life ups and downs through a cover of the “Life Story” TikToks posted by the rapper Lil Nas X.“DED” is the showpiece of “Grio College,” Syms’s retrospective at the CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, in upstate New York. Bard, the artist’s alma mater, also inspired her first foray into independent films: “The African Desperate,” which she directed and co-wrote with Rocket Caleshu, enters worldwide distribution with screenings in New York starting Sept. 16. (The artist Diamond Stingily, an old friend, plays the lead, a Black femme named Palace with a newly minted M.F.A.; Bridget Donahue, Syms’s New York dealer, and A.L. Steiner, her former teacher, have small roles as Palace’s professors.)Installation view of “Martine Syms: She Mad Season One,” a wry take on contemporary life as a Black woman, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, through Feb. 12, 2023.Nathan Keay/MCA ChicagoSyms’s many avatars are a record of survival in a cloying media atmosphere. They’re sometimes self-indulgent — necessarily so, in the manner of psychoanalysis or self-care. The notion of “Grio College,” a place that teaches the trick of honing personal experience into modern stories, developed through the artist’s experience on the M.F.A. track. Syms writes in the press notes to “The African Desperate” that the overlapping dystopias of an advanced art college in the bucolic Hudson Valley came laced with racism. One of the last sequences of the film layers found audio of a man telling off his bigoted co-workers with shots of postcard-perfect fields and shops in Troy, N.Y.“The curriculum that she presents is larger than what a college typically covers,” said Lauren Cornell, the chief curator at the Hessel. “It encompasses one’s whole life, friends, thinkers, culture.” Her professors and gallerists become collaborators; the places she lives become sets and settings.Sitting in the booth at Little Dom’s, on the edge of Hollywood, dayglo-orange braids fell across Syms’s lilac tank top and accented a tattoo on her shoulder: the word “EVIL.” (Seen from a certain angle, it almost reads “LIVE.”) Waitstaff in the hall zapped small flies with loud pops of an electric racquet.Syms grew up in Altadena, a quiet town abutting the mountains east of Los Angeles known as a retreat for roughneck millionaires and an enclave for the Black middle class. Her mother worked as a registered nurse at the Kaiser Permanente hospital on Sunset Boulevard, and Syms would take the bus into Los Angeles to spend afternoons browsing Goodwill and Skylight Books or watching films at the vintage theaters. The kinetic harshness of the city comes through in her work. Her characters take the bus; they walk in Los Angeles.Diamond Stingily, in the role of Palace, stars in “The African Desperate,” which Syms co-wrote and directed, and which opens in theaters this fall.Dominica, Inc.But virtual registers are just as important for Syms and her versions. In some of her videos, characters’ texts pop up on the screen in bubbles; her 2018 piece “Mythiccbeing” is an interactive chatbot. Throughout our conversation, she mustered text messages, voice memos and notes from her phone, piecing together how ideas coalesced into art. Her style of hyperlinking in real time matches the hybrid way she works, reifying, refining and recollecting the thoughts that make a person up.Syms traces “DED” to a dream she had in early 2020, while she was sick with Covid; it is stored in an audio file that she doesn’t remember recording. The title of the 2021 show in which that work debuted, “Loot Sweets,” derives from another reverie. She pulls up her notes app: “post ap life in a weird mall. bard people and others. lauren and i are trying to escape. people are looting so we stop by pleats please on the way out. everything is gone. all the good stuff at least. lauren drops from the second floor into the ocean while i crawl down to meet her. she swims w me bc she’s stronger against the current. we finally get out and i’m immediately shot dead.”It’s heavy stuff, a nightmare fed by civil unrest incited by police killing unarmed Black Americans, against the background simmer of a global pandemic. Syms explained the chain of associations behind the phrase “Loot Sweets”: medieval lute music, Bobby McFerrin’s cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” reparations. While artists and activists have called for ending the exploitation of images of Black death, Syms turned to gallows humor.Syms with her electric guitar in her studio in Los Angeles.Simone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesBut Syms is mining the vein of absurdity, hidden in plain sight, running through freewheeling experiments in Black culture like Amiri Baraka’s poetry or Sun Ra’s jazz. In 2013, she wrote “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” which deflates Afrofuturist esoterica and other escapism. Instead, she proposes: “The chastening but hopefully enlivening effect of imagining a world without fantasy bolt-holes: no portals to the Egyptian kingdoms, no deep dives to Drexciya, no flying Africans to whisk us off to the Promised Land.”The curator Meg Onli, who included Syms in the 2019 exhibition “Colored People Time” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, told me that the text underpinned the show’s take on “the confluence of temporalities, Blackness and the mundane.”