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    Martha Stewart Gives Netflix’s ‘Martha’ a Scalding Review

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    When a reporter phoned about her new documentary, the lifestyle star didn’t hold back: “I hate those last scenes. Hate them.”Most business titans spout niceties — insipid, banal, stale — when speaking to reporters on the record. It can be impossible to get them to say what they really think, and if they accidentally let something colorful slip, a saw-toothed publicist inevitably arrives to try to scrub it away.But not Martha Stewart. As a media savant, she may understand that startling candor cuts through the clutter and gets her heard. Or maybe, at 83, she just has no more you-know-whats left to give.Even so, I was not quite prepared for a recent phone interview with her. I called to discuss her experience with the documentarian R.J. Cutler, whose “Martha” documentary arrived on Netflix on Wednesday after a run on the fall festival circuit. I figured our chat would last 10 minutes. She’d say a positive thing and a negative thing and go back to making TikToks with Snoop Dogg.Out came roughly 30 almost uninterrupted minutes of sharp critique. “R.J. had total access, and he really used very little,” she said, referring to her archive. “It was just shocking.”After a couple of failed attempts to interject a question, I decided it was best to just get out of her way. Below are some of the things she’s sore about (some lightly edited for clarity).Cutler declined to comment on specific points. “I am really proud of this film, and I admire Martha’s courage in entrusting me to make it,” he said. “I’m not surprised that it’s hard for her to see aspects of it.”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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      ‘Dahomey’: Mati Diop’s New Documentary on the Painful Legacy of Looted Artifacts

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      Mati Diop examines the fate of 26 treasures — sometimes from their point of view — looted from Benin in 1892.There are many voices in Mati Diop’s new documentary, “Dahomey” (in theaters), and one of them belongs to Artifact No. 26. “I lost myself in my dreams, becoming one with these walls, cut off from the land of my birth as if I was dead,” it says in French, its timbre tweaked to contain both a low rumbling bass and a higher, more feminine sound. “Today, it’s me they have chosen, like their finest and most legitimate victim.”Artifacts technically do not talk, but this imaginative element frames the rest of Diop’s film. The movie comprises mostly observational footage shot during the shipping and repatriation of 26 objects that France had looted from the kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) during the invasion of 1892. They had resided until 2021 in Paris, in the Quai Branly museum, which houses Indigenous art and cultural items from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.The return of those 26 antiquities was part of a much bigger story that began with a report on the restitution of African treasures commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron of France in 2018. That November, he announced that the items would be handed over, and that his government would study and consider giving back other objects removed from African nations without consent. He stopped short of following the report’s full recommendation, which was to return all items if asked. The move kicked off years of debate among former colonial powers in Europe, including Germany and Britain, about similar treasures in their national museums and archives.It took years to actually give back those initial 26, which included effigies of the rulers King Behanzin and King Glélé, two thrones and four painted gates from Behanzin’s palace. “Dahomey” homes in on their fate as a way of exploring the complexity of the very act of repatriation — not for the Europeans, but for the Beninese. We watch conservators and curators carefully pack everything up. (The camera briefly takes the point of view of Artifact No. 26, with the sounds of screws going into the top of the crate and then noises of transit.) They’re then unloaded in Benin, and officials arrive for the occasion.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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      The Menendez Brothers: How True Crime Is Re-Examining Old Cases

