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      ‘The Smartest Kids in the World’ Review: Putting School to the Test

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      This documentary aspires to offer a study of education worldwide, but it lacks in economic and cultural context.As summer ends and families agonize over how to send children back to school safely, we receive an education documentary that was plainly produced before the pandemic. “The Smartest Kids in the World” aspires to offer a study of teaching methods worldwide, but the documentary (on Discovery+) contains little rigor. It’s a dippy lecture in motion.Inspired by Amanda Ripley’s book of the same name, the documentary introduces four American teenagers planning to study abroad for a year. We are told that their chosen destinations — the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland and South Korea — far surpass the United States in education. This calculation comes from PISA, an international learning assessment. On what this mystery exam contains, however, the director, Tracy Droz Tragos, spends no time at all — the first of many curious omissions.As the students become immersed in overseas high schools, the movie pairs their stories with talking-head speculations from Ripley, who rhapsodizes over the foreign systems. In Finland, class autonomy empowers students. Switzerland offers enriching pre-professional opportunities. And the value South Korea places on education inspires a drive for excellence. Ripley’s ideas are interesting, but they are conveyed in swift succession and in broad and basic terms, giving the impression of a series of flashcards dispensed for memorization.Sometimes, Ripley’s notions diverge from the students’ experiences. When Jaxon, struggling with his Dutch curriculum, chooses to drop out and return to the U.S. early, the documentary declines to probe the cultural barriers to his ambitions. Later, Brittany, studying in Finland, marvels that the country pays its students to attend college — a crucial gesture at the economics of success that is left hanging in the air, unanalyzed.Listening to students is “the key to understanding how we’re doing and what’s possible,” Ripley proclaims early in “The Smartest Kids in the World.” The documentary fails to follow this advice, and its smartest points suffer for the mistake.The Smartest Kids in the WorldNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      ‘Cryptozoo’ Review: Wild Things

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      This animated film is a rapturously hallucinogenic daydream for mature audiences.In one of the year’s most memorable openers, Matthew and Amber, a hippyish couple voiced by Michael Cera and Louisa Krause, make love under the stars, their naked, fleshy bodies enveloped by the blank, black space that is the forest around them. It’s an eerily enchanting scene flecked with droll humor that gives way to industrial menace when the duo stumble upon a towering chain link fence hiding something both wonderful and terrible: a whole wide world of unicorns, griffins, hydras — you name it.Far from childish playthings, these mythical beings, or “cryptids,” bring our two dazed dreamers violently down to Earth.Imbued with the polychromatic sensibility of 1960s animation like Heinz Edelmann’s work on “The Yellow Submarine,” “Cryptozoo,” the new feature directed by Dash Shaw, with animation directed by Jane Samborski, is a rapturously hallucinogenic daydream for mature audiences.Following the uncanny cold opening, the film presents its real leading lady, Lauren Grey (Lake Bell), a cryptozoologist employed by an aging heiress to wrangle vulnerable cryptids and protect them from a warmongering military man who wants to weaponize them against a growing counterculture movement. These missions take our heroine around the world to desolate tundras, electric jungles — and in the gutter to sketchy strip clubs and writhing orgies.Especially valuable is the baku, a mystical pachyderm capable of sucking dreams — and nightmares — straight out of one’s head. Catastrophe is imminent should the beast fall into the wrong hands.Opposite the “real” world in which cryptids are poached and trafficked is the titular cryptozoo, an amusement park and sanctuary intended to be a steppingstone toward a more integrated world. Here, cryptids of all kinds are commodified into tourist attractions — but at least they do not live in fear.Phoebe (Angeliki Papoulia), a Medusa-like being who passes for human by tranquilizing the snakes atop her head and wrapping them in a head scarf, questions Lauren’s gradualist approach. An exoticized, refugee-like figure, she’s a too-familiar symbol of marginalization that magnifies the film’s schematic political commentary. Caught between an authoritarian state that hates them and a profit-driven liberal project that dehumanizes them, the cryptids are obviously better off fending for themselves. “Jurassic Park,” another film about failed utopias, comes to mind.Yet “Cryptozoo” stands out as an aesthetically ambitious undertaking, seducing viewers with its hypnotizing hand-drawn animation and John Carroll Kirby’s pulsing electronic score. The story is interestingly windy enough, but it’s these otherworldly sounds and fluidly surreal, pastel-colored images that will leave you entranced.CryptozooNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘On Broadway’ Review: History and Celebrity, Stages and Lights

