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      4 Surprising Things We Learned From the John Williams Documentary

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      A new Disney+ film about the prolific film composer chronicles his life and career, with a focus on his famous music for movies including “Jaws” and “Star Wars.”The composer John Williams is responsible for some of the most recognizable music in film history: the epic fanfares in “Star Wars,” the two-note dread of “Jaws” and too many other examples to name without sounding like an IMDb tour of popular American cinema.A new documentary, “Music by John Williams” (streaming on Disney+), introduces audiences to the man behind all of that music, featuring extensive interviews with Williams and glowing interviews with filmmakers he has worked with, including Steven Spielberg (also a producer of the movie), George Lucas and J.J. Abrams.Laurent Bouzereau, the documentary’s director, first met Williams while directing making-of features for the home video releases of Spielberg movies, including “Jaws,” “Jurassic Park” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”In a phone interview, he said the project started as part of Williams’s 90th birthday celebration, but it became clear it would be a waste to not do a full documentary combining his interviews with Spielberg’s archival footage of Williams, now 92, scoring his films. “I wanted people to understand his dedication to an art form,” Bouzereau said. “John is an eternal student.”Here are some takeaways from the film.When he first heard the ‘Jaws’ theme, Spielberg thought Williams was joking.Early in the documentary, Williams recounts the first time he played the opening music to “Jaws” for Spielberg.The director thought he was joking. “I was expecting something just tremendously complex, and it’s almost like ‘Chopsticks,’” he says.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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      Luther Vandross Is Transformational in the Documentary ‘Never Too Much’

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      He was hounded by a fat-phobic press, but as Dawn Porter’s new documentary shows, he was a transformational presence from the start.Beginning in the late 1970s, while making the transition from background singer to phenomenal solo act, Luther Vandross shaped the sound of commercialism as much as he shaped the sound of modern American music. He recorded lucrative jingles for Juicy Fruit, Miller beer and even Gino’s pizza. During the Gino’s session, he was asked to personify a sizzling hot pie coming from the oven, and he improvised by quickly dropping his tenor into the hadal zone of his body and retrieving it, like a free diver collecting pearls.“I could see the control room just jumping up and clapping,” he says in one of the interviews laced throughout “Luther: Never Too Much,” a new documentary by Dawn Porter (in theaters).It was a genius stroke. He developed a signature as recognizable as Whitney Houston’s record-length notes or Mariah Carey’s fluted crystalline range. Vandross’s musical intelligence predated what is obvious in the era of TikTok: A distinct sound is worth the price of gold.Vandross left a full, rich archive, yet there’s still an emptiness at the heart of it that manages to come through in Porter’s engrossing work. She starts her chronology with Vandross’s second birth. In an interview clip early in the film, Oprah asks Vandross when he knew he could sing. He answers that he decided to sing after seeing Dionne Warwick perform in 1963 in Brooklyn. “I wanted to be able to affect people the way she affected me that day,” he explains. Notice how he didn’t specify a date. Notice how he knew the voice was always there. He just chose the way he wanted to use it.Vandross with Dionne Warwick. He saw her sing in 1963 and decided he should sing as well. Jim Smeal/Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesIn the film, a white interviewer asks Vandross, who grew up in the Alfred E. Smith Houses on the Lower East Side, if he was poor then. His response is earnest if not amused. “My impression of life growing up was great.” He knew something that she did not: Money is only one kind of wealth.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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      Prickly Martha Stewart Makes for a Bracing Netflix Documentary

