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      ‘Randy Rhoads: Reflections of a Guitar Icon’ Review: Beyond ‘Crazy Train’

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      Forty years after Rhoads’s death, small rock venues across the nation still host tribute shows honoring him. This new documentary explains why.As those of a certain generation (OK, boomer) are well aware, a sobering number of rock greats met their ends in aviation catastrophes. The documentary “Randy Rhoads: Reflections of a Guitar Icon” delves into the 1982 plane crash that took Rhoads’s life. Just 25, and still the relatively new guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne, Rhoads didn’t much like flying. But, wanting to take some aerial photos to send his mom, he accepted a ride in a private plane piloted by a guy who thought it was funny to fly dangerously close over the tour bus in which Osbourne and crew were sleeping.It’s a sad end to a story that, as told in this movie directed by Andre Relis, is weirdly lopsided. Rhoads made both his name and arguably his best music over a period of only two years or so, with Osbourne on the albums “Blizzard of Ozz” and “Diary of a Madman.” Before that, he had been a founding member of the band Quiet Riot. Relis’s movie spends a lot of time on the pre-superstardom Riot years, which are replete with tales of internecine weirdness and elusive record deals redolent of “This Is Spinal Tap.”While his eclectic, sometimes classically inflected approach is heard to memorable effect on the Osbourne records — his riff for the song “Crazy Train” is one for the ages — attempts here to pin down what made Rhoads great vary. One friend marvels that he could play “fast,” “slow,” “crunchy” and “blues.” A guitar tech, Brian Reason, on the other hand, gives a nicely wonky breakdown of Rhoads’s showstopping solo style, with insights into his use of effects and the volume control.Rhoads comes off as a pleasant guy (never a big partyer; he tried to counsel Osbourne on his excessive drinking) and a genuine ax savant who died with a lot more music in him.Randy Rhoads: Reflections of a Guitar IconNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Sanctity of Space’ Review: Such Great Heights

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      In this mountaineering documentary, climbers chronicle their obsessive quest for alpine glory.The Tooth Traverse is a five-mile alpine route across the skyline of the Mooses Tooth massif in the Central Alaskan Range. Wind-whipped and sun-beaten, its rocky peaks brushed with sheets of ice and snow, the traverse is highly technical and profoundly forbidding. For the filmmaker-mountaineers Renan Ozturk and Freddie Wilkinson, it’s also an obsession.The documentary “The Sanctity of Space” covers how the pair spend the better part of a decade endeavoring to become the first to complete the Tooth Traverse — even in the face of accidents, injuries and the kinds of close calls that could easily have been fatal. At one point, Ozturk explains that his romantic partner has left him because she could no longer stand his dangerous vocation. In the very next scene — a title card reads “One Week Later” — we find Ozturk in a gurney, wrapped head-to-toe in bandages, flitting in and out of consciousness. These are risks, the filmmakers suggest, inherent to the lives they lead.Ozturk and Wilkinson devote some of the film’s running time to the biography of one of their mountaineering heroes, the explorer and photographer Bradford Washburn. Though Washburn’s life was certainly interesting, these sections feel digressive and not well integrated.“It is belief as much as anything that allows one to cling to a wall,” James Salter wrote in his mountaineering novel “Solo Faces.” “The Sanctity of Space” is at its best when conveying the power of that belief — when a helmet-mounted GoPro captures the sheer expanse of a pitch mid-ascent, say, or when an aerial shot from a circling helicopter makes a climber appear minuscule against the vast face of a daunting peak. It’s this glory that the climbers were dedicated to pursuing, and through their eyes we can well understand the beauty of the quest.The Sanctity of SpaceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sheryl’ Review: The High Highs and Low Lows of Pop Stardom

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      This documentary about Sheryl Crow depicts a musician whose work ethic did not allow a lot of time for frivolity.The early trajectory of Sheryl Crow’s career is not entirely unfamiliar. Born and raised in the Missouri Bootheel, she grew up loving and learning music. After a fortuitous break — a vocal in a McDonald’s ad — she lit out for more showbiz-friendly environs and got an instant dose of reality. Crow’s tale of finding a boot on her parked car and being unable to pay the ticket seems inevitable.In time she found a place in Michael Jackson’s band and its attendant glitz, glam and eccentricity. And, later, experienced sexual harassment at the hands of Jackson’s manager Frank DiLeo. Crow drops this bombshell with what some may consider surprising equanimity. It’s not the only dark story she tells here.Eventually, of course, Sheryl Crow became Sheryl Crow — the multiplatinum-selling singer-songwriter with a hefty set of radio hits. This documentary, directed by Amy Scott, is assembled in the semi-standard slick method of our day — you know, where they make the vintage footage look really vintage by digitally inserting a sprocket hole on the left side of the frame. Oy.Still: Crow herself is a more than interesting subject. She’s a musician whose Rock-with-a-capital-R cred — her guitar playing is ace, her voice is soulful and her ear for a hook is unimpeachable — is sometimes overlooked in favor of her pop appeal. And her story has a lot of twists. (Remember when she was engaged to Lance Armstrong?)Here she’s an engaging, unpretentious and consistently frank docent of her own career, which she assures the viewer is still ongoing, despite the fact that she’s not making albums right now. Friends including Laura Dern, Keith Richards and Brandi Carlile kick in words of admiration.SherylNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Showtime platforms. More

