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    ‘Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna’ Review: Confusing Accounts

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    The Hulu documentary challenges ideas around who is responsible for the death of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of “Rust.”“I don’t know how you get justice from an accident.” In 2021, the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot on the set of the movie “Rust.” The new Hulu documentary “Last Take: Rust and the Story of Halyna,” directed by Rachel Mason, a friend of Hutchins, is not a chronicle of Hutchins’s life, nor a tribute to it. The film is instead a plodding but cleareyed account of the confusion, blame and scandal around her death.The documentary begins with a brief overview of the case, highlighting some of the crew members who were involved. The film goes on to challenge a schematic reading of who is responsible for Hutchins’s death, and even suggests that certain “Rust” producers were never held accountable for mismanaging the production.One compelling section highlights an email received by the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, which scolded her for neglecting her prop duties to focus on firearm supervision. The revelations offer new perspectives on a tragedy that was already thoroughly covered in the media.The film’s biggest letdown lies in its cursory tour of who Hutchins was apart from her final hours. Despite testimony from Hutchins’s friends that repeatedly references her artistry, Mason rarely incorporates clips of Hutchins’s cinematography outside “Rust.” When the documentary does find time for a montage of her work, it is only to illustrate a point about where the guns onscreen are being aimed.Last Take: Rust and the Story of HalynaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Jonas Mekas, Master of Avant-Garde Film, Shows His Tender Side

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      Mekas’s diaristic film clips, left behind when he died, fuel a new documentary that renders an intimate portrait of a man who often trafficked in the abstract.For 70 years Jonas Mekas, widely seen as the godfather of American avant-garde film, created nearly daily visual documents that showed elements of his life.He called them “film diaries.” They were recorded on film reels and tapes that were stored in cardboard sleeves with labels like “angry dog,” “small memorabilia” and “Warhol.” Those were stacked throughout Mekas’s loft in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn, organized in a way that only he fully understood.After Mekas died in 2019 at 96, a re-creation of the cluttered loft was installed on the fifth floor of an arts center in New Jersey, including the recordings and other possessions: Mekas’s old film editing equipment. A cardboard box with trimmings from the beard of his longtime friend Allen Ginsberg. A scarf he brought when fleeing his home country, Lithuania, in the 1940’s and held onto while surviving a Nazi labor camp.In the summer of 2020, the filmmaker KD Davison started sifting through those archives to create a documentary about Mekas. That film, “Fragments of Paradise,” will begin streaming on Amazon Prime Video on March 13.The documentary draws heavily from Mekas’s visual diaries, which Davison said seemed to reflect the rootlessness he experienced as a refugee during World War II and his enduring search for moments of beauty or calm.“I began to see this melancholy that I think isn’t often associated with Jonas,” she said. “It was like watching someone through the course of their life reconcile themselves with loss and begin to find freedom and joy just in the present moment.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Housewife of the Year’: Contestants Look Back in Dismay

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      Ciaran Cassidy’s film revisits an Irish television show that judged stay-at-home moms on budgeting and appearance.There’s a temptation, when making a documentary about some obviously retrograde practice from the past, for filmmakers to treat their subject like something to gawk at. Can you believe how backward earlier generations were? Let’s all point and stare and wince.“Housewife of the Year” (in theaters), directed by Ciaran Cassidy, could very easily have gone in that direction. The film is about (and named after) a live, prime-time televised competition that took place from 1969 to 1995 in Ireland — and it’s pretty much what it sounds like. Women, generally married and raising a large family, were judged on qualities ranging from sense of humor and civic-mindedness to budgeting, preparing a simple meal and, of course, keeping up their appearance. All of this, the movie briefly explains via text onscreen, can be seen as an effort to prop up the social order in a deeply religious, deeply traditionalist country where it was virtually impossible for a married woman to maintain many kinds of employment. “The state shall endeavor to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home,” Article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution proclaims. The competition helped reinforce those values.As Irish society changed, especially with respect to women’s rights and reproductive freedoms, the competition eventually turned into “Homemaker of the Year,” open to all genders. But that’s not the focus of the documentary, nor is there ponderous narration explaining to us what happened. Instead, “Housewife of the Year” focuses on two main ways of telling its story. The first is archival footage from the competition, which reinforces how much of it focused on patronizing and even belittling the women as they participated, via the male host, Gay Byrne, interviewing them onstage. It’s remarkable to watch.But woven throughout are present-day interviews with many of the participants, now much older, who see things differently than they probably did back then. They tell stories of what was really going on in the background: alcoholic or deadbeat husbands, economic catastrophes, backbreaking labor. One woman, Ena, talks about having given birth to 14 children by the time she was 31, owing largely to the ban on contraception.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Chaos: The Manson Murders’ Review: All You Ever Knew is Suspect