“I love her ability to pivot from conversations around Black futurity that center on the fantastic and spectacular,” Onli added, “and remind us that our future may not look drastically different from our present.”Syms pointed out that Teeny, her avatar in “DED,” doesn’t really die. The back of Teeny’s white sweatshirt reads TO HELL WITH MY SUFFERING in all caps. Call it a koan to contain the ambivalence of enjoying an often-awful world.Installation view of “Martine Syms: Neural Swamp,” through Oct. 30 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with a script and performances constantly revised in real time.Joseph Hu/Philadelphia Museum of ArtAt the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the glowing green installation of “Neural Swamp” mounts two women’s faces on monitors, arranged around vinyl poufs. A third screen flashes with footage from rounds of vintage video game golf. The score and performances are constantly revised in real time: Digitized actors recite a script that Syms wrote but an algorithm updates constantly into an amalgamation of sitcom clichés and tongues.Formally, “Neural Swamp” resembles the Chicago install, and both recall another Syms production: her design for a Prada-sponsored supper club in Hollywood during this year’s Frieze Los Angeles art fair. Her vision for what she called “Prada Mode,” branded “HelLA World,” included “every last detail, from the lecture series to the matchbooks,” Donahue said. Her name on the restaurant’s marquee, DMs from guests crawling around long screens in the dining room, closed-circuit videos of the crowd on monitors hung from the bare studs between the restaurant, the outside bar — “It was a Martine Syms waking dream scene.”Maybe it’s a metaphor, too: There are stanchions, there are walls, but sometimes you can walk through them. Maybe it’s simply that, in a world prone to displays of despair, Syms’s fluorescent way of coping draws a crowd.I asked Syms why, given her dynamic range, she still works as a gallery artist. “I feel a great deal of freedom, you know?” Only in the art world, she said, are your most unqualified hunches met with such serious support. She told me about an event at the Zentrum Paul Klee residency in Bern, Switzerland, where, in lieu of showing slides of old work, she asked the organizers to serve a purple cocktail at the bar. Not only did they agree, a mixologist spent hours beforehand helping her perfect the drink’s taste and color.“If I told somebody I want to run Little Dom’s for a month as an art project,” said Syms, “I probably could.” More

She worked on early projects at Florentine Films, where Ken Burns, her husband for a time, would find fame with “The Civil War.”Amy Stechler, who was instrumental in the early years of Florentine Films, the company behind the Ken Burns series “The Civil War” and numerous other acclaimed documentaries, and who went on to make an Emmy-nominated documentary of her own on the artist Frida Kahlo, died on Aug. 26 at her home in Walpole, N.H. She was 67.Her daughters, Sarah and Lilly Burns, said the death was probably related to her declining health from primary progressive multiple sclerosis, which had been diagnosed in 2005.Ms. Stechler, who was married to Mr. Burns from 1982 to 1993, was credited as the writer and a producer on “Brooklyn Bridge,” the 1981 documentary that was Mr. Burns’s first major directing credit and the first major project of Florentine Films. The company had been formed in 1976 by Mr. Burns and two college friends, Roger Sherman and Buddy Squires, with Ms. Stechler joining soon after.The four were recent graduates of Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where, Mr. Burns said in a phone interview, two professors in particular, Jerome Liebling and Elaine Mayes, had influenced their thinking about storytelling and the power of still images. They plunged right into the “Brooklyn Bridge” project, learning by doing.“Everybody told us we couldn’t do it,” Mr. Burns said. “‘Why aren’t you apprenticing?’”Mr. Squires said that Ms. Stechler was a key part of that learning process.“It’s really important to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,” he said. “We were all just sort of making it up as we went along.”“Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.Mr. Burns had been inspired to tell the story of the Brooklyn Bridge by the 1972 book “The Great Bridge,” by the historian David McCullough, who provided narration for the documentary. Mr. Burns recalled a moment during a recording sessions when Mr. McCullough, who died on Aug. 7, told him and Ms. Stechler that the writing needed work, hauled them aside and gave them an impromptu three-hour tutorial.“We came back in with a much improved script,” Mr. Burns said. “It was the single greatest three hours of learning we’d ever had in our lives.”The project took several years. Mr. Burns said that in 1979 he and Ms. Stechler were living together in the Chelsea section of Manhattan when a rent increase — to $325 a month from $275 — drove them out of the city and to Walpole, N.H., and a house where Mr. Burns still lives.“Forty-three years ago last week,” he said on Wednesday, “we packed up a green van and moved up here.”They and the rest of the team finished editing the documentary there. The results were a breath of fresh air for the somewhat staid documentary genre. “Brooklyn Bridge,” first shown at film festivals in 1981 and then broadcast on PBS in 1982, was nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature.“‘Brooklyn Bridge’ is more than just a short course in one colorful phase of American history,” Kenneth R. Clark wrote in a review for United Press International in 1982. “It is a thing of grace and beauty — one of television’s few truly golden hours.”The film put Florentine and especially Mr. Burns on the map. In 1984 he and Ms. Stechler jointly directed “The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God,” another well-received documentary, on which Ms. Stechler was also a writer and producer. She was also one of the writers of “The Statue of Liberty” (1985), directed by Mr. Burns, which was nominated for an Oscar.She and Mr. Burns had married in 1982 and by 1986 had two daughters. Ms. Stechler stepped away from filmmaking for some two decades and took up painting, although she had consulting credits on “The Civil War,” Mr. Burns’s Emmy Award-winning 1990 mini-series, which transformed the documentary landscape.Ms. Stechler returned to filmmaking in 2005 long enough to write and direct “The Life and Times of Frida Kahlo,” a documentary broadcast on PBS, about the Mexican painter known for her colorful artwork and eventful life. Robert Koehler, reviewing it in Variety, called it “uncommonly smooth, fluid and richly textured.”Mr. Squires was her cinematographer on that project. He said the choice of subject did not surprise him.“I really feel that she saw Frida as a kindred spirit,” he said, “an uncompromising woman who was trying to tell her truth as she saw it.”Ms. Stechler in an undated photo. “It’s really important,” a colleague at Florentine Films said, “to understand how instrumental Amy was in developing the signature Florentine style,”Florentine FilmsAmy Georgeanne Stechler was born on June 23, 1955, in New Haven, Conn. Her father, Gerald, was a psychologist, and her mother, Ellen (Bodner) Stechler, was a social worker.She grew up in Lexington, Mass. Mr. Squires said that as an undergraduate at Hampshire College she was outraged by the white response to efforts to desegregate Boston schools in the mid-1970s and made a student film about it, a project for which he was part of her crew. She was a year or two behind Mr. Burns in school, graduating in 1977, and was part of the crew for his senior film project.Mr. Squires said that although the young filmmakers’ education at Hampshire had grounded them in ideas and theories, it was not a traditional film curriculum and was short on practical matters. Once the group was in the real world trying to get Florentine going, it was often Ms. Stechler who figured out the nuts and bolts.“She was always innovating, always saying, ‘OK, we have a problem, how do we fix this?’” he said, adding, “It’s far harder to figure out how to do something than how to make minor improvements along the way.”He saw a through line connecting the varied subjects of the films she worked on — Kahlo, the Shakers, the visionaries behind the Brooklyn Bridge — and including her as well.“They were all people who had the courage of their convictions,” Mr. Squires said.Ms. Stechler’s second marriage, to Rod Thibeault, also ended in divorce. In addition to her daughters, she is survived by her partner, Bill Patterson; a sister, Nancy Stechler Gawle; and five grandchildren.Ms. Stechler split her time between Brooklyn and Walpole, where she lived not far from Mr. Burns. He said she was “as fiercely her own person as anybody I’ve ever met, but also kind of graceful — there was a kind of grace in who she was.”He summed up her influence on his career simply.“I don’t think you’d have ever heard of me had she not been there,” he said. More