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      The neon lights are bright, and so is the spirit of this brief but loving history of Broadway.A sunset view of the New York City skyline, speckled with lights, while George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” plays. Old Broadway marquees. Moving snapshots from a Broadway of more recent past — a flight of Hogwarts wizards, the swinging and snapping Temptations, the triumphant gaze of a brown-skinned Alexander Hamilton.“On Broadway” sure knows how to work a theater-lover’s heart.The documentary, directed by Oren Jacoby, welcomes stage stans into a brief but loving history of Broadway that still reckons, if somewhat myopically, with some of the less attractive parts of its past and present. The film provides a fascinating textbooklike chronology of these stages from the 1960s until today, how economic downturns and cultural shifts changed the star status and fiscal success of the Great White Way.“On Broadway” could have easily become an extended post-pandemic “Broadway returns!” PSA, but thankfully Covid-19 is only mentioned in a brief epilogue of text. The story of these theaters’ resilience and resurrection throughout the pandemic is already there in the documentary’s account of Broadway’s long history of failures and deathbed moments, from which it always bounced back.“The key to Broadway is every day you have to pay your rent,” the director George C. Wolfe says at some point in the film, discussing the colossal financial risks that shows face and how exorbitant ticket prices have become standard. That the documentary manages to critique its subject while still declaring its love is commendable. Broadway is, after all, a commercial enterprise. The documentary weaves an account of the 2018 opening of the play “The Nap” — from awkward, stilted early read-throughs to the big premiere — into its narrative to illustrate the uphill battle that is bringing a show to Broadway. “The Nap” is transparently used as the shining example of what Broadway is at its best: It’s an American premiere without any celebrities and a transgender lead actress — and it was a critical success.But for the documentary’s heraldry of this little Broadway darling, it also isn’t that interested in it; the story of the play is briefly and haphazardly slotted into the larger narrative.The bigger problem of “On Broadway” is that it is (understandably) seduced by Broadway’s superficial glamour. So there are mostly big names interviewed, like Helen Mirren, Hugh Jackman, John Lithgow and Alec Baldwin. The archival clips also focus just on familiar faces: James Earl Jones, Bernadette Peters, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber. It’s hard for the film to see past the veil of celebrity that obscures the lesser known (and thus less glamorous) but vital theater-makers and artists who also make Broadway what it is.And yet, by the end of the film, what stuck most with me was the fresh surge of affection I felt for Broadway — even the bad shows. Even the commercial schlock. At heart “On Broadway” may be just another valentine to Broadway, but I get it; I’m also happy to bask in the warmth of those lights.On BroadwayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Times Analyzed 3,000 Videos of Capitol Riot for Documentary

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      Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On Jan 6., as rioters were attacking the U.S. Capitol, Times journalists on the Visual Investigations team were downloading as many recordings of the violence as they could find.Over the next six months, the team, which combines traditional reporting techniques with forensic visual analysis, gathered over 3,000 videos, equaling hundreds of hours. The journalists analyzed, verified and pinpointed the location of each one, then distilled the footage into a 40-minute documentary that captured the fury and destruction moment by moment. The video, the longest the team has ever produced, provides a comprehensive picture of “a violent assault encouraged by the president on a seat of democracy that he vowed to protect,” as a reporter says in the piece.The visual investigation, “Day of Rage,” which was published digitally on June 30 and which is part of a print special section in Sunday’s paper, comes as conservative lawmakers continue to minimize or deny the violence, even going as far as recasting the riot as a “normal tourist visit.” The video, in contrast, shows up-close a mob breaking through windows, the gruesome deaths of two women and a police officer crushed between doors.