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    Suleika Jaouad Revisits Bone Marrow Transplant in “American Symphony”

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    This month, writer Suleika Jaouad revisits her second bone marrow transplant in the documentary “American Symphony.”In the months following her second bone marrow transplant, Suleika Jaouad’s TikTok algorithm started serving her videos of bearded dragons shedding their skin. For a writer whose work deals in ambiguities, that metaphor was tidier than she’d have preferred.Ms. Jaouad quotes Joan Didion and Emily Dickinson in casual conversation. She is the author of “Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of Life Interrupted,” a best seller which documents her first bone marrow transplant and its aftermath. Diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2011, Ms. Jaouad recorded the experience in real time for a column in this paper.“Why am I drawn to these?” Ms. Jaouad, now 35, wondered of the reptilian videos. She posed the question while settling into the crook of her couch at her home in Brooklyn, with a lunch spread laid out over a low table in front of her. Her dog River ogled some baba ganoush from his perch near her feet.More than time-tested sonnets and snippets of Buddhist wisdom, it was molting bearded dragons that seemed to tell the truth about what Ms. Jaouad called, “the experience of forced renewal.” She too had molted — twice now. And like the lizards, she had no choice but to be vulnerable. “I was so stripped bare, I felt larval,” said Ms. Jaouad.Diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia in 2011, Ms. Jaouad recorded the experience in real time for a column in The New York Times.via Penguin Random HouseThis month, Ms. Jaouad will revisit the raw period of her cancer recurrence and second transplant when the feature documentary “American Symphony” premieres on Netflix in collaboration with Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company, Higher Ground. The work follows Ms. Jaouad and her husband, the musician Jon Batiste, as the couple faces what Ms. Jaouad has called their “life of contrasts.” Both Ms. Jaouad and Mr. Batiste serve as executive producers.Just how stark are the contrasts? In November 2021, Ms. Jaouad learned her cancer had returned. That same week, Mr. Batiste earned 11 Grammy nominations — the most of any artist. The night before Ms. Jaouad checked into the hospital for her transplant, the two — who met as middle schoolers at band camp and later reconnected — married at home and swapped twist-tie rings.Meanwhile, Mr. Batiste continued both to serve as bandleader on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” and to compose a one-time performance at Carnegie Hall in New York (also called “American Symphony”) that would distill the whole of American history into sound. In her sterile room, Ms. Jaouad started to paint and papered her walls in vibrant, sometimes gruesome watercolor.None of this was supposed to happen.As in the lead-up to her initial diagnosis, Ms. Jaouad had been negotiating persistent fatigue for months when she went to see her doctors for tests.It had been over a decade since Ms. Jaouad’s first bone marrow transplant. Her own medical team was so convinced of her durable health that the biopsy she insisted on was deemed a kind of indulgence. Minutes before the procedure, a nurse told her she didn’t have to do it. “I felt embarrassed,” Ms. Jaouad said. “I felt like I was being a hysterical, melodramatic hypochondriac.” She almost backed out, but the writer Elizabeth Gilbert — a friend and mentor — had driven her to the appointment. She didn’t want Ms. Gilbert to feel she had wasted her time.“I was right to push for the biopsy,” said Ms. Jaouad. “I wish I hadn’t been.”Netflix“She’s able to transform darkness, alchemize darkness, and transmutate darkness into light,” Mr. Batiste said of his wife.NetflixDoctors ground into Ms. Jaouad’s spine to extract a sample of her marrow. Ms. Gilbert stood watch, calling the ordeal “grisly as hell.” The relapse “simply wasn’t supposed to happen,” she wrote in an email. “There was no template for it, which was why nobody was looking for it.”“I was right to push for the biopsy,” said Ms. Jaouad. “I wish I hadn’t been.”The filmmaker Matthew Heineman had already started production on what would become “American Symphony” when Ms. Jaouad’s results came in. Mr. Heineman, who directed “Cartel Land” and “A Private War,” had been interested in shadowing Mr. Batiste as he devised the Carnegie Hall piece. Ms. Jaouad’s recurrence necessitated — as Mr. Heineman put it — a “pivot.”Ms. Jaouad was not sure she wanted to function as a plot twist.