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      Errol Morris returns to his main obsessions — evil and delusion — in a new Netflix documentary about the famous murders.Two recurring inquiries — scary ones, entwined — characterize Errol Morris’s decades-long directing career, which includes landmark documentaries like “The Thin Blue Line,” “Mr. Death,” “The Fog of War” and “Standard Operating Procedure.” The first question regards the nature of evil: what it is, where it comes from, whether it’s invited into a man’s heart or chooses to takes up residence there. The other is the fine membrane between truth and fiction, which dictates how we become deluded, by others and by self, and how those delusions come to rule the world.In Morris’s more recent work, those themes are brought together most sharply in “American Dharma,” a 2019 chiller in which Morris feeds ample rope to the Trump adviser Steve Bannon to explain his vision of the world and, in so doing, expose a kind of cruelly pompous vapidity. But other contemporary works by Morris — “Separated,” about policies that tear migrant children from their parents; “The Pigeon Tunnel,” about what the spy novelist John le Carré never really revealed about himself — are also held together mostly by these questions. At their heart is some primal fear: that evil, or evil people, can control us without our even realizing it. And for Morris, this is not a religious question so much as an existential and political one.Little surprise that his latest project, the Netflix documentary “Chaos: The Manson Murders,” returns to the same arena. Based, sort of, on the hair-raising book by the journalist Tom O’Neill, the film winnows its central question to one recurring baffler: Why are we, as a culture drenched in true crime narratives, so obsessed with this particular set of murders, which occurred over 55 years ago?Most likely you know the outline of the case: Charles Manson, the failed musician and wild-eyed hippie, ordered his “family” — drug-addled runaways, mostly, who had been living with him at a ranch full of old movie sets — to carry out a series of gruesome murders on the evenings of Aug. 8 and 9, 1969. Among the victims was the actress Sharon Tate, then eight and a half months pregnant with her first child. Her husband, the director Roman Polanski, was out of town at the time.The story includes all kinds of weird spiky bits, well-documented, from accidents and coincidences (who was there that night, who wasn’t) to Manson’s connections to Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys and his worship of the Beatles to the bizarre behavior he and his acolytes exhibited during the sensationalized trial. O’Neill, in his book, goes deeper, raising the specter of various conspiracy theories about potential covert government operations that seem, with the space of time and some well-placed Freedom of Information Act requests, to at least have the potential of maybe being linked to the case.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘No Other Land,’ Whose Politics Deterred Distributors, Wins Best Documentary

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      Accepting the Oscar for best documentary feature on Sunday night, two filmmakers behind “No Other Land,” which chronicles Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the southern West Bank, called on the world to work to help halt the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians, free the remaining Israeli hostages captured in “the crime of Oct. 7” and chart a more equitable path forward for Palestinians.“When I look at Basel, I see my brother,” said Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist and one of the filmmakers, referring to his fellow director, the Palestinian activist Basel Adra, who had just spoken. “But we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws, that destroy lives, that he cannot control.”Adra said that their film “reflects the harsh reality we have been enduring for decades and still resist, as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.”The selection of “No Other Land” for best documentary feature represented a landmark and a rebuke. Despite a string of honors and rave reviews, no distributor would pick up this film in the United States, making it nearly impossible for American filmgoers to see it in theaters or to stream it. This shortcoming made “No Other Land” part of a broader trend in recent years in which topical documentaries have struggled to secure distribution.The film is often brutal, featuring disturbing images of razed houses, crying children, bereft mothers and even on-camera shootings. (Israel’s Supreme Court ruled the government has the right to clear the area depicted in the film.) And it entered a perennially supercharged political climate at an especially sensitive moment, debuting within months of Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s response in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza.The politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are especially prominent in Hollywood. Last year, the entertainment executive Ari Emanuel, who is Jewish, drew boos after criticizing Israel’s conservative prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, while accepting an award from a major Jewish group in Los Angeles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      These Films See People the Way They See Themselves

