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      ‘Introducing, Selma Blair’ Review: An Actress in Her Second Act

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      A window into the actress’s battle with multiple sclerosis.The documentary “Introducing, Selma Blair” presents a bracingly relatable version of an often all-too-artificial event: a performer navigating the process of reinvention. Change came to the actress Selma Blair involuntarily, when she was diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacks the central nervous system, in August 2018. She went public with her illness with an Instagram post in October of that year.Blair’s initial announcement was candid, detailing the initial apathy she received from medical professionals, and she offered generous thanks to the friends — some famous and some not — who encouraged her to seek help. At the time, Blair, now 49, was best known for her supporting roles in several of the most approachable and entertaining Hollywood movies of the last 20 years. This familiarity lent to her remarkably frank post the quality of reading an update from an old friend.Her decisions following her public announcement remained consistent with this initial burst of sincerity. Blair continued to publicly document her illness on Instagram. She attended red carpets with a jeweled cane. She offered interviews, permitting journalists to show her disruptions of speech and movement. She was in turn glamorous and clumsy, funny and mournful.The documentary “Introducing, Selma Blair” expands the existing record of Blair’s life into a coherent, feature-length account. The film begins in 2019, after the initial cycle of media attention has passed. The director, Rachel Fleit, follows Blair at home for over a year, her camera watching in vérité style as the actress contemplates the aftermath of her diagnosis and plans ahead for life with a disability.At the start of filming in 2019, Blair was preparing for an experimental medical treatment that would combine chemotherapy and stem cell transplants to repair her immune system. When the procedures begin, the movie follows her into the hospital, incorporating video diaries from Blair in convalescence.The greatest asset of the film is its ability to simulate the intimacy of disclosure, and Blair’s comfort with the camera — her actress-y will to entertain — makes her a uniquely endearing subject. The forthrightness that has become the signature of her public persona is on full display; she treats the camera as if it were a trusted friend.In some of the film’s most touching sequences, Blair allows the filmmakers to watch as she plays with her son, her jolting movements at once a part of the fun, and evidence of her physical state. When he is out of the picture, she shares her worries about how her visible vulnerability might affect her child. She jokes, she weeps, she cries out in pain.The movie does not address all aspects of Blair’s life. There is little discussion of her career, and no mention of how she affords the extravagant home and the medical treatments that have provided her with relief through the worst days of her illness. What this human interest story offers instead is a simple and sympathetic portrait of a captivating character. Curiously, the career supporting actress Selma Blair has never before seemed like such a star.Introducing, Selma BlairNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. Also available on Discovery+ beginning Oct. 21. More

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      ‘The Velvet Underground’ Review: And Me, I’m in a Rock ’n’ Roll Band