“I never want to be flattened into ‘the sick girl,’” Ms. Jaouad said of her deliberations. “I said to Matt outright, ‘I don’t want to be the dramatic counterpoint to Jon’s meteoric success.’” Mr. Heineman insisted he too was uninterested in the tropes of the illness plot. In “American Symphony” no one feels an errant lump. Ms. Jaouad doesn’t have a dramatic phone call with her oncologist. Viewers discover she has cancer in the middle of a fierce snowball fight in which Ms. Jaouad — struck and faux-outraged — protests: No hitting the girl with leukemia.Ms. Jaouad came around on the project as she did on “Between Two Kingdoms.” Then too, she had been hesitant. Ms. Jaouad recalled an encounter with the writer Cheryl Strayed not long after her first transplant. She told Ms. Strayed she wanted to write a book, but not one about illness. Ms. Strayed told her she had once been determined to avoid writing about the death of her mother. Then she turned in the manuscript for “Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.”“It’s about the hike, but it’s all about her dead mother,” Ms. Jaouad said with a smile.Ms. Jaouad’s book, and to some extent, “The Isolation Journals,” a popular newsletter she launched at the outset of the pandemic, explores how to re-enter the world after devastation. “American Symphony” follows up: How to keep going when there’s no straightforward “after.”So when it came time to watch an initial cut of the film (drawn from 1,500 hours of footage), Ms. Jaouad queued it up alone. “I feel a bit desensitized to it now,” she said. “That specific time is not representative of how I live or who I am.” But she has “no qualms” about her depiction or the decision to let Mr. Heineman film the crucial appointment three months post-transplant in which she would learn if her transplant worked. Mr. Heineman thus found out at the same time she and Mr. Batiste did that the procedure had been a success — and that Ms. Jaouad would have to be in treatment to outwit her cancer for the rest of her life.Lately, Ms. Jaouad is forcing herself to make plans. She sees it as an act of, “necessary optimism,” that she has committed to write two more books. Dana Golan for The New York Times“To describe it as a roller coaster would be an insult to roller coasters,” Ms. Jaouad said of her emotional whiplash. “The idea of indefinite treatment thrust me into a whole different kind of in-between place, and it’s one that I’m still learning to swim in.”“She’s able to transform darkness, alchemize darkness, and transmutate darkness into light,” Mr. Batiste said in a phone interview. (He called hours after still more Grammy nominations. This year, he earned six, including one for “Butterfly” — the song that plays in the “American Symphony” trailer and which he wrote for Ms. Jaouad.) “She’s able to look into what she’s facing and see not only how she can find God and find healing through it, but also provide that insight to hundreds of thousands and millions of other people out there whom she’s never met.”Necessary OptimismAfter the film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, Ms. Jaouad recalled that someone in the crowd approached her and said how relieved she was: “You’re still here.”“When it comes to illness stories, we tell them from the vantage point of having survived,” Ms. Jaouad said. In that sense, “American Symphony,” which stops short of a white-text-black-screen epilogue and offers no update on Ms. Jaouad’s health, is a corrective. “It wasn’t clear that I was going to survive the shooting period of this,” she said. The credits roll, but there is no neat ending for Ms. Jaouad and Mr. Batiste.“None of us know if we’re going to exist in the future, but I have a heightened fear of not existing in the future,” Ms. Jaouad said.In “Between Two Kingdoms” Ms. Jaouad writes about her exchanges with a man named Quintin Jones. Mr. Jones, who introduces himself to her as “Lil GQ,” read her columns while on death row. He’d written from a place of recognition — one trapped person to another. After her transplant, she visited him in prison. But the week her book was released, he was given an execution date. Ms. Jaouad was devastated. She threw herself into the movement to get his death sentence converted into a life sentence. It didn’t work.On the morning of his execution, Mr. Jones was granted four hours of phone calls. He spent them with Mr. Batiste and Ms. Jaouad. “It was unbelievable because we were talking in the future tense, knowing that the future wasn’t going to come to pass,” Ms. Jaouad said. “He talked about coming to visit us, hanging out in our garden. We were all just choosing to live in that space.” She tried to explain the suspension. Their conscious decision to be outside of time.Lately, Ms. Jaouad is forcing herself to make plans. She sees it as an act of, “necessary optimism,” that she has committed to write two more books. One will be a work of painting and prose that Ms. Jaouad has titled “Drowning Practice.” The second will be a book about journaling, incorporating writing prompts. She will show her work at the art center ArtYard next summer.A few weeks ago, Ms. Jaouad traveled to Seattle and was walking outside, suddenly under a torrential rain. Someone rushed to offer her an umbrella. “I was like, ‘No, I’m good,’” Ms. Jaouad remembered. She wanted to feel the rain on her face. Back in New York, she let herself fantasize. Not about prizes or red carpets, but about some unspecial rainstorm a decade from now. How incredible it would be not to feel new, she said. “If I’m around, I’ll want the umbrella.” More