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      A thriving genre built on podcasts and documentaries, coupled with younger generations’ more skeptical worldview, helped revitalize interest in this case and others like it.There’s a montage during the new Netflix documentary “The Menendez Brothers” in which comedians, late-night hosts and other pop culture figures of the 1990s mock Lyle and Erik Menendez. The brothers had recently delivered testimony at their first murder trial, detailing their accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, Jose Menendez, whom they had gunned down and killed in 1989, alongside their mother, Kitty.There was a 1993 “Saturday Night Live” skit that had John Malkovich and Rob Schneider mimicking the brothers in the courtroom, weeping dramatically and sarcastically. On the “Late Show,” the comedian Sandra Bernhard told David Letterman, “These two arrogant brothers are gonna fry,” to whoops and laughter from the audience.“I called Jay Leno’s show once, to protest them making fun of them,” Joan Vander Molen, Kitty Menendez’s sister, says in the documentary. “That’s all they did. They just made fun of them.”Some 30 years later, Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were 21 and 18 when the murders were committed, have gone from pariahs and punchlines to something approaching sympathetic figures in the eyes of a growing number of people.They’ve also gone from the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in prison to having a chance at freedom after George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney, announced on Thursday that he would recommend a resentencing that would make the brothers eligible for immediate parole.Gascón cited the work the brothers have done to improve the lives of their fellow inmates. “I believe they have paid their debt to society,” Gascón said.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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      Review: ‘Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’

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      At 75, Springsteen is doggedly committed to live performance. This documentary chronicles how he keeps up on tour, and why.While it was Lou Reed who coined the adage that one’s life could be saved by rock ’n’ roll, Bruce Springsteen embodies it. It may be paradoxical, to assert that the performer transcends the genre for which he relentlessly waves the flag, but at this point in time, Springsteen is the world’s greatest living entertainer, full stop. “Road Diary,” a new documentary directed by Thom Zimny, offers dynamic proof for this argument.The movie’s full title is “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,” and many of the current members of that group have been with Springsteen since they were barely out of their teens. The most colorful and funny member, Steven Van Zandt, who also works as an actor (“The Sopranos”), is a prominent talking head because he’s a born raconteur.More than the funny stories, the movie is about Springsteen’s artistic mission.He sings about the things that make life worth living: friendship, love, community and the sense of a higher calling.Seeing Frank Sinatra at the beginning of his Diamond Jubilee World Tour, when he was 75 and in good health, one could see that he seemed bored by the whole thing. Springsteen turned 75 last month, and never seems bored for even a moment. He’s a man on a mission.The tour chronicled here is ongoing; Springsteen plays in Montreal next week. The punchline of this engaging movie is one that Springsteen lifts from his early influence: Van Morrison. Addressing the camera on his way to another stage, he cheerfully yells, “It’s too late to stop now.”Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street BandNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Hulu and Disney+. More

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      ‘My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock’ Review: Director’s Commentary

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      A richly detailed essay film imagines Hitchcock commenting on his own oeuvre over a mesmerizing daisy chain of clips.Alfred Hitchcock’s voice remains indelible, like a droll bloodhound trying to hypnotize you over tea. Mark Cousins’s richly detailed essay film “My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock” imagines the director commenting on his own oeuvre over a mesmerizing daisy chain of clips, with an insider’s knowledge of filmmaking.Lest that premise induce suspicions of artificial intelligence: The impressionist Alistair McGowan reproduces Hitchcock’s plummy drawl. But the insights belong to Cousins, a world-class close reader known for his mellifluous journeys through film history and cinephilia. Over sinuously edited, high-quality clips, his Hitchcock addresses playful and piercing observations to the audience in virtuosic variations on themes: escape, desire, loneliness and so on, from both famous and lesser-known films.Hitchcock’s work here suggests a series of dreamlike passageways through seemingly ordinary worlds where desire and danger open new doors. A typical riff mingles the cinematic and personal: Hitchcock’s “escape” from his British stomping ground to America; the escapist painterly countrysides that recur in his films; and the narrative traps his characters must cheat, like when Paul Newman flees a theater by shouting “fire” in “Torn Curtain.”The resulting director’s commentary from beyond the grave should send any viewer supermarket-sweeping Hitchcock titles onto the queue. Yet whereas scenes like Ingrid Bergman murmuring “you love me” to Cary Grant in “Notorious” are still jaw-dropping, the voice-over conceit can become stifling, and arguably limits our critical point of view.But as Alma Hitchcock reportedly encouraged her creative partner and husband: “Be interested.” Cousins’s attuned eye and ear keep us interested afresh in the Hitchcock magic.My Name Is Alfred HitchcockNot rated. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Remarkable Life of Ibelin’ Review: More Real Than Reality