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      Todd Haynes’s documentary paints a jagged, revelatory portrait of the New York avant-garde scene of the 1960s.Sometime in the 1960s, John Cale, a classically trained Welsh violist with avant-garde leanings, met Lou Reed, a middle-class Jewish college dropout from Long Island who dreamed of being a rock star. Their creative partnership, encouraged by Andy Warhol and enhanced by the mercurial presence of the German model, actress and singer Nico, was the volatile bedrock of the Velvet Underground, a commercially marginal band that altered the course of popular music.The Velvet Underground story is hardly obscure, and in outline it might fit fairly neatly in the standard music-documentary template. Early struggle gives way to (relative) triumph, and then the whole thing blows up in a squall of battling egos, substance abuse and self-destructive behavior. In the aftermath life goes on, solo careers are pursued, and the survivors — fans as much as artists — look back with mellow affection on the wild and heady past, brought alive by excavated television footage.“The Velvet Underground” has some of those elements, but it’s directed by Todd Haynes, a protean filmmaker who never met a genre he couldn’t deconstruct. While not as radical as “I’m Not There,” his 2007 Bob Dylan anti-biopic, this movie is similarly committed to a skeptical, inventive reading of recent cultural history. It’s not content to tell the story in the usual way, and it finds revelation in what might have seemed familiar.Haynes doesn’t just want you to listen to the reminiscences of band members and their friends, lovers and collaborators, or to groove on vintage video of the band in action. He wants you to hear just how strange and new the Velvets sounded, to grasp, intuitively as well as analytically, where that sound came from. And also to see — to feel, to experience — the aesthetic ferment and sensory overload of mid-60s Manhattan.A lot of eloquent people are on hand to talk about what it was like. Cale and Maureen Tucker, the drummer, the two original Velvet Underground members who are still alive, share their memories, as do some of Reed’s old friends and surviving members of the Warhol circle.Their faces, shot in gentle, nostalgic, indirect light, share the screen with a rapid flow — a kinetic collage — of images. While those images sometimes document places, events and personalities — offering up Allen Ginsberg, Max’s Kansas City and a news clip about the downtown scene narrated by Barbara Walters — they serve more importantly to link the Velvets’ music to the experimental cinema of the time.From left, Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Reed and Tucker in a split-screen frame from the film, which places the band in context of the aesthetic ferment of mid-60s Manhattan.Apple TV+Warhol was, along with everything else, a filmmaker, as was his associate Paul Morrissey. Haynes dedicates “The Velvet Underground” to the memory of Jonas Mekas, the great champion and gadfly of New York’s cinematic vanguard who died in 2019. In the film, Mekas marvels at the sheer abundance of artistic activity in the city in the early ’60s, and the constant blending and cross-pollination that was taking place. Traditional boundaries — between poetry and painting, high art and low, film and music, irony and earnestness — weren’t so much transgressed as shown to be irrelevant.It was a remarkable time, but not exactly a golden age. Haynes respects the art too much to idealize the artists, or to impose retrospective harmony on their dissonances. The overt cruelty and menace of the music — the droning and distortion behind lyrics about addiction, sadism and sexual exploitation — didn’t come from nowhere.The film critic Amy Taubin, who appeared in a Warhol film about “the most beautiful women in the world,” bluntly recalls that the Factory, Warhol’s headquarters, was a bad place for women, who were valued for their looks rather than their talents. An aspect of Warhol’s genius was a gift for using people, and often using them up. Reed, who died in 2013, is a posthumously beloved figure, but not many of his contemporaries would describe him as a nice person.And niceness was, in any case, antithetical to what the Velvet Underground was trying to do. “We hated that peace and love crap,” Tucker says. The artist Mary Woronov, who toured with the Velvets on the West Coast, elaborates on their hostility to the California counterculture: “We hated hippies.” Never a political band, it nonetheless articulated a powerful protest — against sentimentality, stupidity, false consciousness and positive thinking — that would sow the seeds of punk rock and later rebellions. Testimony to their influence is provided by the singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, who estimates he saw them live 60 or 70 times when he was a teenager in Boston, and whose enthusiasm is undimmed more than half a century later.Drop a needle on any Velvet Underground record — or queue up a playlist, if that’s how you roll — and what you hear will sound new, frightening and full of possibility, even on the thousandth listen. “The Velvet Underground” will show you where that perpetual novelty came from, and connect the sonic dots with other, contemporaneous artistic eruptions. As a documentary, it’s wonderfully informative. It’s also a jagged and powerful work of art in its own right, one that turns archaeology into prophecy.The Velvet UndergroundRated R. “Heroin,” “Venus in Furs,” “Sister Ray” — you do the math. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV+. More

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      The NY Cat and Dog Film Festivals Return After Pandemic Hiatus