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      Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Film: 4 Takeaways From the Premiere

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      The star skipped the red carpet and slipped into the celebrity-filled screening on Saturday night. But the movie pulls back the curtain — a little.Near the end of her new concert documentary, “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” Beyoncé states that she’s tired of being a “serial people-pleaser.” Since she was a child, she says, she has been striving for stardom, but now that she’s on top of the world and two years into her revelatory 40s, it’s time to recalibrate.“I have nothing to prove to anyone at this point,” she says.Maybe that’s why Beyoncé decided to skip the red carpet entirely at the Los Angeles premiere of her movie on Saturday night, leaving that task to a starry list of invitees that included Tyler Perry, Ava DuVernay, Lizzo and Issa Rae. Though Beyoncé made a posed appearance at the Oct. 11 premiere of “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” — like that concert documentary, “Renaissance” will be distributed by AMC Theaters — she entered her own premiere only after the lights had been turned off and the movie was seconds away from beginning.Unlike Swift, who shares plenty about her life and is currently in a high-profile, well-documented romance with the N.F.L. player Travis Kelce, Beyoncé is one of our most private superstars. She has given virtually no interviews over the last decade, and any insight into her life or work mostly has to be inferred from brief statements released on social media or her website. “Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé,” which chronicles the most recent world tour in support of her seventh studio album, offers fans something new to interpret, pulling back Beyoncé’s curtain ever so slightly.Here are four the takeaways from the premiere of the movie, which is out in theaters Dec. 1.This is more than just a filmed concertSwift’s AMC film was a straightforward concert documentary that never left the stage: It was meant to feel as if you had the best seat on her tour stop, but it included no behind-the-scenes frills.“Renaissance” does things a little differently. Like Beyoncé’s film “Homecoming,” which chronicled the assemblage of her 2018 Coachella performance, the new movie often takes us behind the steel girders to see just how the mammoth tour was put together. “I’m excited for people to see the show,” Beyoncé says in the film, “but I’m really excited for everyone to see the process.”That process comes in bits and pieces as we watch Beyoncé call the shots on everything from lighting to set decoration to orchestration, sometimes getting frustrated that her notes aren’t heard. “Communicating as a Black woman,” she says, “everything is a fight.”Still, people come around to Beyoncé’s will sooner or later, she says: “Eventually, they realize this bitch will not give up.”Beyoncé also devotes behind-the-scenes segments to her recovery from a knee injury, a hometown visit in Houston, and her late, treasured Uncle Johnny, whose love of house music helped inspire the dance bangers on “Renaissance.” And there’s plenty of fan footage, too: The film often cuts away to shots of audience members in various states of ecstatic crying or frozen, religious awe.Only a little bit got left outThough the ballad-heavy prelude that opened Beyoncé’s Renaissance set list is trimmed, nearly every other song from the tour is included in the film. She even found room for “Thique” and “All Up in Your Mind,” a Renaissance double-header excised from many of her tour stops.The only egregious omission in this two-hour-48-minute movie is a behind-the-scenes bit that goes by way too quickly: Beyoncé convenes a Destiny’s Child reunion in Houston that includes not just Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams but also two of the girl group’s first members, LeToya Luckett and LaTavia Roberson, who were contentiously pushed out. “It was like a new birth for us, and a lot of healing,” Beyoncé says in her narration, though we only see the five of them together for a second and don’t hear a single thing they discussed. I would have watched three more hours of that summit alone!The missing ‘visuals’ remain a mysteryThe “Renaissance” album was released in July 2022 without any sort of music-video accompaniment, a surprise given Beyoncé’s recent run of game-changing visual albums for “Lemonade” and her self-titled 2013 record. A subsequent teaser video for the first “Renaissance” album track “I’m That Girl” seemed to promise more to come, but none did.At a Louisville, Ky., stop on the Renaissance tour, a fan held up a sign asking where the visuals were, prompting Beyoncé to grandly tell the crowd, “You are the visuals.” (The crowd didn’t love that.) The “Renaissance” movie is cheeky enough to include that moment, but otherwise, there’s no mention of