“In providing the definitive account of what happened that day, the piece serves to combat efforts to downplay it or to rewrite that history,” said Malachy Browne, a senior producer on the Visual Investigations team who worked on the documentary.“It serves the core mission of The Times, which is to find the truth and show it.”Haley Willis, a producer on the team who helped gather the footage, said that some of the searches required special techniques but that much of the content was easily accessible. Many of the videos came from social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Parler, a platform that was popular with conservatives and later shut down. The team also collected recordings from journalists on the scene and police radio traffic, and went to court to unseal body camera footage.“Most of where we found this information was on platforms and places that the average person who has grown up on the internet would understand,” Ms. Willis said.In analyzing the videos, the team members verified the images, looked for specific individuals or groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and identified when and where each one was filmed. Then they put the videos on a timeline, which allowed them to reconstruct the scenes by the minute and track the key instigators.David Botti, a senior producer, said the team wanted to use this footage to explain how the riot happened, to underscore just how close the mob came to the lawmakers and to explore how much worse it could have gotten. For example, the investigation tracked the proximity of the rioters to former Vice President Mike Pence and an aide who was carrying the United States nuclear codes.“It’s rare to get an event of this magnitude that’s covered by so many cameras in so many places by so many different types of people filming with different agendas,” Mr. Botti said. “There was just so much video that someone needed to make sense of it.”Dmitriy Khavin, a video editor on the team, said he wanted viewers to feel like they were on the scene. But he also recognized the images were graphic, so he tried to modulate the pace with slower moments and other visual elements like maps and diagrams.“This event was overwhelming,” Mr. Khavin said. “So we worked a lot on trying to make it easier to process, so it’s not like you’re being bombarded and then tuning out.”Carrie Mifsud, an art director who designed the print special section, said her goal was similar, adding that she wanted to stay true to the video’s foundation. “For this project, it was the sequence and the full picture of events,” she said. Working with the graphics editors Bill Marsh and Guilbert Gates, she anchored the design in a timeline and included as many visuals and text from the documentary as possible to offer readers a bird’s-eye view of what happened.“My hope is that the special section can serve as a printed guide to what happened that day, where it started, and the aftermath, Ms. Mifsud said.For the journalists on the Visual Investigations team, it was challenging to shake off the work at the end of the day. Mr. Khavin said images of the riot would often appear in his dreams long after he stepped away from the computer.“You watch it so many times and look at these people and notice every detail and digest the anger,” he said. “It is difficult.” More

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      Pat Hitchcock O’Connell, Director’s Cast Member and Daughter, Dies at 93

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      She spent time on the sets of films directed by her father, Alfred Hitchcock, and acted in three of them, including “Psycho.” She later wrote a book about her mother’s role as his cinematic partner.Pat Hitchcock looks at the troubling scene unfolding before her in her father’s 1951 thriller, “Strangers on a Train”: Bruno Antony — a psychopath who has strangled the estranged wife of a man, Guy Haines, he has just met and believes would in turn kill his father — is demonstrating his murderous technique on a society matron at a party.“You don’t mind if I borrow your neck for a moment, do you?” asks the oleaginous Bruno, played by Robert Walker. He places his hands on her neck and starts to throttle her.Miss Hitchcock, playing the sister of the woman Guy wants to marry, is seen in a blurry background shot, her expression curious. But it quickly turns to horror as she watches the matron struggle for breath; she sees that Bruno is staring at her, probably because she is wearing glasses like those the murdered woman had worn.She finally freezes in shock after some other partygoers pry Bruno’s hands from the woman’s neck, and he collapses.Miss Hitchcock says nothing in the scene, but it is perhaps her most notable in a modest career that included small roles in two more of her father’s films: “Stage Fright” (1950) and “Psycho” (1960), in which her character, Caroline, is a co-worker of Marion, played by Janet Leigh.