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      After a pandemic-induced hiatus, these celebrations of human-animal bonds are screening in Manhattan and beyond.Two annual cinematic celebrations invariably attract impassioned ticket buyers, even though they lack car chases, explosions, alien invasions or Daniel Craig as a pouty James Bond.What they do have: whiskers, wildness and no small amount of wit.They’re the NY Cat Film Festival and the NY Dog Film Festival, which are returning to Manhattan after a pandemic-induced hiatus. The cat festival, screening at noon on Saturday — Global Cat Day — at the Village East by Angelika theater, comprises 21 short works that run for a total of around 90 minutes. The nearly two-hour dog festival, which arrives at the same theater on Oct. 24, features 20 short films. (Animal lovers outside New York can see the festivals, too: They will tour for several months, both nationwide and in Canada.)“I think it’s the highest-quality year, possibly, for both,” said Tracie Hotchner, an author and radio host in Vermont who founded the dog festival in 2015 and the cat edition two years later. In a telephone interview, she explained that in the early days of lockdown in 2020, “people couldn’t find toilet paper, but they were making beautiful movies.”Not surprisingly, the pandemic is featured in both festivals. In “Will You Be My Quarantine?,” a feline comedy, the actress and director Susku Ekim Kaya shows herself and her pet, Lady Leia, in split screen, engaged in typically obsessive lockdown activities like grooming, TV watching, cellphone scrolling and FaceTime calling. They lead harmonious parallel lives, whereas the feline protagonists of Jasmin Scuteri-Young’s “Quarantine Diary” and Asali Echols’s “House Cats” complain of their owners’ constant presence in human-supplied voice-overs.The dog festival’s subjects, on the other hand, never seem to long for social distancing. “You don’t believe in personal space,” Kyle Scoble says tenderly to Darla, his Labrador retriever-pointer mix, in “The Second Time I Got to Know My Dog,” a documentary that acts as a tribute to how Darla got him through 2020.But cats may have a reason for their apparently aloof attitudes. “If it’s an indoor cat, it’s enduring a perpetual state of lockdown,” Kim Best, a director from Durham, N.C., said in a phone conversation.That observation fuels Best’s “The Great Escape,” in which a cat named Monkey makes concerted attempts to exit the household, even consulting the digital assistant Alexa, which he bats around and meows at. In Best’s other festival entry, “Cat Capitalization,” her pet, Nube, turns to the internet to market his artistic talent, pretentiously thanking — in thought bubbles — mentors like the artists Mark Rothko and Vincent van Gogh. (Nube is missing a bit of one ear.)Best said she aimed for “a satire of not only capitalism but also of academia.”Such humor is very much a theme of the cat festival, in which films like Nevada Caldwell’s “Feline Noir” and Priscilla Dean’s “Catfight at the O’Kay Corral” parody old Hollywood clichés.But while the canine film slate is not without laughs — David Coole’s animated “Go Fetch” is a pointed two-minute revenge comedy — it has far more of the in-depth examinations of the human-animal bond that characterized both festivals previously.“Affection in the Streets,” for instance, a Brazilian documentary by Thiago Köche, captures the lives of Pôrto Alegre’s homeless, who often take better care of their dogs than themselves. The loyal pets also attract concern from passers-by, who frequently ignore the suffering of the animals’ owners.“People who love dogs just look right past the humans,” Hotchner said. “I would love more movies about that, because I think it’s the thing we don’t want to look at.”“The Comfort Dogs” also shows the power of pet ownership. Made by Matthew Salleh and Rose Tucker, an Australian couple who live and work together in Brooklyn, the film is an excerpt from their feature documentary “We Don’t Deserve Dogs.” The segment focuses on the Comfort Dog Project, which provides pets to young people who were forced to become child soldiers in Uganda’s civil war.With the dogs at their side, the former soldiers can share “quite harrowing” experiences, Salleh said in a joint phone call. “The dogs almost become part of the storytelling method itself.”Another documentary, Zach Putnam’s “Nicola,” illustrates how its subject, a yellow Lab from Canine Companions, a service program for people with disabilities, transformed not only the life of the college student who received her. She also delivered a strong lesson in trust and sacrifice to the student who devotedly trained her but ultimately, tearfully, had to give her up.Both festivals, however, remind viewers that these animals need people as much as people need them. Hotchner, who organizes the programs as a labor of love — tickets to each are $20 — always contributes part of each screening’s sales to a related local charity. The cat festival in New York will help support Bideawee’s Feral Cat Initiative, while this year, all dog festival showings will benefit the nonprofits associated with Saving Senior Dogs Week (Oct. 25-31).“There is a growing awareness,” Covid aside, “that senior dogs are delightful to adopt and the most quick to be put to sleep in a shelter,” Hotchner said. In Gary Tellalian’s “Legends of Comedy Share Love for Old Dogs,” you’ll hear this message in a public service announcement from celebrities who are seniors themselves: Carol Burnett, Bob Newhart and Lily Tomlin, along with Carl Reiner, who died last June at 98.The plight of dogs that aren’t cuddly puppies also surfaces in documentaries like “Not Broken: Freedom Ride,” by Krista Dillane, Emma Lao and Dylan Abad, about a long journey to transport 53 rescued dogs from Louisiana to a pet adoption fair in Rhode Island. In “Chino,” another excerpt from “We Don’t Deserve Dogs,” its aging subject, a street mutt in Santiago, Chile, survives simply because concerned residents provide care.“The street dog culture there is completely different,” Tucker said, adding that the animals are a way to “just bring an entire community together” — a goal for these festivals, too.NY Cat Film FestivalOct. 16 at the Village East by Angelika, Manhattan; catfilmfestival.com.NY Dog Film FestivalOct. 24 at the Village East by Angelika, Manhattan; dogfilmfestival.com. More

