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    In ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics,’ Director Petra Costa Examines Brazil’s Rightward Shift

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    The director Petra Costa examines a rightward shift in her country by zeroing in on the rise of a televangelist.Here is one thing that makes Petra Costa’s new documentary, “Apocalypse in the Tropics” (in theaters and streaming Monday on Netflix), so powerful: It is very precisely not about American politics. Yet the temptation for a segment of viewers to see it as being about that will, I suspect, be insurmountable. But Costa is here to tell a bigger story.She begins with the extraordinary shift in her homeland of Brazil toward evangelical Christianity — over the past 40 years, the percentage of Brazilians identifying as evangelical has grown to 30 percent from 5 percent, by some estimates. That’s an immense, almost unprecedented change.What’s more, it’s had radical effects on that nation’s politics, leading directly to the election of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Costa wasn’t raised to be particularly religious, so she approaches the subject as something of an anthropologist who knows Brazil well. (Her parents are left-wing Brazilian activists who opposed the military dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to 1985, and her fiery 2019 film, “The Edge of Democracy,” explored both her and her country’s political past.) Instead of focusing solely on Bolsonaro and his electoral battle with Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the current president, Costa hones in on something else: the way the Pentecostal televangelist and celebrity Silas Malafaia has operated at the core of politics.She suggests that Malafaia, with the money and influence he wields, was extremely consequential in the rise and popularity of Bolsonaro. In other words, she argues that his media savvy, tied to capitalism and a certain strain of apocalypticism, accounts for the rightward lurch in Brazil’s politics.What she’s pointing out is how these three things — the lure of money, the lure of celebrity and the lure of power — constitute an unholy trinity, especially when held and venerated by a figure like Malafaia, who can dole them out. That has always been true. Humans love to be rich, popular and important, and a lot of the time those things can be woven into people’s religious beliefs, making those convictions even stronger.But it may be that elements of the present, like social media, internet misinformation and extinction-level threats to human life make that combination more potent than ever. That’s what “Apocalypse in the Tropics” draws out so well: This pattern in Brazil is infinitely repeatable. If you recognize it, well, it’s not because your country’s leaders are unique. It’s because while history may not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes. More

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      ‘Little, Big, and Far’ Review: Dwelling in the Cosmos

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      The experimental director Jem Cohen’s latest is an uncategorizable film about astronomers and humanity and love and the stars.Around halfway through Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Misérables,” the omniscient narrator is musing on the ways that the tiniest and grandest building blocks of life in our cosmos intersect. “Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins,” he writes. “Which of the two possesses the larger field of vision?”Good question. In Jem Cohen’s uncategorizable film “Little, Big, and Far,” an astronomer named Karl (Franz Schwartz) remarks that he was surprised as a child to learn that the stars were millions of miles apart, something he tells us while we’re seeing images of the night sky. From his point of view perched on Earth, those stars seemed crowded together, keeping one another company, all connected. This leads him to ruminate on how human relationships can contain vast distances, even when our bodies are in relative physical proximity. For instance, there’s the distance that’s grown between him and his wife of 40 years, Eleanor (Leslie Thornton), who’s also an astronomer, and who seems to be drifting away.That sense of echoes between celestial bodies, our bodies and the tiniest parts of the world — the ways things like uncertainty and harmony and connection and memory are embedded in the natural world, as well as the more metaphysical one — is the theme of “Little, Big, and Far.” But I am not quite sure how to tell you what the film is, other than achingly beautiful. Those who’ve seen Cohen’s previous films, including “Museum Hours,” will have a sense of what they’re in for; I’ve seen “Big, Little and Far” described as an “epistolary essayistic docu-fiction hybrid,” which is accurate but not all that illuminating.Epistolary, because most of the dialogue in the film is in the form of letters between Karl and a younger colleague, Sarah (Jessica Sarah Rinland), who is forming a relationship with Mateo (Mario Silva), also an astronomer. Karl and Sarah share their thoughts about their work, their relationships, their lives and the things that draw them to the stars. Often we’re hearing their letters while seeing images of a giant telescope, people on a town square, traffic whizzing by on the highway, the natural world, the lights in the night sky. We hear a little from Eleanor, too, who speaks about watching an eclipse from a mall parking lot and being just as fascinated by the way the other observers, mostly strangers to one another, form a little community for the moment.During this rumination and many others, most images we are seeing are of real people going about their real lives, whether it’s riding the light rail in Vienna or sitting on a folding chair and watching a solar eclipse. In one stretch of the film, Sarah’s voice reflects on whether museums, as she puts it, must be “places not only of knowledge, but of mourning” in an era in which species are disappearing from Earth at fearsome rates. As we listen, we watch people milling about a natural-history museum, looking at the displays, seemingly unaware of the presence of a camera.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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      ‘Videoheaven’ Review: Rewinding the Tape