the missing visuals, nor an explanation of why they’ve seemingly been scuttled.Blue Ivy fought for her tour spotBy and large, the Renaissance tour eschewed celebrity cameos and surprise drop-ins, preferring to keep the focus on the queen bee herself. Big names joined Beyoncé onstage at only two tour stops: Houston, where Megan Thee Stallion performed “Savage,” and Los Angeles, where Diana Ross and Kendrick Lamar came out for the concert held on Beyoncé’s 42nd birthday.Those appearances all made it into the movie, but the special guest the movie is most interested in is Beyoncé’s 11-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, who often participated as one of the dancers on her mother’s songs “My Power” and “Black Parade.” I caught one of Blue Ivy’s first tour appearances last May in London, where she was still getting the hang of her choreography, but by the end of the Renaissance tour, she had everything — the moves, the attitude — down pat.Turns out, Blue Ivy’s performance was only supposed to be a one-off, and even that took some negotiating. “She told me she was ready to perform, and I told her no,” Beyoncé says in the film. Though she finally relented, Beyoncé was dismayed when Blue Ivy read comments on social media that criticized her lackluster moves. But it thrilled her mother that instead of quitting, she decided to put in the work and train even harder for future stops.Blue Ivy also pops up in much of the behind-the-scenes footage, offering her often unsugarcoated opinion on stage design, song choices and more. In a film where everyone else treats Beyoncé as a boss or a goddess, Blue Ivy is an amusingly irreverent presence: To this 11-year-old, Beyoncé is just a mom. More

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      ‘Against the Tide’ Review: Tales of the Sea

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      Sarvnik Kaur’s breathtaking documentary about Indigenous fishermen in Mumbai brings to life an ecosystem wrecked by corporate greed and climate change.“Against the Tide, ” Sarvnik Kaur’s breathtaking documentary about Indigenous fishermen in Mumbai, India, dispels the myth that cinematic beauty has to do with the power of the camera or the glossiness of the image. Shot by Ashok Meena, the film finds beauty, simply, in perspective.The camera looks down from above at a baby held gingerly between the knees of a grandmother as she rubs oil on his skin. It tilts gently upward on a boat that ventures into a roiling sea in the dark; it peers into a bucket of fish crowded by hands holding cash, as a seller barks his prices. In each frame, the right vantage point yields a revelatory view.Kaur tells the entangled stories of two fishermen from the Koli community. Rakesh, who lives in a cramped house with his wife, mother-in-law and newborn child, struggles to sustain a living with ancestral fishing practices. The more ambitious Ganesh employs giant deep-sea boats and LED lights (banned in many parts of India) to attract fish, but is still besieged by debt. As the two friends navigate work, manage their households and argue over late-night cups of tea, the camera stays close and loose, more like a quiet listener than a voyeur.The film avoids easy binaries of tradition and modernity, and instead brings to vivid life the ecosystem that encompasses both Rakesh and Ganesh — one that has been wrecked by corporate greed and climate change. Their only choice is between bad and worse, and if this makes the film rather bleak, the two men’s prickly yet undying friendship (centered by Kaur in another keen perspectival decision) warms the movie like a fire.Against the TideNot rated. In Hindi and Marathi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Smoke Sauna Sisterhood’ Review: Women, Uninterrupted

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      In Anna Hints’s bewitching documentary, Estonian smoke saunas beget a sweaty purification process — one that’s revealed to be more than skin deep.In Estonia, the smoke sauna is an 800-year-old tradition carried out with regularity — to this day — by the Voro community in the southeastern part of the country.Singled out by UNESCO as one of the world’s great cultural heritages (like the baguette in France or shadow puppetry in China), the Estonian practice begets a sweaty purification process — one that’s revealed to be more than skin deep in Anna Hints’s bewitching documentary, “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood.”Hints, whose grandmother introduced her to the smoke-sauna ritual, uses the documentary to speak volumes about what it means to be a woman, even as the focus remains fixed on a single location: a cramped sauna-cabin located in a forest.Inside the womblike sauna, Hints simply lets the women, who are primarily middle-aged and older, speak freely among themselves, just as they’re accustomed to doing; she doesn’t bother with title cards or other forms of contextualization. The women talk about their bodies, their relationships with men and the difficulties of growing up in a patriarchal society. One woman, her face