“My father wanted a contrast to Janet, someone more bubbly,” she told The Washington Post in 1984. “I barely remember the whole thing, and most people forget I’m in ‘Psycho.’ I say, ‘How can you possibly remember, after everything else that happens?’”Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell — whose connection to her famous father included writing a book about his wife and collaborator, Alma — died on Monday at her home in Thousand Oaks, Calif. She was 93.The death was confirmed by her daughter Tere Carrubba.Patricia Hitchcock was born on July 7, 1928, in London. Her mother, Alma (Reville) Hitchcock, was a film editor who played a critical role as a writer, adviser and story consultant to her husband, a relationship Mrs. Hitchcock O’Connell explored in the 2003 book “Alma Hitchcock: The Woman Behind the Man,” written with Laurent Bouzereau.Mrs. Hitchcock O’Connell explored her mother’s professional partnership with her father in a 2003 book.Miss Hitchcock visited her father’s movie sets in England and moved with her parents to the United States in 1939 after her father received an offer from the producer David O. Selznick to direct “Rebecca” (1940). The move came just after the start of World War II in Europe.“My father was devastated because his mother was in England,” Mrs. Hitchcock O’Connell told the Television Academy in a 2004 interview. “And I remember him trying to get a call through and the operators saying there are no more calls to the country because of the war.”Miss Hitchcock made her Broadway debut at 13 in John Van Druten’s 1942 comedy “Solitaire,” playing the central role of Virginia, a rich girl who befriends a hobo. She had been recommended for the role by the actress Auriol Lee, who had appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Suspicion” the year before.Reviewing the play in the The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote, “She plays Virginia with childish innocence and sincerity.”She had roles in two other Broadway shows, “Violet” (1944) and “The High Ground” (1951). By then, she had already been onscreen in “Stage Fright” as a school friend of Jane Wyman, who played an aspiring actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, which Mrs. Hitchcock O’Connell was attending at the time. She would graduate in 1950.After “Strangers on a Train,” she was seen mostly on television. She had roles in the sitcoms “My Little Margie” and “The Life of Riley” and in anthology series like “Matinee Theater,” “Playhouse 90” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” a series of mysteries and thrillers that featured her father’s droll onscreen introductions.“I think ‘Alfred Hitchcock Presents’ really brought him to the public because they got to see him,” Mrs. Hitchcock O’Connell, who appeared in 10 episodes between 1955 and 1960, said in the Television Academy interview. “He loved it. He had the best time doing those lead-ins.”While her acting career was linked to her father, she made clear in her book that her mother had a strong cinematic partnership with him, which included screenwriting credits on “Suspicion” and “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943).“He would find a story and then take it to my mother and have her read it,” she told the BBC in 1997. “And if she thought it would make a film, he would go ahead with it and have a treatment and screenplay done.”In addition to her daughter Tere, Mrs. Hitchcock O’Connell is survived by two other daughters, Mary Stone and Katie Fiala; six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Her husband, Joseph O’Connell, a sales consultant in the trucking business, died in 1994.Mrs. Hitchcock O’Connell said she wished she could have acted in more of her father’s pictures. But that wish went unfulfilled.“I would have loved it if he had believed in nepotism,” she said in the BBC interview. “But he only cast people if he thought they were absolutely right for the part. I could have told him a lot of parts I would have liked to have played, but he didn’t believe it.” More

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      ‘Don’t Breathe 2’ Review: Don’t Be a Woman, Either