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      RaMell Ross subverts our gaze, breaking the conventional frame in “Nickel Boys” as he did in his documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening.”It’s incredibly rare — in fact, I don’t think it’s ever happened before this year — for a filmmaker to get an Oscar-nomination for a documentary and then land a best picture nomination for their next feature film. (A few have come close, though, and Ava DuVernay pulled it off, but in the opposite order.) Part of the blame lies with the Academy, which has somehow never nominated a documentary for Best Picture. It’s also just difficult, though by no means impossible, to excel in both fiction and nonfiction in a way that captures voter attention.Yet with “Nickel Boys,” nominated this year for both best picture and best adapted screenplay, the photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross has done just that. His previous film, the groundbreaking, lyrical documentary “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” was nominated for best documentary in 2019. “Hale County” may be less well-known than its fictional sibling, but it’s a vital companion piece. In fact, revisiting it now in the light of “Nickel Boys” illuminates Ross’s bigger project, and what makes his work so disruptive and his images so indelible.Much has been written — including here in The New York Times — about “Nickel Boys,” which topped my own list of 2024’s best movies. In reimagining Colson Whitehead’s novel, Ross and Joslyn Barnes shifted the book’s third-person narration to first person perspective, so we spend nearly the entire film looking through the eyes of two teenage boys, Elwood and Turner.That kind of perspective isn’t alien to storytelling. Movies have used it (including Steven Soderbergh’s recent thriller “Presence”), and it’s common in video games. But in “Nickel Boys” it feels fresh and radical. Ross, along with the cinematographer Jomo Fray and the camera operator Sam Ellison, positioned themselves and their equipment incredibly close to the actors so that their perspectives would follow their performances. The effect is remarkable: While Whitehead’s novel is about how we remember history, individually and collectively, Ross’s film is about how we see history.Wilson as Turner, left, and Ethan Herisse as Elwood. We spend nearly the entire film looking through the eyes of two teenage boys. Orion PicturesThat “we” includes the audience — in fact, it might be more accurate to say it implicates the audience. “Nickel Boys” insistently shakes the viewer out of the habits audiences have developed when watching fiction films. The action sometimes cuts away to documentary footage, historical images of Black Americans, without a narratively obvious motivation to do so. The camera acts like a person with their own subjective view in the scene, not the ostensibly impartial eye watching drama unfold that fiction films traditionally employ. Characters look straight into the lens, seemingly directly into our eyes, dragging us into the story.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Japanese Oscar Contender ‘Black Box Diaries’ Isn’t Being Shown in Japan

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      Shiori Ito’s searing indictment of Japan’s justice system in handling sexual assault cases is nominated for best documentary feature at Sunday’s Academy Awards.A film by a Japanese woman about her search for justice from uncooperative authorities after she reported being raped is a contender at Sunday’s Academy Awards. Yet, despite being the first full-length documentary made by a Japanese director ever nominated for an Oscar, the movie cannot be seen in her home country.In the film, “Black Box Diaries,” the journalist Shiori Ito tells the story of what happened to her after she reported being raped at a hotel by a prominent television journalist and the ordeal she says she experienced with Japan’s justice system.The film, which is up for best documentary feature, premiered in January 2024 at the Sundance Film Festival. It was released in U.S. theaters in October and can currently be seen or is slated to be shown in over 30 countries. However, those do not include Japan.The Japanese subsidiary of a major streaming service declined to distribute the film in early 2024, the filmmakers said, and theaters have so far displayed little interest in showing it. The prospects for the film’s release grew even murkier in October when Ms. Ito’s former lawyers and other previous supporters, including fellow journalists, spoke up against her, saying she had used footage without the consent of people in it.Ms. Ito with the producers of “Black Box Diaries,” Hannah Aqvilin and Eric Nyari, at the Oscars nominees dinner in Los Angeles on Tuesday.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesThis is not the first time that Japan has balked at showing unflattering films that were well received in Hollywood. “The Cove,” a documentary about a dolphin hunt in the town of Taiji, and “Unbroken,” a feature film about cruel treatment of Allied prisoners during World War II, both opened at least a year after their U.S. premieres. “The Cove,” which was made by an American director, won the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2010.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Guide to the Documentary Oscar Nominees