The director behind award-season favorites ‘Birdman’ and ‘The Revenant’ returns with a personal new movie, but not everyone is a fan.I love a great movie debate, and on only its second day, the Venice Film Festival has kicked off a robust one. As I walked out of the press screening for Alejandro G. Iñarritu’s lengthy new film “Bardo,” I thought I had just watched Oscar catnip, the kind of movie that awards voters typically go gaga for.Then I talked to other people.“Bar-NO,” texted one critic. “Three hours? So self-indulgent,” said a film festival programmer. And in a hotel elevator later that day, an Italian woman segued smoothly from complaining about the weather (“Horrible!”) to the movie (“Also horrible! Why does he have to copy Cuarón?”).She was implying that “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths” (to use its full title) takes more than a few cues from Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” and there are certainly some similarities: Like his friend Cuarón, Iñárritu is a Hollywood-venerated filmmaker who has returned to his native Mexico for a Netflix-financed autofiction teeming with long takes, digital tricks and stunning cinematography.The streaming service certainly hopes that “Bardo” can net the same Oscar nominations as the laureled “Roma” (which wound up taking three statuettes), and with Iñárritu at the helm, there’s reason to be bullish: Every film he’s made has received at least one Oscar nomination, and he’s coming off back-to-back best director wins for “The Revenant” (2015) and “Birdman” (2014), as well as a best picture victory for the latter film.So will award voters respond more favorably than that initial wave of Venice filmgoers would indicate? I think so. Certainly, the plot will resonate more with them: “Bardo” is Iñárritu’s riff on “8½”: it’s a surreal dramedy about Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho), a documentarian making sense of his life story. Though he’s prone to dreamlike visions, Gama’s problems are the kind that middle-aged Hollywood types can relate to: Do I deserve my success, or am I a fraud? Have I spent too little time at home with my family? Will my children be spoiled and entitled?After Iñárritu shot “Amores Perros” in Mexico in 2000, he and his family moved to Los Angeles to pursue mainstream Hollywood success, just as the “Bardo” protagonist did. In many ways, Gama is a thinly veiled Iñárritu stand-in: He’s attired just like his creator and haunted by an old collaborator who now shuns him, which may be a reference to the rancorous professional breakup between Iñárritu and the co-writer of his early films, Guillermo Arriaga.But though the film acknowledges Gama’s flaws, it doesn’t really examine them. Characters tell Gama that he’s too self-involved, too bougie, too fake, and we have to take their word for it, since Gama just shrugs and moves on. Giménez Cacho is appealing but passive in the role, which may inhibit a robust awards run, but the film can definitely rack up several technical nominations: Darius Khondji’s cinematography is superb, and all of Gama’s visions — apartments flooded with sand, subways steeped in fish-tank water — are brought to incredible life by the production designer Eugenio Caballero (who also worked on “Roma”).Past that, we’ll see how well the film connects with the Hollywood types it’s portraying, and whether Netflix is willing to push it as hard (and as expensively) as it did “Roma.” Certainly, “Bardo” implies that streaming services have the coin for it: One of the movie’s most successful jokes is that in the world of “Bardo,” Amazon is about to complete its successful purchase not of a new awards contender but of the entire state of Baja California. Compared with that, what’s the cost of a few hundred for-your-consideration ads and some private planes? More

Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown star in this satire about a fallen megachurch pastor and his first lady praying and angling for a comeback.In the keen-eyed satire “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul,” Pastor Lee-Curtis Childs and his first lady, Trinitie, aren’t simply ready for their close-up, they’re in dire need of it. Sterling K. Brown portrays Lee-Curtis, the fallen megachurch pastor who hires a documentary filmmaker to help him mount a comeback. Regina Hall is a wonder as the woman who stands by her man for a mash-up of reasons, not least being the elevated position the title first lady confers. After all, his and hers gilded thrones sit in their church, Wander to Greater Paths.Thanks to a sex scandal, nearly everyone in the church’s congregation of thousands took its name to heart and departed — many of them for the growing rival church of their former parishioners Keon and Shakura Sumptor (played by Conphidance and Nicole Beharie).The comedy (originally a short) was written and directed by the first-timer Adamma Ebo, who produced it with her filmmaking partner and identical twin, Adanne. The Ebo sisters were raised in the Southern Baptist tradition in Atlanta, where the movie