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      In the long-awaited sequel to the 2016 chiller “Don’t Breathe,” a blind veteran battles more home invaders.In horror films, dogs often die. People die too, of course, and female characters are usually the quickest to perish.There are exactly two women and two dogs in “Don’t Breathe 2.” More women are killed than dogs. Such is the chilling moral landscape of this sequel directed by Rodo Sayagues, who wrote both “Don’t Breathe” films with Fede Álvarez, the first movie’s director.“Don’t Breathe,” a runaway 2016 hit, saw a blind veteran turned killing machine, Norman (Stephen Lang), face off against three delinquents in a twist on the home invasion genre. In that film, the robbers were ransacking his house for riches, but Norman was hiding a darker secret involving twisted dreams of fatherhood that were dashed during the heist.In the sequel, our antihero (still played by Lang) has somehow acquired a daughter, Phoenix (Madelyn Grace). He tirelessly trains her in fighting and survival skills, but rarely lets her leave the house. Phoenix is so cooped up that she dreams of life at a children’s center. When some goons show up to kidnap her, a bloody showdown ensues, and her true parentage is revealed.This film is harsh on women and girls, even by horror standards. After dispatching one of its only two women within the film’s first 15 minutes, “Don’t Breathe 2” sticks Phoenix between two despicable patriarchs. And compared to his competition, Norman looks like Father of the Year.“Don’t Breathe 2” is plenty lively, full of violence and action, but a rancid narrative (and some seriously terrible dialogue) overpowers the script. And at the center of it all is Phoenix, needlessly shouldering a violent man’s neuroses at the tender age of 11. At least she gets out alive.Don’t Breathe 2Rated R for ubiquitous impalement and “Midsommar”-level skull-crushing. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      A New Must-Have for TV and Movie Shoots: Therapists

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      Working on set can be challenging. In Britain, many productions are hiring trained counselors to help casts and crew cope.LONDON — When Lou Platt talks about her increasingly in-demand TV and movie production job, she has to make one thing clear: She can’t discuss 99 percent of the work itself.Platt, 41, is a British therapist who has worked on high-profile productions like “I May Destroy You,” Michaela Coel’s TV series inspired by her own experience of sexual assault.Client confidentiality means Platt can’t say exactly what happens in her sessions, and nondisclosure agreements mean she can’t even reveal most of her productions’ names. People often misconstrue what her work is about, she said in an interview, thinking she’s there to spot — and put a stop to — story lines or scenes that might upset actors and technicians.“My role is to actually help the art take greater risks,” she said, adding that no one makes their best work if they’re stressed or anxious.Sometimes, Platt — a former actor — is involved before filming begins, helping writers turn harrowing autobiographical material into scripts. Other times, she introduces herself to the cast and crew at the start of filming, and lets them know they can call her. She’s also there for film editors who have to watch harrowing scenes over and over while finishing off a show.The presence of on-set and on-call therapists is particularly notable in British film and TV, which has been involved in an industrywide discussion about mental health since 2017, when Michael Harm, a location manager who had worked on numerous movies including the Harry Potter franchise, killed himself.The day he died, Harm sent a letter to a colleague, Sue Quinn, saying he had nowhere to turn for help with struggles at work, and urging her to change that for others in the industry.“You’re pushed, pushed, pushed and pushed to the limit, all the time,” said Quinn, also a location manager, about the experience of working on a typical set. That’s especially true, she said, when producers prioritize remaining on budget over mental health. Actors and crew work exhausting hours and many experience bullying, she added.After receiving the letter, Quinn approached a British nonprofit that supports movie and TV workers experiencing financial troubles, and asked it to develop a help line for workers experiencing issues including depression, anxiety and bullying as well as financial stress. The following year, that organization, the Film and TV Charity, started a 24-hour phone line: It received around 7,000 calls in 2020, said Valeria Bullo, a member of the charity’s mental health team.The charity also conducted a survey to assess the extent of mental health problems in the industry. Of 9,000 respondents, over half said they’d considered taking their own life.Before filming started on “I May Destroy You,” Coel and her team knew they wanted a therapist involved, the writer and actress said in an email exchange. Initially, the expectation was that Platt would just work with Coel if “shooting some of the darker scenes that reflected my own life became emotionally taxing,” Coel said. But then a producer decided to make the therapist available to everyone.