Movies

While working on an assignment involving facial-recognition software, the M.I.T. Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini found that the algorithm couldn’t detect her face — until she put on a white mask. As she recounts in the documentary “Coded Bias,” Buolamwini soon discovered that most such artificial-intelligence programs are trained to identify patterns based on data sets that skew light-skinned and male.“When you think of A.I., it’s forward-looking,” she says. “But A.I. is based on data, and data is a reflection of our history.”Directed by Shalini Kantayya, “Coded Bias” explores how machine-learning algorithms — now ubiquitous in advertising, hiring, financial services, policing and many other fields — can perpetuate society’s existing race-, class- and gender-based inequities.[embedded content]
The most cleareyed of several recent documentaries about the perils of Big Tech (“The Great Hack,” “The Social Dilemma”), “Coded Bias” tackles its sprawling subject by zeroing in empathetically on the human costs. Using Buolamwini’s journey from her research to a congressional hearing on facial-detection technology as a through line, Kantayya knits together a number of local and international stories with an eye for emotional detail. A teacher in Houston recounts receiving an arbitrarily poor algorithmic evaluation despite years of experience and awards; a plucky watchdog group in London challenges the police use of A.I.-based closed-circuit TV cameras that often misidentify and racially profile pedestrians.The film moves deftly between pragmatic and larger political critiques, arguing that it’s not just that the tech is faulty; even if it were perfect, it would infringe dangerously on people’s liberties. One segment details China’s efforts to create a “social credit” program that would use face scans to track citizens’ lives and generate scores that control their access to various services.America’s not much different, warns the futurist and author Amy Webb, one of the movie’s expert talking heads (mostly women, refreshingly). She says that in the United States, social media companies, other corporations and law enforcement agencies surveil people and influence their information and opportunities in similar ways. They’re just not as upfront about it.Pronouncements like these are dystopian enough that the music and graphics inspired by “2001: A Space Odyssey” that Kantayya layers on top can feel cheesy. Even so, they do lend an aptly heroic air to the film’s activist subjects — particularly Buolamwini, whose efforts have achieved tangible legislative gains. For a documentary about automated technology, “Coded Bias” keeps its focus firmly on people: their failings, their vulnerabilities and their powers for good.Coded BiasNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch in virtual cinemas. More

“Transhood” is fixated on transition, and therefore preoccupied with time, or at least that seems to be its intention. The HBO documentary, which follows four transgender and gender-nonconforming children in Kansas City, Mo., over five years, races through their changing and evolving understanding of themselves, with barely a moment to catch its breath.Many scenes are fleeting and shorn of a more contemplative approach not only to transgender identity, but also to childhood more broadly. Part of the film’s goal is to frame these kids as just kids: rowdy, hyper, moody.[embedded content]For younger, more rambunctious subjects like Avery (7 at the beginning of filming in 2014) and the gender-fluid Phoenix (4), the camera often has to chase them, making it difficult to capture in a cohesive way how they personally explore their gender identity. Even over five years, observations about them remain shallow. But the older subjects Jay (12), who has to negotiate being out as transgender at school, and Leena (15), an aspirational model, land as more engaging. They’re old enough to speak for themselves and tell their own stories.With so much ground to cover, the scenes’ shortness can feel unsatisfying and even occasionally facile. Though conversations between parents and their children are designed to be emotional beats, there’s a peculiar staginess that comes off as jarring at times.Directed by Sharon Liese, the movie hints at more thoughtful threads, like looking at the obstacles of insurance coverage or negotiating how to distance oneself from internet fame. But if it aims to mimic Richard Linklater’s time-stretching “Boyhood” in its observations of change both large and small, those efforts fall short.TranshoodNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

Through the magic of montage, the city symphonist Manfred Kirchheimer (“Stations of the Elevated”) brings fresh life to sights and sounds that New Yorkers have often taken for granted. At 89, he has a new movie, “Free Time,” that further assembles footage he shot with Walter Hess, a friend, from 1958 to 1960. (Their trove also served as the basis of three Kirchheimer shorts over the years, beginning in 1968.) It was first shown at the New York Film Festival last year, when the freewheeling street scenes had a historical curiosity but didn’t induce the same pandemic-era wistfulness.“Free Time” affords moviegoers the time to people-watch. Children play stickball, feign sword fights and write on the streets with chalk. Adults wash windows, work at construction sites and sit in lawn chairs. Occasionally someone strikes a pose for the camera.[embedded content]Some of the joy is architectural, and the choice of angles adds to the poetry. The film gazes down from a high floor (or perhaps a rooftop) at a man pushing a cart on the street below. The sight of a riverfront junkyard where scrapped cars are piled in oddly attractive patterns is offset by a kayaker enjoying a paddle in the distance.Kirchheimer and Hess shot on black-and-white 16-millimeter film without sound, and all the audio we do hear — from the traffic noise to snatches of overheard dialogue — has been constructed. The sound effects are emphatic enough to call attention to themselves, and serve as a tacit, admirable acknowledgment that this material has been shaped. Even so, some of the clatter distracts from the purity of these great images.Free TimeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 1 minute. Watch through Film Forum’s virtual cinema. More