is set, and the director displays a tart and nuanced understanding of pastoral power and the wages of hypocrisy. Adamma Ebo said she was inspired by — or more aptly, she wrestled with — the real-life plummet of the megachurch pastor Eddie Long, who in 2010 was accused of sexual misconduct by young men from his congregation.Still, “Honk for Jesus.” is no straight-ahead mockumentary. The unseen fly-on-the-wall filmmaker hired by Lee-Curtis (voiced by Andrea Laing) is just one more witness to the pastor and his first lady’s unraveling. We viewers are privy to a number of telling, intimate interactions between man and wife.Brown, the former “This Is Us” star, plunges deep into his character, a damaged soul whose conflation of God’s blessings and man’s Benjamins is hardly new: The gospel of prosperity has become the rock upon which many a church is founded. Still, Brown makes it a thing to behold. And Beharie is diabolically good as a First Lady 2.0. But it’s Hall who expresses the film’s emotional complexity — and its characters’ flimsy morality. Trinitie, too, enjoys the bounties bestowed on the couple. A visit to a shopping mall to buy a hat for the comeback service includes a peek at the hefty price tag. Later, when Trinitie sits with her mother one morning to discuss her marital doubts, we learn the tangled roots of her conflict.Naturally, Lee-Curtis’s return is planned for Easter Sunday. As the date nears and a settlement agreement with his accusers teeters, his desperation escalates. Let there be street-side sign-twirling. Let there be something called “praise mime.” Roll out the Black Jesus statuette.In the end, the film doesn’t extend much compassion to the good reverend. (He has more than enough sympathy for himself.) Nor is much made of the ache that actual parishioners might experience when their mighty are fallen. Had Ebo gone in that direction, “Honk for Jesus.” might have been truer but darker, landing on heart-rending over the astutely hilarious. For this oh-so-smart comedy, that would have been tragic.Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.Rated R for language and some sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters and available to watch on Peacock. More

A new documentary makes the case that under her hardened exterior, the novelist Patricia Highsmith was a longing romantic.“Loving Highsmith,” a constrained documentary by the filmmaker Eva Vitija, tries to make the case that author Patricia Highsmith was prodigious in both writing and romance.When Highsmith died in 1995 at the age of 74, she left behind several lifetimes-worth of words, according to her biographer: 22 novels, including the best-sellers “Strangers on a Train,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” and “Carol” (originally titled “The Price of Salt”), plus over 200 unpublished manuscripts and over 8,000 pages of personal journals.Her handwritten entries, snippets read aloud here by the actress Gwendoline Christie, burn with the grievances — class, racial, familial, romantic, professional — that fed her fictional characters’ homicidal impulses and the public’s image of Highsmith as a coldblooded loner who preferred the company of her pet snail, Hortense. Even her sometime publisher called her “a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being.”Such comments are not included in Vitija’s tale, which is intended to be a counterpoint. “Loving Highsmith” reveals Highsmith’s squishy bits under her shell, the dalliances she tucked into her diaries during an era where queer women like her exited the subway one stop early, lest strangers suspect they were headed to a lesbian nightspot.Highsmith was something of a playgirl, Vitija finds, an assertion confirmed by several former girlfriends interviewed in the documentary who recall the novelist partying with David Bowie in Europe or outfitting herself in men’s wear and grandly buying a round for the bar. Most of her exes’ memories stop short of being psychologically insightful. Strung together, however, these tender confidences shape an outline of a woman who never trusted anyone with her heart. Again and again, Highsmith’s craving for connection is thwarted by her competing desire to be an emotionally invulnerable workaholic.The film builds its conception of Highsmith selectively from her mercurial notebooks, highlighting excerpts that support its argument that her lovelorn disappointments drove her into isolation (“I am the forever seeking”) while omitting those that conflict (“One situation — one alone, could drive me to murder: family life, togetherness”).To make her adventures feel alive, the editor Rebecca Trösch stitches clips from Highsmith’s Hollywood adaptations alongside recently shot B-roll of glitter-strewn drag shows. Slow-motion footage of a cowboy roping a baby steer is paired with Highsmith’s turn to gay conversion therapy in a failed attempt to please her conservative Texan family, particularly her mother, Mary, a figure as cruel as any character she imagined.It’s hard to imagine the author herself would have approved of the documentary’s flowery narration and sentimental acoustic score. More impactful is the realization that Highsmith’s chilliest calculation was correct: She’d inspire more acclaim — and less moral outrage — exposing her murderous hatreds than her strangled loves.Loving HighsmithNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

