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    ‘Titan: The OceanGate Disaster’ Review: A Company’s Failures

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    Netflix’s documentary about the catastrophe uses familiar techniques to spotlight the faulty judgment of Stockton Rush, who ran OceanGate.It was only a matter of time before a flurry of documentaries about the Titan submersible disappearance turned up on streaming platforms. The event captured the world’s attention in 2023 after the vessel, operated by the company OceanGate Expeditions, vanished in the North Atlantic, triggering a days-long search for survivors.Netflix’s “Titan: The OceanGate Disaster” offers an adequate rundown of the story. Directed by Mark Monroe, the film wisely does not linger in the lurid details of the Titan’s catastrophic end, and instead uses an investigative framing that sketches the company’s origins and use of carbon fiber while chronicling a series of problematic dives leading up to its final plunge. As it catalogs OceanGate’s failures, the documentary spotlights the faulty judgment of one man: the company co-founder and chief executive Stockton Rush, who died in the implosion.That Rush mismanaged his employees and played fast and loose while priming Titan is, by this point, old news. And creatively, “Titan: The OceanGate Disaster” often relies on familiar techniques, such as a continuous, synth-heavy score and sensationalist chyrons for interviewees: the insider, the investigator, the whistleblower.But audio recordings that capture Rush in fits of frustration, alongside startling footage of him cutting corners during an expedition — “close enough,” he declares, after reaching 3,939 meters on a dive meant to hit 4,000 — lay bare his grandiosity. Add to that the haunting sound of carbon fibers breaking at depth and one appreciates the case for giving this well-known story an audiovisual treatment, even if it is a standard one.Titan: The OceanGate DisasterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Call Her Alex,’ Plus 7 Things on TV this Week

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      The series about the podcast host Alex Cooper airs, alongside a slew of new documentaries.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that are airing or streaming this week, June 9-15. Details and times are subject to change.Day in the life of a podcaster.In October 2018, a new podcast hit the charts: “Call Her Daddy,” hosted by Alex Cooper and Sofia Franklyn, and produced by Barstool Sports. Since then, Cooper and the podcast have weathered a very public co-host breakup and a battle for the podcast’s I.P. — and it’s gotten a $60 million Spotify deal. This and more will be examined in the new documentary series “Call Her Alex.” The two-part series originally premiered at Tribeca Film Festival last week. Cameras also followed Cooper as she prepared for her podcast tour and reminisced on her childhood, which started her on her current trajectory. Streaming Tuesday on Hulu.A series of unfortunate events.On March 20, 2013, a flight was set to depart the Dominican Republic, headed to St. Tropez. On board was 700 kilograms of cocaine stored in 26 suitcases, four French nationals who claimed it wasn’t theirs and they didn’t know who it belonged to. The French documentary series “Cocaine Air” tries to unravel the strange story and figure out how it got on the plane. Streaming Wednesday on Netflix.A picture of the OceanGate Titan Submersible.OceanGate Expedition via ReutersIn June 2023, the world seemingly held it’s breath when news that a submersible, called Titan and owned by OceanGate, imploded on its way down to explore the wreckage of the Titanic. The five people onboard, including OceanGate’s founder and chief executive, Stockton Rush, died in the wreck, after a trip that lasted an hour and 33 minutes. The implosion has been attributed to a faulty design and inadequate testing. The new documentary feature “Titan: The OceanGate Disaster” explores what went wrong. Streaming Wednesday on Netflix.Heather Rovet, a Toronto real estate broker, has a perfect relationship with her boyfriend, Jace — until she finds out that she is actually dating Jason Porter, a felon with a history of romantic schemes. And suddenly, Heather is now in a horror film. The true crime documentary “Romcon: Who the F**k is Jason Porter” tells how it all went down. Streaming Thursday on Prime Video.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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      Documentary Series Goes Inside Trump’s Bubble