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      ‘Shepherd’ Review: Solitary Assignment

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      An island of ghosts and an ocean of guilt plague a grief-stricken widower in this moody horror movie.With “Shepherd,” the Welsh writer and director Russell Owen shows us how to accrue a great deal of atmosphere with very little fuss. Callum Donaldson’s marvelously icy soundscape might be doing much of the heavy lifting, but it’s Owen’s slow and steady directing style — favoring patient reveals over swift scares — that keeps this ominous horror tale firmly on track.The setup is simplicity itself. Eric (Tom Hughes, perfectly pallid and pained), a brooding widower haunted by vivid nightmares after his wife’s death, takes a job as a shepherd on a desolate Scottish island. When not huddling in a creaking, tumbledown cottage with unreliable phone service, Eric and his collie, Baxter, tend to a scattered herd of horned sheep. In a silence broken only by the howling wind and the clanging bell of a nearby lighthouse, Eric’s macabre hallucinations intensify. When, one morning, his estranged mother (Greta Scacchi) appears in his kitchen, ranting against the “ungodly woman” who was his wife, Eric fears he may be losing his mind.The creepy ferry operator with the milky eye (Kate Dickie) seems to know a thing or two about Eric’s past, but — like the larger narrative — she refuses to share. This withholding may irritate some viewers, but Owen, drawing from several Welsh ghost stories (including the inspiration for Robert Eggers’s 2019 fantasy, “The Lighthouse”) remains unapologetically enigmatic. Coaxing us to a surprisingly satisfying conclusion on the strength of Hughes’ potent central performance and the moldy richness of Richard Stoddard’s cinematography, the director displays an assuredness with Gothic tone that steadily strums our nerves.“Run, Mr. Black,” a chapter heading advises near the end of the movie. I was way ahead of it.ShepherdRated R for mental distress and mutilated animals. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Human Factors’ Review: Paranoia is the Family Business

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      This thriller, about the invasion of a fractured home, is elevated by a talented cast but hampered by a stubbornly intellectual tone.“Human Factors,” from the writer-director Ronny Trocker, is a chilly, airless home-invasion drama in which the threat is out of sight, like termites chewing at floorboards. The members of a disengaged German family — two parents, Jan (Mark Waschke) and Nina (Sabine Timoteo), their teenage daughter, Emma (Jule Hermann), and young son, Max (Wanja Valentin Kube) — are settling into their vacation house when strangers burst from an upstairs bedroom and escape out of the front door. Nothing is stolen and nobody is seriously hurt. But the film repeatedly relives the incident through each character’s point of view, piecing together the mystery and its aftershocks and exposing calamitous emotional fractures within the family.Paranoia is the point. Paranoia is also the family business. Jan and Nina own a marketing company whose new client is a politician who wants to campaign on provocation and fear. Wherever Trocker’s camera goes, it finds characters who seem to be afraid of all the wrong things. The lens skulks like a voyeur and does what it can to frazzle us, too. (Klemens Hufnagl is the director of photography.) A drunken brawl might be an assault or a prank. A locked door looks safe, but adds to the sorrow. At one point, Jan and Nina’s office windows are pelted by mysterious goo. Why? And by whom? Trocker refuses to answer, sustaining the unease until it becomes ennui.The tone is too rigidly intellectual for the movie to succeed as a tense thriller. But the actors are up to the challenge of not so much sharing scenes as coexisting within them, particularly Timoteo as the embittered wife who roils like a teakettle that has been welded shut. The most cleareyed observer, however, turns out to be a pet rat — evidence that this family, a microcosm of modern anxieties, is more imperiled by its silent dysfunction than by outside enemies.Human FactorsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘In a New York Minute’ Review: Love or Freedom?

