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Tracey Davis, who turned her often painful experience as the child of the entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. into a tale of reconciliation across two memoirs, died on Nov. 2 at her home in central Tennessee. She was 59.Her ex-husband Guy Garner confirmed the death but said he did not know the cause.In “Sammy Davis Jr.: My Father,” written with Dolores A. Barclay and published in 1996, Ms. Davis described growing up with a frequently absent father well known for his workaholism and his nightlife exploits; the anger she felt over the years when reflecting on her childhood; and the ability she gained, toward the end of Mr. Davis’s life, to forgive him and reconnect.Mr. Davis died in 1990 at 64.“I said things like, ‘Dad, I always loved you, but I didn’t like you that much,’” Ms. Davis told The Los Angeles Times in 2014. “He said, ‘Well, I didn’t like you that much either.’ It turned out the air needed to be cleared.”Her second book, “Sammy Davis Jr.: A Personal Journey With My Father” — written with Nina Bunche Pierce and published in 2014 — quoted from conversations the two had during that period, when, Ms. Davis wrote, “my father became particularly nostalgic about the past.”In addition to attaining fame as a singer, dancer and actor, Mr. Davis led a much-scrutinized social life. He belonged to the crew of rakish midcentury celebrities known as the Rat Pack, which included his longtime pal Frank Sinatra, who was the best man at Mr. Davis’s wedding in 1960, when he married Tracey’s mother, the actress May Britt. Mr. Davis was Black and Ms. Britt was white, and their union brought applause from supporters of interracial marriage and bomb threats from others.MGM announced plans last month to make a movie about Mr. Davis based on Ms. Davis’s first book.“I am thrilled to know my father’s life, both private and public, will be brought to the big screen with this team of storytellers,” Ms. Davis said in a statement when the deal was announced. “He and my mother, May Britt, took on the world, choosing love and compassion over hatred and bigotry, and I am a product of that decision.”Tracey Hillevi Davis was born on July 5, 1961, in Los Angeles. She grew up in Nevada in the region around Lake Tahoe, where her mother moved after her parents divorced. She graduated from California State University, Northridge, in the mid-1980s and married Mr. Garner in 1986. They divorced in 2001. Another marriage, to Jim Cotta, also ended in divorce.Ms. Davis worked in advertising.In addition to her mother, May Britt Ringquist, she is survived by two brothers, Mark and Jeff Davis; two children from her first marriage, Sam and Montana Garner; and two children from her second marriage, Greer and Chase Cotta.The New York Times contributed reporting. More

John Belushi’s entrances onstage raise a grin with the promise of unruly energy. But his early exit from life after a drug overdose in 1982 left a legend that tends to seal his tomb. So it’s touching to learn something new from “Belushi,” R.J. Cutler’s warmly told documentary: the man who once impersonated a zit also wrote soul-bearing (and sometimes adorable) love letters.Judith Belushi Pisano (formerly Jacklin) was the comic’s lifelong sweetheart, and Cutler’s biography hits home hardest as a kind of love story. But Belushi’s career trajectory is faithfully charted — from Second City to “The National Lampoon Radio Hour” to “Saturday Night Live” to “Animal House” and the Blues Brothers. The gang’s all here, in audio interviews: close pal Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, a peevish Lorne Michaels, Jane Curtin, brother Jim, Carrie Fisher, and more, musing candidly on Belushi’s magnetism and many drives. (Some excerpts come from Judy’s 2005 book, “Belushi: A Biography.”)[embedded content]Belushi’s incredible Joe Cocker routine underlines his origins in a counterculture that soon served the purposes of mass entertainment. Cutler also includes illuminating stories of Belushi’s background. The Illinois native was the son of an Albanian restaurant owner, and his mother once ran away to act in a play. Who knew the classic cheeseburger sketch had a poignant echo with his father’s workplace?Belushi’s confident physicality in the moment was paired with an underappreciated cleverness (which might not give all generations the same rebellious kick). But “Belushi” taps the sweetness in a cultural fixture with an irreplaceably wild sense of fun.BelushiNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Showtime. More

In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A teenager’s bedroom becomes an escape room in the thriller “Run,” streaming on Hulu. Kiera Allen plays Chloe, a wheelchair-user whose mother (Sarah Paulson) has locked her in. The stakes are high for her escape, and the how of it involves a different set of techniques than would be needed for a nondisabled person.In this video, the film’s director, Aneesh Chaganty, says the sequence is something of a microcosm for what he was trying to do with the entire film: “take a normal house and turn every single element of that house into a massive, Burj Khalifa-scale obstacle.”Chloe “MacGyvers” several objects from her room to aid her in breaking free. Chaganty discusses the meticulous storyboarding of the scene, as well as how he took cues from Hitchcock, M. Night Shyamalan and, for one nifty trick, a friend’s glassblower father.Read the “Run” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

Project Mercury’s mission to blast the first American astronauts into space was fastidiously undramatic. NASA’s founding administrator T. Keith Glennan — still introducing the agency by its initials like a proper debutante — aimed to send his seven pilots up and down in a metal pillbox that even a chimp couldn’t crash. From engineering to public relations, there was no room for human malfunction. It took two decades for the journalist Tom Wolfe’s “The Right Stuff” to reveal the frizzed wires underneath the capsule’s smooth exterior: the ego clashes, the stress and depression, and the wives who took tranquilizers so they could serve cheery can-do-isms to Life Magazine.[embedded content]Tom Jennings’s documentary “The Real Right Stuff,” produced by National Geographic and streaming on Disney+, hammers the unruliness back under the hood. Alan Shepard’s philandering, for example, is polished to a quick mention of his appetite for “cookies,” as the astronauts’ female fans were nicknamed, over shots of women boating Cocoa Beach in modest swimsuits, as though all involved parties were merely hot for wholesome fun in the sun. With the meaty Mercury 7 gossip cleaved to Disney+’s concurrent fictionalized series, “The Right Stuff,” the documentary is a bland chronology of successful launches and minor mishaps, constructed from scraps of archival newscasts, home videos and book excerpts read by Wolfe himself. The only dissonant note is from the synthetic, heavy-panting score, which seems anxious that an alien might — just might! — decide to cling to the heat shield.Sixty years have not dimmed the Mercury crew’s courageous, telegenic appeal. In another life, the dimpled John Glenn could have poached James Cagney’s career of playing bruiser priests and boxers with a heart of gold. Alas, the film’s polished heroics let the astronauts’ humanity whiz by out of reach. Instead, it’s the anonymous spectators who shoulder the film’s emotional power. These lesser mortals are constrained by gravity and fate to remain on the ground. Yet, the heart swells to see a crowd united in celebration of an America that delivered on a sky-high scientific ambition.The Real Right StuffNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More