“The Underground Railroad” employed a therapist on set.Atsushi Nishijima/Amazon StudiosFor “I May Destroy You,” Michaela Coel initially brought mental health support on for herself.HBO, via Associated Press“She is very clearly on the side of the person who is in need,” Coel said of Platt. She puts that person “before producers, directors and money, and television itself. And actually she may have been the only person on set able to do that,” she added.Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor, a writer and producer, said she first worked with Platt while writing a short film about her experience of seeking asylum in Britain. She found their sessions so useful that she decided to bring Platt onto the sets for several other productions she was working on, including an upbeat Christmas movie.“It should be part of how we all work, as we don’t know what anyone’s working through,” Gharoro-Akpojotor said.When TV companies came back to work last year after lockdowns across Britain lifted, casts and crew found themselves under pressure to make up for lost time, cramming a year’s work into a few months, according to Sarah McCaffrey, another therapist whose company, Solas Mind, provides counseling in the industry.These compressed timelines were “almost unsustainable,” McCaffrey said. On top of that, crew were often split up into in small “bubbles,” isolated from each other for coronavirus safety, which meant fewer social interactions. On some productions, up to 30 people had booked sessions with her company, she said.The pandemic also seems to have encouraged American companies to offer more on-set support. Last April, Netflix hired Jake Knapik, a clinical psychologist, to help develop mental health courses for its British and United States productions. Knapik said that “Covid has been the catalyst,” noting that lockdowns helped everyone realize just how debilitating loneliness and anxiety could be.Kim Whyte was on hand to offer support to the cast and crew of Amazon’s “The Underground Railroad,” whether they wanted to talk about the production or their home lives.Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York TimesWhen Amazon was filming “The Underground Railroad,” a series about enslaved workers fleeing a cotton plantation, the therapist Kim Whyte was on set for much of the shoot. Some therapists prefer working off-site so people avoid the possible stigma of being seen receiving mental health support, but Whyte said she walked around chatting with everyone between takes: that way nobody knew when she was discussing something serious, or something trivial.When someone needed to talk something through, it was sometimes about issues raised by the show, she said. “Some of the cast and crew were disturbed by the content — just the institution of slavery,” she added. But just as often, they wanted to talk about issues they were dealing with at home, and how those were having an impact on their mood, like in any workplace.Platt said she felt therapists should also be available after productions end, in case problems emerge later. “You wouldn’t have therapy for the effect of a car crash while you’re still in hospital,” she said. Actors and writers should even have access to counseling when promoting films, she added, since journalists often ask them to relive traumatic experiences over and over again.“At the moment, all this is radical,” Platt said. But she hoped the stigma would disappear, and that soon on-set mental health support would be considered normal: She imagined a therapist’s trailer, with a line of people happy to be seen waiting outside. More

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      ‘Respect’ Review: Giving Aretha Franklin Her Propers

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      Jennifer Hudson plays Aretha Franklin in a movie that follows many of the usual biographical beats but finds its own groove.Ray Charles said that Aretha Franklin “sang from her inners.” For her father, C.L. Franklin, she was “a stone singer.” That’s a good description for a great singer whose voice did something that even some brilliant, technically virtuosic vocalists can’t do. When Franklin was at her most sublime, her voice seemed to give shape to the entirety of human feeling — to the joy and the despair — so much so that it seemed as if she were birthing a twinned version of herself with each breath and soul-stirring note.The new drama “Respect” is a march-of-time fictionalization of Franklin’s life. Attractively cast and handsomely mounted — Jennifer Hudson plays the queen — it is a solid, sanitized, unfailingly polite portrait. It conforms to the familiar biopic arc: the artist begins humbly; reaches towering heights (artistic, commercial, maybe both); suffers a setback (bad lovers, addiction); only to rise higher still. In album titles, the movie flows to the beat of Franklin’s discography from “The Electrifying Aretha Franklin” to “Laughing on the Outside,” “Spirit in the Dark” and “Get It Right.”Taken as a whole, the movie — directed by Liesl Tommy from a script by Tracey Scott Wilson — doesn’t hold you firmly, though it has its