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      A documentary by Alex Ross Perry examines how movies and TV have portrayed video store culture.Borrowing the format of “Los Angeles Plays Itself” (2004), Thom Andersen’s great, sprawling survey of how movies have depicted Los Angeles, Alex Ross Perry’s archival documentary “Videoheaven” takes on a topic that is considerably more niche: how movies have depicted video stores.The subject is more capacious than it might sound. For one thing, it is intriguingly time-bound. Video stores couldn’t have appeared in movies until the late 1970s, says Maya Hawke, who narrates, in a nod to her role as a video store employee on “Stranger Things.” Eventually, such stores will only be portrayed by people who never experienced them firsthand, she says, “like westerns or the World War II film.”Drawing on Daniel Herbert’s book “Videoland,” Perry traces how films and TV went from showing home viewing as exotic or dangerous (“Videodrome,” “Body Double”) to seeing it as routine. Onscreen, video stores became sites for romantic interaction or potential embarrassment. Pondering a television trope in which a person seeking to rent a pornographic movie is, without fail, shamed, “Videoheaven” describes “an extremely 1990s paradox wherein adults are interested in sexuality but unwilling to admit it.”The observations range from the incisive to the grandiose, and at nearly three hours, “Videoheaven” could stand a tighter edit. Early on, a line of voice-over is sloppily repeated verbatim. And Perry only needs so many clips of obnoxious clerks, even if it’s funny to see David Spade repeatedly typecast in that role.But the material will be irresistible to any cinephile who has spent countless hours in these spaces, and a critic would do well to admit susceptibility. I’ve met Perry a few times over the years, and the first time, he thought I looked familiar — I assume because I had frequented the Kim’s Video where he worked.VideoheavenNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      When Nobu Masuhisa Changed Sushi in America Forever

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      “I am so glad I didn’t give up on my life and kept going,” says the chef, who’s the subject of a new documentary about his remarkable career.Nobu sits along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, with ocean waves lapping under its outdoor deck. It is an interlude of tranquillity along a road that is a maze of construction crews, police cars, fire trucks and the charred frames of beachfront homes — evidence of the wildfires that raced through here earlier this year.But at 11:45 a.m. on a recent Saturday, the crowd stretched 200-feet deep waiting for Nobu to open for lunch. By 12:30, every table was filled. It was a testament to the endurance and appeal of a restaurant that encapsulates — in food, celebrity and style — a global phenomenon that began 38 years ago, and 20 miles away, when the chef Nobu Matsuhisa opened a modest sushi restaurant in Beverly Hills.At 76, Matsuhisa today sits atop a restaurant and hotel empire that stretches almost entirely around the globe. He is the chef who, as much as anyone, transformed the sushi scene in New York and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles. He was one of the first chefs, along with Wolfgang Puck, to have soared beyond the boundaries of his first restaurant to become a celebrity in his own right. And he is now the subject of a new documentary, “Nobu,” tracing the arc of his life, from growing up in a small town outside Tokyo to becoming a magnate with homes in Japan and Bel-Air.“I am step by step,” Matsuhisa told me. “When I opened my first restaurant in 1987, I never thought about growing. Always I had the passions — always my base was cooking. And now I have so many, we have so many restaurants around the world.”“There are a handful of people who have changed the way the world eats,” the critic Ruth Reichl says in the documentary. “Nobu is certainly there in that pantheon.”AGC InternationalAs Matt Tyrnauer, the filmmaker who spent two years making the documentary, said over plates of sushi at the Nobu in Malibu: “He’s gone from one modest restaurant on La Cienega to becoming a global luxury brand centered on food and hospitality. There are not a lot of people that have pulled that off.”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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      Barbara Walters Film ‘Tell Me Everything’ Sticks to Highlights