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      Advance episodes of “Art of the Surge” offer a rare behind-the-scenes look at the adulatory environment in which Mr. Trump has moved since regaining power.A few weeks after winning the election, President-elect Donald J. Trump found himself face-to-face with Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, a rising star in the Democratic Party, as the two men made their way through the bowels of Northwest Stadium in Landover, Md., to watch the annual Army-Navy game.The governor greeted him effusively.“Mr. President, welcome back to Maryland, sir, welcome back to Maryland!” Mr. Moore said. “Great to see you, great to see you, great to have you back here.”“You’re a good-looking guy,” Mr. Trump observed.“We are very, very anxious to be able to work closely with you,” the governor added. Then he mentioned the ongoing efforts to rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge outside Baltimore, which had collapsed that March.This chummy encounter was captured on camera for a documentary series called “Art of the Surge,” now streaming on Fox Nation, which provides a rare behind-the-scenes look at the adulatory environment in which Mr. Trump has moved since regaining power. The series gives a sense of how much he is enveloped by people eager to stroke his ego and get in his good graces — including some unexpected figures, according to advance episodes viewed by The New York Times.A still image from video footage of Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland greeting President-elect Donald J. Trump at the Army-Navy football game in December 2024.Art of the SurgeAt one point, inside the V.I.P. box at the football game, Brian Grazer, a top Hollywood producer, gets his photo taken with the president-elect and confides to those in the room that he cast his ballot for the Republican.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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      Billy Joel Documentary ‘And So It Goes’ Traces His Early Days

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      The first half of the HBO documentary premiered at the Tribeca Festival on Wednesday night. Joel, who is fighting a brain disorder, sent a message via its directors.The Tribeca Festival’s opening-night premiere of the upcoming HBO documentary “Billy Joel: And So It Goes” was marked, in part, by the absence of Billy Joel himself. Late last month, the musician announced that he was canceling all of his upcoming concerts because of a brain disorder called normal pressure hydrocephalus, which has led to problems with his hearing, vision and balance.After Robert De Niro called Joel “the poet laureate of New York” and helped introduce the film with a dramatic reading of some of his lyrics (“He works at Mr. Cacciatore’s down on Sullivan Street,” he intoned), one of the film’s co-directors, Susan Lacy, told the Beacon Theater audience that Joel sent his greetings — with typical wry humor: “In fact, he said, ‘Getting old sucks, but it’s still preferable to getting cremated.’” The audience roared with laughter. On a note of encouragement, Lacy said Joel “will be back.”The crowd broke out into applause throughout the screening, which included just the first part of the two-part film. It still ran nearly two and a half hours as it covered Joel’s childhood and rise to fame through his infamous 1982 motorcycle accident. (To put that in perspective: It doesn’t get to the writing of “Uptown Girl.” No Christie Brinkley yet.)There are pictures and footage of early Joel performances and stories about the surprisingly robust Long Island rock scene of the 1960s. But “Part One” is largely an intimate portrait of Joel’s relationship with his first wife, Elizabeth Weber, who would eventually become his manager, and it elevates her to a starring role in his life. It also features a host of stories about the making of some of his best-known songs, and tidbits about his Long Island obstinance. Here’s some of what we learned.As Joel’s relationship with Weber first foundered, he attempted suicide twice.Joel and Weber’s relationship began in dramatic fashion: She was married to Jon Small, Joel’s early bandmate, and had a son with him. Joel and Small first played together in a group named the Hassles, then broke off to start a Led Zeppelin-inspired metal outfit called Attila. (An album cover shoot featuring a longhaired Joel standing amid sides of raw beef, wearing fur, is something to behold.) Eventually, Joel fell in love with Weber, but when a guilt-ridden Joel shared his feelings with Small, he got punched in the nose and Weber left.Despondent, Joel overdosed on pills and was in a coma for days. His sister, Judy Molinari, who had provided the pills to help him sleep, recounts her guilt onscreen. “I felt that I killed him,” she says. Joel drank a bottle of furniture polish in another attempt on his life. After moving back into his mother’s house, he checked into an observation ward where his own struggles were put into perspective. From there he started to channel his feelings into music, and the songs that he wrote as a result of the experience would become his first solo album, “Cold Spring Harbor.” After about a year, Weber re-entered his life.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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      ‘Slumlord Millionaire’ Review: Costs of Living