In this striking, formally rigorous drama, the director Ricky D’Ambrose revisits his Long Island childhood with restraint and tenderness.Toward the end of “The Cathedral,” a movie filled with restrained feeling and shimmers of beauty, the young protagonist describes in voice-over a photograph that fills the screen. It’s an image of two of his aunts, both then young women, in a room that’s scarcely bigger than the bed they’re on. One sister, dressed in a bright red sweater and socks, is seated on it. The other sits on the floor, her upper body leaning on the bed. The women are smiling; they seem happy. “The room’s still there,” the voice-over continues, “even if the same people aren’t.”Much like this moment, “The Cathedral” is about absence and presence, rooms and the people who inhabit them. Mostly, though, it is about Jesse, the person describing the photo, and who, over the course of this spare, precise, formally rigorous movie grows from a quiet, wide-eyed toddler into a pensive, watchful teenager. In its sweep, Jesse’s life is unremarkable. He is born and he is loved, or at least cared for; he plays, draws pictures, goes to school, experiences death and observes the world around him. And in observing, Jesse develops a sensibility. He becomes the young man with the photo, one who can discuss — and create — art.What distinguishes Jesse’s story is the striking way that the writer-director Ricky D’Ambrose tells it — its ellipses, voice-over, visual precision and an emotional reserve that can feel like clinical detachment but is more rightly described as an aesthetic. Set on Long Island, it opens in 1986, before Jesse’s birth, with the death of his uncle, which the family has obscured. After Jesse arrives, the movie settles into four roughly divided time frames — different performers play the character at ages 3, 9, 12 and 17 — each with ceremonies that formally mark the arc of a life and end with his graduation from high school.Much of the story and certainly its prickliest, most demonstrative scenes involve the ties — emotional and economic — between Jesse’s parents, Richard and Lydia (Brian d’Arcy James and Monica Barbaro), and their extended families. The relationships are messy, at times petty and grim, painfully human. Richard is the font of much of the tension. He’s from a lower-middle-class family and makes an unfortunate career choice, and from the start nurses grudging resentment that he increasingly, volubly voices toward Lydia’s wealthier parents. When he demands they help pay for his and Lydia’s wedding, the marriage is already sunk.D’Ambrose has said that the movie is autobiographical, and the story takes some wincing and revealing turns, most egregiously in the shabby treatment of Lydia’s grandmother, a frail, somewhat bewildered-looking woman whose children shuttle her around carelessly. Jesse witnesses some of what happens to her, including after she’s finally dumped in one of her daughter’s homes, where she will fade. This is clearly a crucial chapter for him, one that builds its resonant power not in tears and talk but through spare, near-hieroglyphic images.Part of the pleasure of “The Cathedral” is how D’Ambrose plays with — and gently destabilizes — narrative conventions by drawing from different realist traditions. Although most of the main actors are working within the parameters of Hollywood-style psychological realism — their expressions, gestures and movements are recognizable, not alien — the performers playing Jesse are generally tamped down and at times look almost blank. Here, D’Ambrose seems most influenced by the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, who directed his actors (he called them “models”) to deliver minimal obvious expression. “Hide the ideas, but so that people find them,” Bresson said. “The most important will be the most hidden.”D’Ambrose isn’t really hiding all that much. If Jesse seems enigmatic, it’s only because he’s a quiet, solitary kid; his father does plenty of talking for everyone. But the adult who Jesse becomes is evident in every image of this personal movie and in the ways D’Ambrose deploys different storytelling strategies, most notably through his use of still images, tableau staging — including a wedding dinner that evokes Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” — and the novelistic narration (delivered by Madeleine James). Here, when a fight