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      “Tell Me Everything” is more of a puff piece than its subject might have liked, but the film is at its best examining TV journalism’s evolution.Given the subtitle — and, to be honest, the subject — of Jackie Jesko’s documentary “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” (streaming on Hulu), I expected a bit more soul-baring. That’s what Walters, the pioneering journalist who dominated the TV interview for decades, was known for. As Oprah Winfrey notes in the film, Walters’s specialty was getting subjects from Fidel Castro and Anwar Sadat to Monica Lewinsky and Winfrey herself to say something they’d never said to anyone.There’s nothing that really qualifies as a bombshell or revelation in this film, though. Like most documentaries about celebrities these days — and Walters, who died in 2022, was undoubtedly a celebrity — it features some frank comments from various interviewees, but carefully positions Walters in her best light: not a flawless woman, but one whose foibles don’t detract from her overall legacy.That means the film comments upon but doesn’t dwell on some of Walters’s more controversial moments: grilling women like Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga on their romantic lives, or cozying up to men like the notorious Roy Cohn. The lives of women in the spotlight are often scrutinized far more intently than those of their male colleagues, but here it’s not without reason: journalists who aspire to do their work in a fair, independent way have to accept that close personal relationships with subjects are off-limits in their private lives, and some questions probably cross ethical lines. But the film tries to frame most of these moments as responses to her upbringing, without spending much time on how they play into a broader American attitude of mistrust toward journalists.By those standards, “Barbara Walters: Tell Me Everything” is disappointing, and more of a puff piece than I suspect Walters herself would have wanted. Yet seen through a different lens, it’s also fascinating — a rather thrilling history of television journalism, as seen through Walters’s life.That’s because she was absolutely a trailblazer for women in news, subjecting herself to plenty of ridicule as she took on one barrier after another: co-hosting a morning show, then anchoring evening news, landing consequential interviews, breaking ground with newsmagazines and innovative talk formats like “20/20” and “The View,” and ultimately creating a brand out of herself that signaled something to the public. There was a time when “the Barbara Walters interview” with a celebrity was an Event, something to stay up late and watch.Throughout the film, a host of voices — including Walters’s own, via archival interviews — tell this story. Winfrey and the seasoned news anchor Katie Couric, in particular, are valuable in filling in the historical background, showing how television journalism progressed from an era in which “hard news” was the realm of serious men in suits, all the way to the years when Walters sat around on a couch with her fellow hosts on “The View,” mixing news and interviews with live-wire conversations. Alongside Walters, they tell the tale of a shift in the shape of TV news. A medium built for entertainment has slowly changed how journalism is delivered and what you expect, and you can see it happening right before your eyes.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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      ‘Afternoons of Solitude’ Review: Man Versus Bull

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      Albert Serra’s mesmerizing documentary about a bullfighter faithfully depicts a violent tradition and the specter of death that suffuses it.Albert Serra’s first documentary feature, “Afternoons of Solitude,” shows the Peruvian-born torero Andrés Roca Rey as he battles bulls in the ring and psychs himself up offstage. The film’s faithful depiction of the bloody Spanish tradition could serve as an argument against the much-protested practice, but Serra’s vision is mesmeric not polemic. He records spangled ceremonies marinated in the fear of death, producing an X-ray of the male ego and its costly upkeep.Serra doesn’t frontload the spectacle: He likes to observe Roca Rey at rest, driven in a crowded car and facing a fixed camera. The fresh-faced bullfighter obsesses over his matches and masculinity, and his cuadrilla (team of assistants) big him up like a boxer before a fight. Serra’s mastery of mood in the film builds on an iconoclastic career spanning from the Don Quixote deconstruction “Honor of Knights” to the atomic tropicalia of “Pacifiction.”In the ring, Roca Rey and the bull are often tensely composed in medium shots and close-ups. The face-offs are hypnotic, like those between a mongoose and python; Roca Rey grimaces as he risks being gored in his angling and attacks. But notions of courage are complicated by the preparatory rituals of the “picadors,” who stab the bulls until they are weakened by muscle injury and blood loss.If this review sounds conflicted, that reflects the power of a nonfiction film that might also escape its director’s loftier intentions. This flop-sweat portrait suggests that a toreador is never as brave as the bull and maybe knows it.Afternoons of SolitudeNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Natasha,’ a Film About a Murdered Russian Activist, Takes Its Own Risks