moments. First, it has to dispatch with the standard preliminaries, including Aretha’s childhood, with its crackling tensions and cautiously muted torments. It’s a story that’s been told before, including by the Franklin biographer David Ritz. Here that life is often in soft focus, and generally sprinkled with tears rather than drenched. Even so, it is catnip to watch the young Aretha (Skye Dakota Turner) wander her family’s house late at night, smiling and hailing partygoers she calls out to as “Uncle Duke” (as in Ellington) and “Aunt Ella” (Ms. Fitzgerald to we mortals).Tommy, a theater director making her feature film debut, handles the material and its many moving parts with assurance. “Respect” opens in Detroit in 1952, where the young Aretha is living with her siblings under the stern eye of their father, C.L. (Forest Whitaker). A legendary Baptist minister and friend to Martin Luther King Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown), C.L. lords over his house with imposing hauteur and an unpredictable temper. Also sternly minding the brood is his mother (Kimberly Scott), who’s helping raise the children. Their mother, Barbara (Audra McDonald), a saintly figure in amber, has split from her husband and lives elsewhere, and clearly has Aretha’s heart.Everyone and everything in “Respect” looks good if not too movie-perfect. The rooms seem lived in and the people feel real, none more so than Mary J. Blige, who, as Dinah Washington, briefly sets the movie ablaze. Oddly, a showdown between Aretha and Dinah is borrowed from a confrontation Washington had with Etta James. Perhaps that was to give the movie juice, because otherwise the first chunk slides into the sluggish and dutiful. A distinct exception is a shocking, dimly lit image of the young Aretha that made me gasp. It’s a simple, devastating vision of trauma that lingers even as the story motors on and continues to hit the biographical markers: Hello, Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron).“Respect” succeeds in doing exactly what is expected of it. You may argue with this or that filmmaking choice and regret its overly smooth edges, but it does give you a sense of Franklin as a historical figure, a crossover success story and a full-throttle, fur-draped diva. (As a mother, she remains M.I.A.) Mostly, it gives you her music, with its passion and power, lyricism and schmaltz. Long after they fell off the charts, these are songs that light you up — with feelings, memories — when you hear them. You sing along with them in your head and, after the credits roll, you keep on singing (and murdering) them.A line in one of Ritz’s books on Franklin sheds light on the challenges of transposing her complicated life to the screen. “The pain stayed silent in all areas except music, where, magnificently,” Ritz wrote, “it formed a voice that said it all.” The movie has a tough time handling this quiet, and even when Hudson takes over, the character remains frustratingly vague. She’s misty rather than mysterious, maybe because for too long she is drifting along rather than steering her own course. When she walks into Columbia Records, escorted by her father, she is an unanswered question; the puzzlement only deepens when C.L. orders Aretha to stand up and twirl for a surprised record executive.Things vastly improve once the adult Aretha sits down with some session players and starts pulling apart the songs she will rebuild, discovering “her true voice,” as Franklin’s sister Carolyn (Hailey Kilgore) once put it. Hudson is a deeply appealing screen presence, and it’s a pleasure to watch her just walk into a room. She doesn’t look or sound like Franklin, but she manages the role confidently and with a pure singing voice that more than holds its own. She never feels possessed by Aretha, even when she’s making you rhythmically sway in your seat. Yet Hudson also manages what memorable singers do: she transports you, pulling you alongside her as she takes you up, up and away.Hudson with Marc Maron, who plays the record producer Jerry Wexler.Quantrell D. Colbert/Metro Goldwyn MayerThat’s a nice place to be (and to feel), even intermittently, because it’s then that Aretha Franklin flickers before you. She died in 2018 at 76 and her life was filled with agonies that the movie seems anxious to attenuate or ignore, as if the depth of her pain and its rawness might tarnish her legacy. That’s too bad but it doesn’t damage this movie, which finds an enjoyable groove as Aretha falters and triumphs anew. In the end, it is the music and your love for her that keeps you going and watching. With their hooks and oceans of feeling, Franklin’s songs worked on you and worked you over. They entered our bodies and souls, our cultural and personal DNA, becoming part of the soundtrack for our lives.RespectRated PG-13 for language, violence and child pregnancy. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. In theaters. More