breaks out, D’Ambrose cuts from the brawlers to a lingering shot of a broken glass, letting the angry voices fill the air.In time, Jesse develops an interest in film. He flips through a cinema book (Alain Resnais and Jacques Demy are here but, amusingly, not Disney), and Richard buys him a video camera. Jesse shoots and shoots some more as his family falls apart. In dialogue and drama and through postcards, TV ads and news clips — a bombing, a war, a burial — a larger world comes into view. Again and again, you watch Jesse looking at this reality, taking in its beauty and ugliness. He looks at its kitsch, its vivid faces and bright colors, but he also looks at the light that flickers on the walls — and that eventually leads him to this quiet, tender movie.The CathedralNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

In this intimate documentary, a Philadelphia family of six reels from a daughter’s recent overdose.“Our American Family,” an intimate documentary, hopes to give a human face to the epidemic of addiction. The film opens and closes with footage of rainy city streets as maudlin music plays, but for the most part, the directors Hallee Adelman and Sean King O’Grady wisely home in on the story of a family of six in Philadelphia.The documentary pays special attention to the clan’s matrilineal bonds. When the film begins, the 29-year-old Nicole has recently survived an overdose, and must move into a nearby rehab clinic. She leaves her toddler in the care of her mother, Linda. Nicole is a veteran of recovery programs, and she approaches her crisis with a clear eye and jocular attitude.Also living under Linda’s roof are her husband (and Nicole’s stepfather), Bryan, and Nicole’s two brothers, Chris and Stephen. This is a stubborn group prone to squabbles, and the filmmakers assemble a nearly unremitting string of arguments, tense discussions and outbursts. Among an array of big personalities, Linda, a yoga instructor, is tasked with keeping the household peace.As the family members speak candidly both to one another and in voice-over testimonies, the film’s freshest insight lies in the comparison of addiction to cancer. Both are deadly diseases; only one is stigmatized. But for some in the family, the analogy only goes so far. People with cancer “don’t go through your wallet while you’re sleeping,” Bryan counters, adding, “They don’t get arrested because they’re trying to buy chemo.” That’s “part of the fallout from the disease,” Linda shoots back.The filmmakers let these tensions remain unsettled. Addiction is a complex, challenging topic, and “Our American Family,” in its sharp specificity, handles it with grace.Our American FamilyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

A schoolteacher’s odyssey into erotic self-discovery and existential desire fuels this Brazilian drama, which is based on a novel by Clarice Lispector.Lóri, the heroine of the decidedly grown-up Brazilian drama, “The Book of Delights,” is an unconventional sort — an elementary schoolteacher who encourages her young students to think about existentialism.Outside the classroom, Lóri, played by Simone Spoladore, spends her time exploring her own existential desires. She’s a woman with an active erotic life, and multiple lovers, men and women, come to her apartment for a night. (She has her own apartment in the city, an inheritance from her late mother.) This matrilineal gift is an opportunity for freedom that Lóri does not want to waste.But despite her fierce commitment to self-discovery, she is drawn to a particular partner, a philosophy professor named Ulisses (Javier Drolas). In a reversal of the Greek myth that inspired Ulisses’s name, it is he who waits for Lóri as she traverses the night. The pair are powerfully drawn to each other, but for their relationship to develop, Lóri must decide if she wants to incorporate partnership into her odyssey of independence.For this story of self-determination, the director, Marcela Lordy, who wrote the script with Josefina Trotta, adapted the film from the 1968 novel “An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures” by Clarice Lispector.The film does not share Lispector’s tendency for formalist innovation. It is a conventional-looking movie, with beautiful performers who deliver their lines in earnest close-ups. Even the film’s explicit sex scenes are shot in a straightforward manner, more informative than they are provocative or titillating. But to the movie’s benefit, it maintains the mature perspective that Lispector brought to her writing. At its best, shows its characters engaged in thoughtful conversations about independence and attraction.If this erotic drama doesn’t break new cinematic ground, it also doesn’t cede its conviction in portraying relationships as a matter of serious consideration.The Book of DelightsNot rated. In Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More