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      “Martha,” from R.J. Cutler, argues that she was ahead of her time. But though she sits for a lengthy interview, this isn’t hagiography.The re-evaluation of maligned celebrities — especially women who reached the height of fame in the 1990s — has become its own mini-genre of pop culture. Often the story tells a bigger tale: a culture bent on taking down successful women, or beautiful ones, or just ones who accidentally strayed into the spotlight.So I wasn’t surprised to see a documentary about Martha Stewart on Netflix’s docket. Titled “Martha” — from that one name, you know instantly who it’s about — and directed by R.J. Cutler, it makes a simple enough case: that Martha Stewart was in nearly every way ahead of her time. She was a stockbroker in the late 1960s, then started a catering company that became the impetus for her books about entertaining and homemaking. Eventually she became a media mogul, considered both the first self-made female billionaire and the original influencer. Then, the movie argues, she was also unfairly prosecuted as a result of her fame and the prosecutors’ need to make a name for themselves. But look, “Martha” says: her road back to influence in recent years on TV and on social media has been remarkable.All of this follows the traditional arc: success, fall from grace, eventual salvation. What I didn’t expect, though, was how Cutler would go about filling in the details. Stewart, who is 83, sat down for a lengthy interview — often an indicator of a pure public relations piece, only telling the story the subject wants told. Usually those are surface-level and hagiographical takes, just part of the overall brand-building package.That’s definitely present in “Martha,” which in its final section chronicles the past decade of Stewart’s life in very rosy terms, beginning with her participation in a 2015 Comedy Central roast of Justin Bieber, which began both her “cool grandma” era and her unlikely friendship with Snoop Dogg.But for most of the film, there’s more fruitful tension than blind celebration. Stewart makes for a prickly interviewee, especially when she’s talking about something she’s not interested in discussing in depth — her first marriage, for instance, or the subject of feelings in relationships. She argues a bit with Cutler. He occasionally lets a statement hang in the air or keeps the camera running, giving us a glimpse of something that feels not totally intended on her part.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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      ‘Chasing Chasing Amy’ Review: A Fan’s Favorite

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      Sav Rodgers sets out to define the legacy of Kevin Smith’s “Chasing Amy” in this documentary, which is elevated by one instructive interview.Partway through “Chasing Chasing Amy,” Sav Rodgers, a first-time feature director and a mega fan of the 1997 movie he’s exploring, sits to interview the film’s star, Joey Lauren Adams. He begins to discuss the role when Adams cuts in.“Are you looking to me for something that I can’t give you?” she asks Rodgers. “I don’t know what it is you want from me.”The moment marks a turning point in Rodgers’s agreeable documentary, which sets out to provide a contemporary lens on “Chasing Amy.” It opens with the director sharing that he once used the story as a queer field guide and a source of comfort amid adolescent struggles. He then calls on writers and thinkers to unpack the movie’s themes and fraught position in the queer canon.But it is not until his interview with Adams that Rodgers touches on the most urgent questions of his cinematic survey. What do filmmakers owe their fans? Who can lay claim to a movie? And who defines its legacy?Adams goes on to share painful memories from that era, including leering Hollywood men — Harvey Weinstein was the producer — and jealous barbs from the “Chasing Amy” director Kevin Smith, her boyfriend at the time.Rodgers, a sheepish and at times bewildered guide, seems ill-equipped to reconcile Adams’s reflections with his admiration for Smith and “Chasing Amy,” and instead pivots the story to focus on his own personal and professional evolution. It’s a convenient ending, but one senses that Rodgers can’t see that, in his overview of the movie’s cultural impact, some perspectives are more instructive than others.Chasing Chasing AmyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Youth (Hard Times)’ Review: Working Till They Drop

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      In Wang Bing’s riveting new documentary about Chinese garment workers, a generation asks: What good is money when you have no rights?Wang Bing calls his new films about Chinese garment workers the “Youth” trilogy for good reason: Most of the people shown clocking marathon hours at sewing machines are barely in their 20s. Maybe that’s why the concrete buildings where they both work and live can feel like dystopian dorms. The men and women split their time largely between cluttered workshops downstairs and bunkrooms upstairs, where they trade war stories of long hours, short wages and bad bosses.It’s a story as old as time, or industrialization, which may be why the English title of the trilogy’s second entry, “Youth (Hard Times),” evokes Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel set in a mill town. Wang’s nearly four-hour documentary depicts the migrants who trek to these streets of Zhili in the district of Huzhou City and earn “bitter money” (to borrow the title of an earlier Wang film). To watch them toil away despite thankless conditions is to admire their resilience but also feel their time being lost.“Youth (Hard Times)” leans into the obstacles thrown at workers and how, despite iron nerves and late nights, the house always wins. Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation. Some tales are mundane but maddening: A man is pushed to work faster with a broken machine. Others combine the ache of short fiction and the brutality of a police report: A slender young man fumes to friends about getting locked up in a police station over a wage dispute, and then his boss stiffs him when his “pay book” (logging his hours) goes missing.Wang’s camerawork feels keen, even personal. Often we hustle along the buildings’ open-air terraces, which lend a theatrical sense of everybody being in everybody else’s business. Days blur into nights — the workrooms don’t seem to have much sunlight — and Wang follows the workers’ youthful energies and comings and goings, which set the film’s pace over the machine-gun chatter of sewing desks. In one workshop, one man starts working shirtless, prompting someone to quip, “That’s a bit sexy.”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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      ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ Review: What Lies Beneath