obscured by her arm as she lies on the sauna bench, shares a horrific story about being raped as a teenager. The others listen attentively, providing the speaker with the compassionate audience she never had in her youth.Most of the subjects have chosen to remain anonymous, so Hints and the cinematographer Ants Tammik film the nude women from the neck down or using disembodied close-ups. Contrary to what one might expect, the focus on bare chests, perspiring backs and stretches of glistening skin doesn’t feel provocative.Instead, these raw bodies exhibit an organic kind of beauty, real and uninhibited as they commune with the swirling smoke from burning wood and the clouds of steam produced by moistened rocks. It’s no wonder the women tend to open up under these sweltering conditions. To feel fully aware of one’s own body is to acknowledge its scars, too.Smoke Sauna SisterhoodNot rated. In Estonian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros’ Review: A Beautiful Collaboration

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      For his 44th documentary, Frederick Wiseman journeys to the French countryside to examine the workings of a family-owned, Michelin-starred restaurant.Frederick Wiseman’s transporting documentary “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” centers on a dynasty of French chefs who live and work in a pastoral region in central France named Ouches, some 65 miles west of Lyon. There, amid rolling green hills and under the canopy of a century-old oak, the Troisgros family has a celebrated restaurant whose beginnings date back to 1930. The current paterfamilias, Michel, who’s in his mid-60s, has been cooking his whole life, and while you could say he makes food, it feels more like an expression of love.Making food sounds too pedestrian for the meticulously prepared, strikingly plated dishes that come out of the kitchen at their restaurant, Le Bois Sans Feuilles (The Woods Without Leaves), and certainly this is cooking on a rarefied level. It has long been acclaimed, receiving its first Michelin star in 1956 and holding on to its third since 1968. (It’s gone through several iterations and name changes.) Michel’s father and uncle, Pierre and Jean, were widely considered to be nouvelle cuisine pioneers, emblematized by a famous salmon and sorrel dish they invented. The chef Daniel Boulud includes the Troisgros salmon recipe in several of his cookbooks.“Menus-Plaisirs” is Wiseman’s 44th documentary and the first that he’s made since “City Hall” (2020), which notionally focuses on the administration building for the city of Boston. (In between “City Hall” and “Menus-Plaisirs,” he made one of his rare forays into fiction, “A Couple,” about Sophia Tolstoy.) Wiseman’s great subject is institutions, though more rightly the tension between organizations — with their spaces, norms and rituals — and the people moving through them. The bluntly descriptive titles of his movies are an authorial signature (“Hospital,” “High School,” “Boxing Gym”) and suggestively and purposely generic; one of the profound satisfactions of his work is seeing how he turns the general into the specific.Wiseman directed, edited and served as one of the producers on “Menus-Plaisirs,” which runs a heroic four hours (about a half-hour shorter than “City Hall”!). It’s absorbing from start to finish. Much of it takes place inside the bright, nature-inspired Le Bois Sans Feuilles, which is part of a larger complex set in a mid-19th-century estate that the family restored a few years back and includes a boutique hotel overseen by Michel’s wife, Marie-Pierre. Wiseman also pops into another Troisgros restaurant, Le Central, in the neighboring city of Roanne, making a more leisurely visit to a third, the nearby La Colline du Colombier, which is in the countryside.Wiseman’s approach is analytical and dialectical, and only seemingly straightforward. As is customary with his movies, “Menus-Plaisirs” doesn’t have music, voice-over narration, onscreen descriptive text, chapter titles or any other standard hand-holding. Wiseman instead uses images of specific physical spaces — the movie opens on the Roanne railway station and then cuts to its bustling, sumptuously stocked farmer’s market — that immediately establish a strong sense of place. In other words, he grounds you in the world of the movie and then, face by face, shot by shot, scene by scene, steadily fills in its details.The movie is arranged in distinct sections that suggest the rhythms of running a restaurant. The inaugural segment (call it Prep) introduces Michel and his sons: César, who cooks alongside his father and some dozen others at Le Bois Sans Feuilles, and the younger Léo, the chef for La Colline du Colombier. The sons run into each other at the market, where they’re hunting and pecking among the perfectly arranged leafy greens, bouquets of beets and radishes, and astonishing clusters of oyster mushrooms. In this section, the sons also meet with Michel to discuss menu options, and then the movie shifts to Le Bois Sans Feuilles.It’s there in this restaurant’s