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      An unconventional documentary tells the story of a Norwegian gamer — and of how we live life on the internet.Almost from the start, the internet scrambled our sense of reality. You could never really know if whoever you were talking to was the person they said they were. Now it’s hard to know if they’re even a person.This is destabilizing and frightening, and also the premise for a good movie. But there has to be more to the story than just the scary parts. No, we don’t exist physically on the internet, but our virtual selves do things that have real-world consequences, and our emotions and minds, in some phenomenological way, extend into cyberspace, too. For better or worse, the internet is a place in which we live and love and rage and mourn. We bring our humanity with us, the bad parts but also the good ones.Movies haven’t always captured this aspect of 21st-century life well, in part because rendering the internet visually is weird and tricky. I loved Joe Hunting’s 2022 documentary “We Met in Virtual Reality,” filmed entirely inside a V.R. platform, for how it captured love and generosity in virtual space. And now we have Benjamin Ree’s “The Remarkable Life of Ibelin,” which is a rare and beautiful thing: a moving documentary that excavates the question of the “real” in a profoundly humanistic and unconventional way.“The Remarkable Life of Ibelin” is about Mats Steen, a Norwegian man who died in 2014 at the age of 25. Mats lived out his final years nearly immobilized, the result of being born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a rare inherited disease which presently has no cure. Mats’s family knew him as smart and loving, but grieved while watching him grow more withdrawn as his symptoms progressed. He would spend most of his waking hours on his computer, playing games. “Our deepest regret was that he would never experience friends, love, or make a difference in other people’s lives,” his father, Robert, tells Ree.Mats’s family were loving, attentive and supportive of him to the very end. But they were wrong about the friends and making a difference part. Oh, were they wrong.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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      ‘Black Box Diaries’ Review: A Public Face for #MeToo in Japan

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      In a new documentary, Shiori Ito recounts her yearslong crusade for justice in Japan after accusing a powerful journalist of rape.Not everyone gets to be the heroine of her own story, much less a champion for others. On May 29, 2017, a 28-year-old Japanese journalist, Shiori Ito, did just that when she announced at a news conference that she had been raped in a Tokyo hotel two years earlier by a powerfully connected journalist, Noriyuki Yamaguchi. (He has denied the allegation.) Ito had decided to speak her truth despite intense pressure to remain silent. “People need to know about the horrors of rape,” she told a room of reporters, “and how deeply it affects one’s life.”Undaunted, Ito talks openly throughout “Black Box Diaries,” her moving if sometimes frustrating documentary about how she became a public face of the #MeToo movement in Japan, all while she grappled with police obstructionism, misogynist laws, sexist vitriol and fears about her safety. Going public was gutsy, and unusual. “One of the first things many Japanese women do while still shivering and bleeding at home is to read online about the experience of others — and deciding it’s just not worth pursuing,” David McNeill, an editor at Asia Pacific Journal, wrote in an interview he did with Ito after her first news conference.At the time, to protect her privacy, Ito wasn’t using her surname; not everyone in her family wanted her to speak out. Yet she soon went fully public, and her name became headline news. It remained so as she continued to seek justice in a fight that — as one year turned into another — grew into a cause, eventually becoming part of a national reckoning on sexual violence and harassment. With friends and lawyers, and buoyed by allies and sympathetic strangers, Ito fought to transform Japan’s laws and ideas relating to sexual violence. (In 2023, Japan criminalized nonconsenual sexual acts; in 2019, the United Nations had issued a statement saying the “absence of consent” should be the global definition of rape.)The documentary, based on her 2017 memoir, “Black Box,” is a chronicle of Ito’s ordeal and her fight. As the title suggests — a prosecutor, Ito has explained, called her case a “black box” because it happened behind closed doors — there’s a confessional aspect to her project. The documentary, for one, opens with some first-person statements styled as handwriting, the words running over an image of flowing water. “Please be mindful of the triggers in this film,” it reads, as cherry blossoms drift across the screen. “Close your eyes and take a deep breath if you need to.” As water and petals flow, so do her words: “That has helped me many times.”What follows is effectively a tense and tangled crime story, one in which Ito is at once the victim, lead investigator, dogged prosecutor and crusading reporter. In 2015, following the assault and after she filed a criminal complaint with the police department, Ito realized that she had to become her own advocate. She began chronicling the investigation in secret audio recordings, detailed written records and videos. After prosecutors dropped the case, despite DNA evidence and testimony from a taxi driver who dropped her at the hotel — she decided to take her personal investigation to the world.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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      The Menendez Brothers’ Case Under Review: What to Know.