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      This drama from Ximan Li teases time in telling the stories of three Chinese women living in a city that tempts promise but delivers frustration.The promising first-time feature filmmaker Ximan Li embraces the twists of immigrant experiences in the drama “In a New York Minute.” Based on a short story by Yi Nan that Li adapted, the director braids the saga of three women living in New York City. While their situations are very different, the malaise dogging each of them overlaps. Visual intersectional hints and an errant at-home pregnancy test link the women in ways intriguing if occasionally, forced.The food writer Amy Chen (Amy Chang) continues to suffer a violent reaction to meals a year after a breakup. Her co-worker Peter (Jae Shin) plies her with eats and her mother (Cheng Pei Pei) pesters her about marriage. A blink-and-you-might-miss-it mention of Amy’s former “roommate” seems a little coy for this day and age but also may explain why the foodie’s story feels undercooked.The actress Angel Li (Yi Liu) can’t seem to get a break, even as the career of the writer (Ludi Lin) she is having an affair with is on the rise. Nina (a charismatic Celia Au) returns from her nighttime gig at a karaoke lounge — where customers retreat to private rooms for singing and more transactional pleasures — with designer bags and cash. She stashes them in her bedroom above the family restaurant in a move toward independence. At the same time, a food truck cook (Roger Yeh) courts Nina with a gentle clarity that confuses her.One character sums up the movie’s underlying quandary: “Which would you choose, love or freedom?” Time will tell whether this is the right question, or one based on a wrongheaded premise.In a New York MinuteNot rated. In English and Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Inbetween Girl’ Review: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman

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      Mei Makino’s coming-of-age drama depicts an artsy, biracial high school student grappling with the guilt of sleeping with another girl’s boyfriend.Angie Chen (Emma Galbraith) trudges through multiple gray areas in “Inbetween Girl,” an intelligent teenage drama by the writer and director Mei Makino.Half-Asian and half-white, Angie, 16, is the “token minority” student at her high school in Galveston, Texas, though she has never felt particularly Asian. Her identity crisis is exacerbated when her parents announce their divorce, and her father — who is originally from China — moves in with a Chinese woman and her Stanford-bound daughter.Then Angie’s crush, Liam (William Magnuson) — the school heartthrob — appears outside her bedroom window. Liam’s girlfriend, Sheryl (Emily Garrett), is an Instagram model, but her Catholic beliefs frustrate his desire for physical intimacy. Liam turns to Angie instead, and though their first romp is predictably awful, they begin to carry on regular trysts in secret. The two fall into something like love.Sheryl, it turns out, doesn’t lead the picture-perfect life Angie thinks she does, and complications ensue when Liam refuses to tell her the truth.Amid her sexual awakening, Angie begins to grapple with feelings of guilt. Makino tracks her evolution through dreamy, meditative transitions that weave examples of Angie’s artistic output with roaming shots of Galveston. In these moments, Angie reflects on her troubles in voice-over drawn from video diary entries; they’re corny, yes, and they spell out Angie’s emotions a little too directly, but her youthful wisdom and vulnerability feel honest.“Inbetween Girl” isn’t the only recent film to center the love life and inter-cultural hang-ups of a young Asian American woman (see “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and “The Half of It”), but it might be the most profound. Though the dialogue is often hit-or-miss, this young adult drama doesn’t simply put a fresh spin on old tropes: It takes seriously the messiness of growing up, the hardest parts of which involve accepting life’s ambiguities.Inbetween GirlNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known’ Review: Rock ’n’ Roll High School

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      This film about the hit 2006 musical is a sure-handed blend of making-of explainer, theater-kid scrapbook, and jukebox documentary.The winner of eight Tonys in 2007 including best musical, “Spring Awakening” now gets an adoring documentary for a victory lap celebration. “Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known” does a suitably wide-eyed recap of the show’s success, on the occasion of a recent reunion concert with the endearingly jazzed cast. Michael John Warren’s film is a sure-handed blend of making-of explainer, theater-kid scrapbook and jukebox documentary, doling out hits from its theatrical run (through clips) and the reunion.Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s musical brought a tragic punch — and cathartic rock-outs and ballads — to the age-old story of adolescents grappling with desire, secret pain, and unforgiving parents and teachers. As adapted from the 1891 Frank Wedekind play, the strait-laced period setting raised the stakes on the anguish of transgression, featuring sex, suicide and the emo touch of characters whipping out anachronistic microphones.Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff, later both on “Glee,” rose up playing the romantic leads, Wendla and Melchior, and here share about their offstage bond. There’s an atmosphere of openness in keeping with the show’s self-expression: Groff discusses coming out after concluding his run, and his co-star Lauren Pritchard references childhood abuse. When it comes to Sater, Sheik and the director of the original production, Michael Mayer, their recalled jitters feel a tad warmed-over, but it’s intriguing to hear Sater note the 1999 Columbine shooting as an impetus.If the documentary feels more packaged than the “American Utopia” film or the vérité classic “Original Cast Album: Company,” it succeeds as a welcoming group hug.Spring Awakening: Those You’ve KnownNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More