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      A documentary looks at New York City residents pushing back against housing troubles.The documentary “Slumlord Millionaire” aims to put a face to a problem that far too many readers in New York will already be familiar with: the high cost of housing in the city. The film, directed by Steph Ching and Ellen Martinez, tells the stories of a cross section of people who in different ways are pushing back.In Brooklyn, the film follows Samantha Bravo-Huertero and her family in Sunset Park as they pursue a legal remedy against a landlord whom they claim neglects maintenance and discriminates against Latino residents. Elsewhere in the borough, Janina Davis recounts how she lost control of her dream brownstone in Clinton Hill to a developer.The movie tags along with Moumita Ahmed, from Jamaica, Queens, during her run for City Council in 2021, when she emphasized the issue of tenants’ rights. And in Manhattan, a group of residents in Chinatown is shown banding together to protest the construction of luxury towers that they fear will displace them.Both the horror stories (mold-induced asthma; rats that, in one woman’s words, “will come marching in, almost like troops”) and the complaints (that politicians and courts are more receptive to moneyed interests than to renters) are far from new. And because “Slumlord Millionaire” has assembled a dynamic and engaging group of activists, it seems churlish to complain that it hasn’t found a way to make the material cinematic.But its bullet-point-laden interviews often seem more suited to a news segment than an unfolding documentary. And it would help, particularly in the discussion of rent stabilization, if the film acknowledged more economic complexity than it does.Slumlord MillionaireNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Last Twins’ Review: A Rare Holocaust Story

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      Erno Spiegel was spared because he was a twin. He went on to help others at Auschwitz, as detailed in this documentary by Perri Peltz and Matthew O’Neill.The documentary “The Last Twins” tells the harrowing true story of Erno Spiegel, a Jewish man who was sent to Auschwitz concentration camp, but was spared for one reason: He was a twin. Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi physician, considered twins to be the ideal subjects because they allowed him to conduct what he believed were controlled genetic studies. He made Spiegel preside over a group of around 60 twin boys — many of whose lives Spiegel would save.Directed by Perri Peltz and Matthew O’Neill, “The Last Twins” is a conventional documentary made up of talking heads, archival materials and somber narration by Liev Schreiber. The speakers are mostly Holocaust survivors — some of the very boys whom Spiegel protected by forging documents or keeping crucial information secret. After the camps were liberated, Spiegel ended up leading his group of twins on a brutal winter trek through Poland and back home to Hungary.Hearing these survivors, now well into their 90s, talk about their experiences is devastating and poignant. But a cynical part of me wonders to what extent a documentary like “The Last Twins” simply scratches the same itch, allowing viewers to indulge a kind of morbid (if sympathetic) curiosity in the Holocaust. Should every unique survival story be packaged into the same kind of storytelling blueprint?One answer might be that real heroes — in the Holocaust and other histories of genocide — are often the stuff of fiction. Here, heroism is presented less as a feat of preternatural bravery than a series of choices made by someone who simply refused to give up his humanity.The Last TwinsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Sacha Jenkins, Filmmaker Who Mined the Black Experience, Dies at 53

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      Shaped by early hip-hop culture, his documentaries put race in the foreground, whether the topic was hip-hop fashion, the Capitol riots or Louis Armstrong.Sacha Jenkins, a fiery journalist and documentary filmmaker who strove to tell the story of Black American culture from within, whether in incisive prose explorations of rap and graffiti art or in screen meditations on Louis Armstrong, the Wu-Tang Clan or Rick James, died on May 23 at his home in the Inwood section of Manhattan. He was 53.The death was confirmed by his wife, the journalist and filmmaker Raquel Cepeda-Jenkins, who said the cause was complications of multiple system atrophy, a neurodegenerative disorder.Whatever the medium — zines, documentaries, satirical television shows — Mr. Jenkins was unflinching on the topic of race as he sought to reflect the depths and nuances of the Black experience as only Black Americans understood it.He was “an embodiment of ‘for us, by us,’” the journalist Stereo Williams wrote in a recent appreciation on Okayplayer, a music and culture site. “He was one of hip-hop’s greatest journalistic voices because he didn’t just write about the art: He lived it.”And he lived it from early on. Mr. Jenkins, raised primarily in the Astoria section of Queens, was a graffiti artist as a youth, and sought to bring an insider’s perspective to the culture surrounding it with his zine Graphic Scenes X-Plicit Language, which he started at 16. He later co-founded Beat-Down newspaper, which covered hip-hop; and the feisty and irreverent magazine Ego Trip, which billed itself as “the arrogant voice of musical truth.”Nas on the cover of the first issue of Ego Trip magazine, which billed itself as “the arrogant voice of musical truth.”Ego TripWe 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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      Misery Loves Company? Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair Hits a Nerve.