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      The widely condemned killing of Natalya Estemirova is the subject of a documentary that those involved say needed to take heed of the dangers of speaking out.For a decade, Natalya Estemirova documented brutal human rights abuses in Chechnya. Her work led to her becoming one of the most prominent and respected human rights defenders working in that small predominantly Muslim region of Russia.But on the morning of July 15, 2009, as she was leaving her apartment, she was abducted and murdered, crimes for which no one has been charged but are viewed by many as precipitated by her work.Years later, filmmakers and former colleagues trying to tell her story encountered their own set of risks as they endeavored to draw attention to her heroism and the conditions that provoked it.The resulting short 35-minute documentary, “Natasha,” as Natalya was known, premiered this month at the Tribeca Film Festival.Andrew Meier, one of the two producers and directors of the film, said he does not imagine it will be shown in Russia anytime soon.“Even revisiting Natasha’s work and Natasha’s murder is a taboo, to put it mildly,” he said in an interview. “It’s one of the big cases you just don’t talk about in Chechnya.”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 a New Documentary, the Deaf Actress Marlee Matlin Talks About Prejudice

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      In a new documentary, the actress talks about the prejudice and loneliness she faced after becoming the rare Hollywood star who is deaf.Actors in documentaries about their own lives rarely — perhaps never — speak with the kind of candor that Marlee Matlin brings to Shoshannah Stern’s new film “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” (in theaters). This kind of project all too often results in a cagey puff piece, lots of warmed-over memories accented by one mildly surprising revelation, which ensures the movie will make headlines.Not this film. From the start, Matlin speaks with an unvarnished frankness about the loneliness and prejudice she encountered when she burst into public consciousness in “Children of a Lesser God,” for which she won the best actress Oscar in 1987. For 35 years, she was the only deaf performer with an Academy Award — a record finally broken in 2022, when Troy Kotsur won for “CODA,” in which he co-starred with Matlin. Now, she says, she isn’t alone anymore.But the path to this point was littered with frustrations in a world that still treats deaf people as second-class citizens. Matlin talks about how solitary she often felt, set apart not just from the hearing world but at times from the deaf one, too. She speaks, with nuance but also pain, of her relationship with her “Children of a Lesser God” co-star William Hurt, who was 16 years older and, she says, abusive at times. (Hurt died in 2022. In 2009, he issued a public apology “for any pain I caused.”) She also addresses the clear anti-deaf bias that surfaces in the news media — demonstrated, pointedly, by archival clips of interviewers saying offensive things — and how it shaped her addiction struggles as well as the way she presented herself in the years following her Oscar win.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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      ‘America’s Sweethearts’ Is a Compelling Sports Series

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      Season 2 of this docuseries about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders is an intense look at found families and all the healing and trouble that come with them.Season 2 of the documentary series “America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders,” on Netflix, is a bit less rah-rah than Season 1 — still full of tears, high kicks and sisterhood but also more attuned to the pain of it all, the sorrow and struggle of cobbling together one’s self-worth.One of this season’s leads is Jada, a five-year veteran of the team and among its best dancers and most thoughtful leaders. She lays out the season’s theme at the beginning: “Everyone’s going to say, ‘Well, they’re just cheerleaders,’” she says. “Well, we’re really good cheerleaders.”Her grin begins to spread. “Show us that you appreciate us,” she adds.Are the members of the team appreciated? Not with money, they’re not, and part of this season’s most invigorating arc is the cheerleaders’ quest for better pay. Season 1 brought additional fame and adulation to the team, and it also drew attention to the exploitation of the enterprise. As Kylie, another team veteran, explains: “The world was kind of telling us, ‘Girls, fight for more.’ And we’re like, ‘OK!’”As the women practice the grueling signature routine, we hear the opening strains of the AC/DC song “Thunderstruck,” over and over. But the true refrain of the season is the fretting about being in one’s own head. It’s the catchall term for all distress and self-recrimination, the explanation for any lack of confidence or lapse in perfection. Yes, performers can overthink things, especially in prolonged auditions, and rumination and anxiety are enemies to the wide smiles and sexy winks the Dallas cheerleaders’ routines require. The job is to make it look easy.But there’s an interesting tension. Your head is where the good ideas are, too — ideas like: “Hey, a lot of people are making a lot of money off my work; why doesn’t any of that go to me?” Or: “Even people who I believe have my best interests at heart can disappoint and hurt me.”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