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      Prosecutors are revisiting the brothers’ convictions in the killings of their parents. It could lead to their release from prison.Over 35 years ago, Lyle and Erik Menendez — then 21 and 18 years old — walked into the den of their Beverly Hills mansion and fired more than a dozen shotgun rounds at their parents.Now, after serving decades behind bars as part of a life sentence without the possibility of parole, the Menendez brothers may be getting a chance at freedom.In early October, the Los Angeles County district attorney, George Gascón, announced that his office was reviewing the case after lawyers representing the Menendez brothers asked prosecutors to recommend a resentencing, a move that could lead to their release.The reconsideration of their life sentences comes at a time when the Menendez brothers have been thrust back into the media spotlight thanks to the revelation of new evidence, an army of social media defenders and a recent television series and documentary examining their crime and trials.Here’s what to know about the Menendez brothers’ case:What were they convicted of?In 1996, the Menendez brothers were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole for killing their parents, Jose, a music executive, and Mary Louise, a former beauty queen who went by the name Kitty.It was their second trial. Two years prior, a mistrial was declared after two separate juries (one for each brother) deadlocked over a verdict.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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      In ‘Smile 2’ and ‘Trap,’ Pop Stardom Looks Pretty Terrifying

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      At a time when the business of being Taylor Swift or Beyoncé is booming, these films examine toxic fandom and what can seem like mass hysteria.This article contains spoilers.Last year around this time, audiences were heading to movie theaters to experience the joy of being in the presence of a pop star.“Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” had just been released, prompting Swifties and the Swift-curious to descend on multiplexes, friendship bracelets adorning their wrists. Weeks later, the Beyhive would don silver cowboy hats for the release of “Renaissance: A Film By Beyoncé.” Attending one of these concert films meant having a great time and reveling in the glory of the women onstage who seemed to be doing the same.Now being a pop star at the movies looks a lot more terrifying.Horror centered on pop stars is all the rage these days. In M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap,” released in August, the concert by the fictional Lady Raven (Saleka) is an elaborate setup to nab a serial killer (Josh Hartnett). This weekend, “Smile 2,” directed by Parker Finn, follows Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), a troubled Grammy winner with a history of addiction who comes to be possessed by a demon that drives her mad with violent hallucinations. To her fans and her team, it looks like she’s on another, possibly drug-induced spiral, but really a monster is goading her into killing herself.Both these movies are a product of a time when the business of being a pop star is bigger than ever. Events like the Eras and Renaissance tours became zeitgeist-defining moments as well as fodder that filmmakers could mine for inspiration. Shyamalan was even direct about it in an Empire interview. His premise for “Trap”? “What if ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ happened at a Taylor Swift concert?”Saleka as a pop star whose concert is a setup to nab a serial killer in “Trap.” Warner Bros. PicturesBut both “Trap” and “Smile 2” prove that beyond the fun of the setup, the life of a pop star is actually thematically ripe for horror. It’s a high-pressure job in which you never know whether you’re meeting a fan or a predator.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