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      Movies that are major downers, it turns out, are a big film festival draw. “Sometimes the world is such that you just need to wallow a little bit.”The festival Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair started three years ago as a primal scream from a little Los Angeles nonprofit organization.What has happened since says a lot about the mood in at least one corner of American culture.The American Cinematheque, a nonprofit that brings classic art films to Los Angeles theaters, was struggling to sell tickets in 2022. Older cinephiles were still spooked by the Covid pandemic; younger ones were glued to Netflix.At the same time, some Cinematheque staff members were depressed about the direction the world seemed to be heading. It was the year Russia invaded Ukraine, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a gunman killed 19 children at a Texas elementary school and Big Tech rolled out artificial intelligence bots.Out of that somber stew came a programming idea called Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair. Over seven days, the Cinematheque screened 30 feel-bad movies. It called the selections “the greatest films from around the world that explore the darkest sides of humanity.” For the inaugural festival, one centerpiece film was Béla Tarr’s “Satantango” (1994), a seven-hour-and-19-minute contemplation of decay and misery.Gabriel Byrne in Joel Coen’s 1990 film “Miller’s Crossing.”20th Century Fox, via The American Cinematheque“‘Everyone was saying, ‘You should do comedies,’” Grant Moninger, the Cinematheque’s artistic director, said. “But we thought, ‘What if you did the exact opposite?’ We’re not in this to dangle keys at a baby.” (Now might be a good moment to mention that Moninger grew up with a mother, he said, who “only rented movies on VHS in two genres: the Holocaust and slavery.”)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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      Tribeca Festival: Music and Movies Make for a Successful Mix

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      The festival has more than 20 music events this year — its highest number yet — including documentaries, music videos and podcasts.Metallica, Billy Idol, Miley Cyrus and Depeche Mode — they are just a few of the music acts participating in the Tribeca Festival this month. The Korean rock band the Rose, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Wizkid and Anderson .Paak are also part of the mix.These artists are either the subject of documentaries or have a hand in creating films premiering at the event, which starts Wednesday and runs through June 15. Following their screenings, some musicians, like Billy Idol and Eddie Vedder, are taking the stage to perform in intimate settings compared with their usual mass crowds. Others, including Depeche Mode and Metallica, are sitting for conversations with audiences.Music has been a part of the event since its inception, according to the festival’s director and senior vice president of programming, Cara Cusumano. In its first edition in 2002, the festival partnered with MTV for a free community concert in Battery Park City with Sheryl Crow, Counting Crows, Wyclef Jean and David Bowie. “We have always considered Tribeca a storytelling festival, so music fits in alongside the other forms of storytelling we celebrate like games, immersive, TV, podcasts and, of course, film at the center,” Cusumano said in an email interview.Much like the festival itself, the amount of music at Tribeca has only grown over the years, she said. The increased presence of musical programming is driven by its popularity with audiences. Cusumano said that the music events saw the highest number of attendees compared with the number of attendees at any other part of the festival. Tribeca is hosting more than 20 music events this year — the highest number yet — including documentaries, music videos and podcasts.“Anecdotally, we often hear audiences speak about how special the experience was since they have usually just seen a doc about the artist, which puts the show and the artist themselves in a unique context,” Cusumano saidIn 2011, Tribeca opened with “The Union,” a documentary about making the eponymous album from Leon Russell and Elton John. In his performance for audiences after the premiere, John dedicated his love ballad “Your Song” to New York. The film and John’s concert set the precedent for Tribeca opening with a music documentary whenever possible, Cusumano 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