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      A passionate and propulsive documentary about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba spins its web in many directions.There are many ways to judge a documentary, but a solid one is this question: Could this movie be an article? A great documentary shouldn’t merely be informative, or even tell a good story; it should also be a movie, harnessing every tool at the filmmaker’s disposal. In making “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous.It’s also demanding, a full dissertation crammed into one feature film, complete with citations and footnotes. (Literally.) You can’t zone out during this film. But that doesn’t mean it’s dry or academic. “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is a furious and elliptical film, a piece of true history structured like a spider web and drenched in real urgency. The story at its center is the rise to power and eventual C.I.A.-led assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was elected in May 1960, shortly before his country gained its independence from Belgium. Congo, a country rich with natural resources that were vital, among other things, to Western countries’ weapons of war, had been colonized by Belgium since the late 19th century.Or is that the story? “Soundtrack” entwines a number of threads, all of which are knotted into one another, though the links aren’t always clear till the movie’s thunderous conclusion. The Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev visits the United States and addresses the United Nations, denouncing American racism and demanding an end to colonialism. Black jazz musicians, like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, are sent to perform around the world as “ambassadors” of American good will and freedom, yet segregation is still the law back home. Leaders of African and Asian countries, newly admitted to the United Nations, form a voting bloc that could threaten the influence of world powers like the United States and the Soviet Union. Leaders of newly independent African nations speak of forming a United States of Africa. And while Eisenhower calls for no foreign interference into African politics, the C.I.A. has other plans.“Soundtrack” largely centers on events of 1960, depending almost entirely upon archival footage as well as the memoirs and writings of leaders and operatives from the time. Text — beautifully designed text, in fact, the work of the designer Hans Lettany — provides historical context and voices from the moment, underscored by on-screen citations (right down to the page number). But Grimonprez swirls the timeline a bit, jumping backward and forward just enough that the links between events — Louis Armstrong’s visit to Congo just as Lumumba is under house arrest and C.I.A. agents arrive in the country, for instance — start to emerge.But what really makes “Soundtrack” work is, well, its soundtrack. The film returns over and over to Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln performing their 1960 album “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.” These famed jazz musicians and many more provide a kind of score, a gorgeous, buoyant, anxious momentum. We watch them play and talk about their music, their hopes for their travels. Yet it’s probably no accident that this film’s title echoes the lauded 2010 documentary “Soundtrack for a Revolution,” which explores the power of Black activists, and in particular their music, in the Civil Rights Movement.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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      ‘After: Poetry Destroys Silence’ Review: A Study in Trauma

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      Richard Kroehling’s documentary presents a mixture of poets’ responses to the Holocaust and argues for the importance of the form in addressing trauma.“After: Poetry Destroys Silence,” directed by the multidisciplinary artist Richard Kroehling, positions itself as a counter to the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This experimental film, a combination of documentary, poetry reading and archival assemblage, insists on the need for poetry as a means of remembering and addressing trauma.Versions of the argument are made directly to the camera — and with unwarranted defensiveness — by the poets Alicia Suskin Ostriker and Edward Hirsch. The poetry featured onscreen makes the case for itself. The film highlights a variety of authors, including the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan (1920-70), heard in a haunting old recording reciting his poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), and the contemporary Brooklyn poet Taylor Mali, who shares a poem about his first wife’s death.The actor Geza Rohrig (“Son of Saul”) appears in a dual capacity as a documentary interviewee and as a poet himself; in addition to reciting his own work, he recalls the obsessive visits he made to Auschwitz. Melissa Leo turns up in something closer to an acting role in a segment based on Kroehling’s poem “Lost Photo.” Kroehling buttresses this already unusual mix of modes with a use of onscreen text that clearly evokes Jean-Luc Godard, while also demonstrating that Godard’s dense layering of image, language and sound is difficult to imitate. “After” presents a sincere plea for the right of artists to respond to horror, but it makes for an inert, academic viewing experience. The director hasn’t found a rhythm or pace to lend momentum to this exploration of disparate material.AfterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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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