spacious, quietly humming open kitchen that the movie begins to gather momentum as Wiseman moves about focusing on one and then another station: One chef expertly filets a large salmon while another trims and butchers some ribs. Elsewhere, Michel and a sommelier discuss some outrageously priced Burgundies, and a brigade of servers ready themselves for the fast-approaching service. “Menus-Plaisirs” has all the virtues of a Wiseman movie, but its focus on beautiful food that’s prepared and served with equal beauty makes it especially seductive, even if you’re not keen on everything on the menu. I now know, for instance, more than I ever cared to about cooking veal brains.Once the customers arrive (call this section Service), the rhythms of the kitchen appreciably accelerate. Anyone who’s ever watched great cooks in action (in life or on TV) knows how enjoyable, even hypnotic it can be watching people with superb craft and technique at work, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Wiseman is sensitive to the sights and sounds of kitchens, including the tempos of chopping knives and the syncopated hiss and burble of pots on a hot stove. He also underscores the hard work on an individual level and when the chefs are in the flow together. These kitchens thrum with quiet intensity, not ego.As “Menus-Plaisirs” continues, its focus widens as the chefs meet with some of their providers — at a small cattle farm, a vineyard, a cheese cave — where the mutual respect is palpable and the talk is sincere and often turns to sustainability. Each of these interludes could be spun off into a separate documentary, but together they expand the prismatic portrait of a family for whom cooking is an aesthetic, a passion, an expression of love, an ethic. There’s individual genius in the Troisgros kitchens, no doubt, but also enormous collaborative effort, which makes the documentary a nice metaphor for filmmaking itself. “Everything is beautiful,” a visibly moved Michel says of his estate; the same holds true of this deeply pleasurable movie.Menus-Plaisirs — Les TroisgrosNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 4 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Stamped From the Beginning’ Review: Examining Racist Thought

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      The documentary, based on Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book, looks at the ugly history of anti-Black ideology.The documentary “Stamped From the Beginning,” based on the 2016 book by Ibram X. Kendi, begins with a trick question and ends with a sage retort.“What’s wrong with Black people?” asks the director Roger Ross Williams of the film’s heady roster of Black female scholars as they consider the ways in which the slave trade created anti-Black racism and, as Kendi argues, not the reverse. The formidable interviewees include the novelist Honorée Fanonne Jeffers; the historian Elizabeth Hinton; and the activist and scholar Angela Davis. When Davis discusses the work “not done” at slavery’s end to retool “the entire society so that it might be possible for previously enslaved individuals to be free and equal,” her words are as muscularly poignant as they are pointed.The subtitle of Kendi’s book is “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” And Williams employs several methods to distill the National Book Award-winning tome’s ambitions as it moves from the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, back to the Portuguese enslavement of Africans and forward to the rise of Trumpism in reaction to the presidency of Barack Obama.In addition to interviews and archival images, film clips and news footage, Williams (“Cassandro” “Life, Animated”) leans into animation. In an engaging gambit, the director utilizes a mix of visual effects, painting and collage to tell the stories of the poet Phillis Wheatley; the author Harriet Jacobs and the journalist and anti-lynching pioneer Ida B. Wells. In a film brimming with visual gestures, these mini portraits of anti-racists are among its most memorable.Stamped From the BeginningRated R for some violent content, language, drug content and nude images. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream: Family Matters

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      Four picks from television, films and podcasts that show blood is not always thicker than water.Family secrets, tumult and trauma are at the heart of so many — if not most — true crime stories, and breed some of the most bizarre betrayals. Here are four picks including podcasts, television and films that explore unforgettable crimes involving families, all of whom prided themselves on presenting a perfect image until the truth came crashing through the facade.Docuseries“Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal”Watching a true crime documentary that is following events that are presently unfolding — where those telling the tale also have no idea of what’s to come — is particularly gripping. And this tale of greed, corruption, outlandish cover-ups and murder in the lowcountry region of South Carolina is a doozy. It is, as the New York Times television critic Mike Hale put it, an “unbeatable crime story.”The first three-episode season, on Netflix, premiered midway through the trial of the family’s patriarch, Alex Murdaugh: the disgraced personal injury attorney and an heir to the area’s legal dynasty, who was accused of killing his wife, Maggie, and son Paul in 2021. The second season picks up from there, covering the march to the verdict. Both seasons were released this year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      ‘Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later’ Review: Trailblazers Revisited