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      A quick guide to the nominated films and why you should watch them.Since the best documentary feature category was first established at the Oscars in 1942, the nominees have been like a snapshot of the year: wars and social concerns, heroes and headlines. This year is no exception. On paper, each of the five nominees look as if they’re ripped from the headlines, chosen for some metric like “urgency” or “timeliness.”But these are no ordinary documentaries. In the past decade, the Academy has gotten much better about nominating nonfiction films that stretch and push at their boundaries, challenging audiences in how they convey their subject matter. Most opt to confront world events through intensely personal stories, and all of them carefully show why their individual stories have far-reaching implications.So, as the 2025 Oscars are upon us, here’s a quick guide to the nominated films and why you should watch them.With “Black Box Diaries” (streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime), the director Shitori Ito takes a courageously personal approach to her biting critique of the handling of sexual assault cases in Japan. In 2017, Ito held a news conference to announce allegations that a prominent Japanese journalist had raped her. In the documentary, she chronicles the fallout of that accusation. The film is both intimate and enraging. As Manohla Dargis wrote in her review, it’s “a tense and tangled crime story, one in which Ito is at once the victim, lead investigator, dogged prosecutor and crusading reporter.”My colleagues and I have written about “No Other Land” (in select theaters) a lot during the past year. It’s probably the most acclaimed documentary of the year, centering on the lives of families who have witnessed their homes, in the occupied West Bank region of Masafer Yatta, be demolished over and over again. Despite its obviously timely story and a directorial team of two Palestinian and two Israeli filmmakers, it hasn’t been able to secure a distribution deal in the United States, which is why it isn’t available to stream here. If you can see it in a theater, don’t overlook how well it’s made, mixing home video archives, journalistic footage and conversations between the filmmakers to powerful effect.“Porcelain War” (in select theaters) has picked up a raft of awards from guilds and critics this season. It, too, looks through the lens of the personal to tell an urgent story — this one about the war in Ukraine. The film centers on Slava Leontyev, who directed the film with Brendan Bellomo, and who is a ceramist as well as a member of a Ukrainian special forces unit. Art and warfare blend in the film, which melds GoPro footage from the battlefield with looks at Leontyev’s work, finally landing on a hopeful note about the value of beauty in darkness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Becoming Katharine Graham’ Review: A Newspaper Leader, in Her Voice

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      The sibling filmmakers George and Teddy Kunhardt use a straightforward approach in this documentary about the Washington Post publisher, letting a pioneer shine.To tell the story of Katharine Graham, who led The Washington Post during a pivotal period for the paper and the nation, the sibling filmmakers George and Teddy Kunhardt use a standard approach, interweaving archival material with talking-head interviews. The result is a conventional documentary, and by all means an admiring one. But her story is so compelling — wrenching, inspiring, precedent-setting — that the straightforward account, with its fluidly constructed chronology and Graham’s voice front and center, hits the mark.Graham took the helm of the Post in 1963, after the suicide of her husband, Phil Graham, the dynamic publisher who had been tapped for the role by her father. At the time, Katharine Graham was stepping out of the shadows and confronting the cultural taboo against female bosses. Still, it took her a year to summon the courage to ask a question at an editorial meeting.Soon she’d be presiding over the newspaper’s transition from a local publication to one of national impact as it went head-to-head with the Nixon administration — first when it joined The New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers, and then when it led the pack in reporting on the Watergate scandal. Excerpts from Richard Nixon’s secret White House tapes — the gift to historians that keeps on giving — reveal, in conversations spewing misogynistic venom, how intent the president was on destroying Graham and her company.The directors also highlight The Washington Post’s 1975 labor dispute with its printing press operators, hewing closely to the management perspective; a more robust and balanced look would have deepened the documentary, or at least injected a welcome bit of friction into its celebratory mood.This is a strong portrait despite such lapses, in large part because it’s fueled by Graham’s voice, via the audiobook of her autobiography and an ample selection of interviews. (She died in 2001, at 84.) With her distinctive upper-crust inflection and striking candor, she quietly explores her unlikely reinvention from self-doubting wife and daughter to groundbreaking businesswoman. Through her eyes, “Becoming Katharine Graham” illuminates a charged moment in American history.Becoming Katharine GrahamNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More