Movies

In 2016, Mount Sinai Hospital opened its Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in Manhattan. The documentary “Born to Be,” directed by Tania Cypriano, follows the work of one of that center’s pioneering surgeons, Dr. Jess Ting.Ting began as a general plastic surgeon; he only entered the field of transgender surgery 18 months before filming began. “Everyone thought I was nuts,” he says, when he stepped up to join the Mount Sinai center. Unlike too many others, in medicine and the world, he seems to understand transgender people and their needs on an instinctive level. Patient, good-humored and thoughtful, he’s always looking for ways to improve surgeries, none of which are depicted explicitly here.[embedded content]It was not too long ago that transgender men and women were compelled to subject themselves to black-market procedures, getting plastics injected into them just to, as Ting phrases it in one scene, make the “external face and the internal identity match.” Now such damaging procedures can actually be reversed, and replaced with viable ones.But it’s been a long journey. Cashmere, one of Ting’s patients, now in her 50s, takes the viewer on a tour of the now largely transformed meatpacking district, where she was once a sex worker. “Everybody in that tape is dead,” she exclaims in one interview, referring to the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning,” which features her old friends. Another, younger patient, Garnet, struggles with self-harm even after a successful surgery.Through it all Ting is an anchor, a presence of compassion and good sense. Anyone confused about transgender people will certainly benefit from a viewing of this picture.Born to BeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and on Kino Marquee. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

In “Crazy, Not Insane,” the prolific documentarian Alex Gibney turns his camera on Dr. Dorothy Otnow Lewis, a psychiatrist and professor with a particular theory of murder. She believes that killers tend to act out of a combination of neurobiological and environmental factors, and that premeditated, repeated murders don’t occur solely because of what some psychiatrists see as a severe lack of empathy. Look closely, she suggests, and psychosis, abuse or brain damage will inevitably factor in.[embedded content]Dr. Lewis is an engaging interview subject whose clarity and upbeat demeanor contrast strikingly with the macabre material. Her writings are read as voice-overs by Laura Dern.Dr. Lewis has also kept an excellent archive. Gibney shows video of her interacting with Arthur J. Shawcross, a serial killer, as he manifests what Dr. Lewis diagnosed as dissociative states, in which he would seem to change personalities. Lewis met and recorded audio of Ted Bundy, whom she contends had far from a normal childhood. But the most chilling footage is of Dr. Lewis interviewing an electrician who did part-time work electrocuting death-row inmates. Dr. Lewis raises the possibility that only chance separated his life from theirs. The electrician was as “confused and muddle-headed, as battered and beaten, as the violent men I had interviewed on death row,” Dr. Lewis concluded.Although Gibney includes some dissenting voices — such as Dr. Park Dietz, who at Shawcross’s trial questioned Dr. Lewis’s interviewing techniques — he moves on quickly from Dr. Lewis’s discussion of Nazism and the Nuremberg trials without clarifying whether genocide contradicts her views on biological predisposition. Gibney also doesn’t broach the issue of confirmation bias — the idea that Dr. Lewis, in searching for traumatic family histories or multiple personalities, might be prone to finding them. But Dr. Lewis is clearly sharp enough to account for that, and the movie makes you want to read her work, not stick with Gibney’s overview.Crazy, Not InsaneNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

Combining documentary, fiction and elaborate soundscapes into a uniquely experimental whole, the Spanish filmmaker Carlos Casas opens his latest film, “Cemetery,” with an on-screen description of the myth of the elephant graveyard, a trove of ivory long sought by poachers.After killing all but one elephant, the legend goes, poachers braved jungle and rivers, mountains and ravines, to follow this survivor to his final resting place. Using this tale as his template, Casas drops us into the Sri Lankan jungle to accompany the elephant and his mahout on their perilous journey.[embedded content]Divided into four chapters and unfolding with minimal dialogue, “Cemetery” is primarily a slow and lovingly detailed immersion in the sights and sounds of the jungle and the mahout’s devoted attention to his animal. Melding myriad trills, screeches, and roars, Chris Watson’s mesmerizing sound design (he regularly works with David Attenborough) joins Benjamín Echazarreta’s lush imagery to create a soothing, almost somnolent sensory blanket. A silvery spider’s web, dangling in foliage like a safety net for falling leaves or acrobatic bugs, is as absorbing as the close-ups of the enormous beast itself — majestic reminders of its prehistoric ancestry.As the poachers close in, the movie shifts gears and, in a nod to early adventure stories (Rudyard Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs are among those thanked in the credits), barrels toward its fantastical conclusion. Shot in the Atacama Desert in Chile, this ending — with its inky pauses and allusive, speeding gray shapes — suffers most from the extreme limitations of home viewing. The result is a maddeningly obscured finale to a movie that’s both a hymn to tradition and a lament for ongoing species destruction.CemeteryNot rated. In Sinhalese and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More