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      This documentary from Daniel Peddle offers an update on the transmasculine people of color who participated in ballroom culture in the 1990s.The 2005 documentary “The Aggressives” provided a novel view of ballroom culture, or the underground pageant scene which emerged as a haven for queer Black and Latino youths in the 1980s and ’90s. The subjects of the 2005 film are people who identified themselves as “aggressives” — they were assigned female at birth, but they competed in ballroom categories highlighting their masculinity. They walked the catwalk dressed in construction gear and basketball jerseys. The original film followed its stars for five years, as they carried their gender performance out of the ballroom and into the streets, into their relationships and family lives.Now, decades years later, the director Daniel Peddle follows up with his former subjects, in the documentary “Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years Later.” Four of the original subjects of “The Aggressives” return to offer updates from their lives, and once again, the filmmaker interviews his subjects across five years.One such subject, Kisha, who was once a model, has grown into an artist, and the film uses Kisha’s photography as a clever way to include commentary on the original film from new transmasculine, nonbinary or lesbian subjects. Trevon now identifies as transmasculine and nonbinary, and is happily partnered and considering how to build a family. Octavio works to reestablish a relationship with his son, and he considers when to pursue gender affirming surgery. Chin seeks support from the Transgender Law Center for assistance in navigating immigration law after he is targeted for deportation by ICE. In each of these updates, Peddle hews close to his original film’s style: he asks his subjects to define themselves and then he keeps watching, letting their actions color in the lines of their self-definition. It’s an approach which grants dignity to his subjects, an effect which is only amplified by the passage of time.Beyond the Aggressives: 25 Years LaterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Disappearance of Shere Hite’ Review: The Feminist Mystique

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      Nicole Newnham’s documentary charts the life and times of the feminist Shere Hite, whose pioneering research on women’s sexuality earned her both fame and notoriety.“The Disappearance of Shere Hite” opens with a 1976 TV interview with Shere Hite about her pioneering study, “The Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality.” As she talks about the revelations of her research — that women masturbate, and most men don’t know how to please them — the interviewer tells a crew member to stop snickering.Then a cut reveals that what we’re watching is actually a clip being screened within another archival clip, from a 1994 interview, in which Hite reflects on her early media appearances. It’s a nifty opening that drives home Hite’s prominence in culture from the 1970s to the ’90s — and how strange it is that the groundbreaking feminist, who died in 2020, is barely discussed now.Nicole Newnham’s film recoups Hite’s story from the margins of feminist history with both style and substance, taking its cue from its subject. Tall, blonde and immaculately dressed, Hite was a model who appeared in Playboy, and a Columbia University graduate student who railed eloquently against sexism and classism.“The Hite Report,” which compiled questionnaires completed anonymously by thousands of women, was a best seller — but in interview after interview, Hite struggled to be taken seriously. By the time her later studies on male sexuality and women’s love lives were published, she had been labeled a male-basher and a fraud, and went into self-imposed exile in Europe.Newnham weaves deftly between biography and history, damningly situating the backlash to Hite’s taboo-breaking work alongside Anita Bryant’s anti-gay activism and Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings. Yet the film also shimmers with hope. Dulcet-voiced readings of Hite’s memoirs by Dakota Johnson (also an executive producer) remind us that it is possible, even in an unyielding world, to think far beyond one’s time.The Disappearance of Shere HiteRated R for brazen talk of women’s sexuality. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More