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      ‘All About My Sisters’ Review: Family Matters

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      Wang Qiong’s debut feature traces the tragic effects of China’s one-child policy on her family.Often in “All About My Sisters,” the Chinese filmmaker Wang Qiong’s documentary portrait of her family, you might forget that what you’re watching is filtered through a camera. Over a period of seven years, Wang filmed her parents, siblings and relatives from within the emotional thicket of their lives, capturing moments of piercing, private intimacy. Her approach yields a film bristling with the kind of familial rancor that usually only emerges behind closed doors.There’s plenty to warrant this bitterness, starting with the fact that Wang’s younger sister, Zhou Jin, was abandoned as a newborn before being retrieved and then given to an uncle to raise. That was in the 1990s, when the combination of China’s one-child policy and a widespread cultural preference for sons had tragic consequences. As we learn over the course of the film’s epic (yet impressively brisk-moving) three-hour arc, Jin’s is one of the many stories of abandoned babies, sex-selective abortions and female infanticide that haunt Wang’s family history.Wang is neither a staid observer nor a formal interviewer, but an active participant in the scenes she captures, often intervening gently from behind her hand-held camera. “Have you ever thought that induced abortion is horrible to baby girls?” she asks her older sister, Wang Li, whose husband is desperate for a male heir. Li’s response is simple but profound: “The world is horrible to us, too. Every move is a risk.”At times, Wang’s candor can be unsettling: I wondered about the ethics of her unflattering portrayal of Jin, who is seen being cruel to her toddler, as if re-enacting her own traumas. In such moments, “All About My Sisters” teeters discomfitingly between the personal and the political, revealing how little separates the two.All About My SistersNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Convergence: Courage in a Crisis’ Review: Tracing a Pandemic’s Arc

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      This Netflix documentary, filmed in different countries throughout 2020, is grueling to watch.A sweeping chronicle of the global fight against the coronavirus, “Convergence: Courage in a Crisis,” directed by Orlando von Einsiedel, feels too much like we’re sitting down to watch the pandemic unfold all over again.With eight stories from different countries — the United States, Britain, Brazil, China, India, Iran and Peru — the documentary is so sprawling as to be overwhelming. The observational approach of its segments, which trace the arc of the coronavirus throughout 2020, is grueling to watch. And the film is intercut with cheesy covers of inspirational songs that gave me traumatizing flashbacks to the infamous celebrity “Imagine” video.Some truly stirring examples of individual grit and compassion manage to shine through, however. In a neat narrative maneuver, Einseidel draws us into seemingly ordinary stories of courage, only to reveal them as extraordinary. We follow Hassan Akkad, a cleaner for the National Health Service in London, and learn that he was tortured in Syria and has a phobia of hospitals. There’s also Renata Alves, a volunteer with an ambulance service in the Paraisópolis favela of São Paulo, Brazil, who reveals that she was formerly incarcerated and suffers prejudice even as she provides an essential service.Natural and political crises emerge as bedfellows in these stories, culminating in a rousing montage of Black Lives Matter protests worldwide. Yet the critical edge of the film feels blunted by platitudes (“Opportunities are born from crises,” says Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization), not to mention the exhaustion viewers will likely feel in reliving early memories of the still-ongoing pandemic for nearly two hours.Convergence: Courage in a CrisisRated R for up-close glimpses of sickness and death. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters and on Netflix. More

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      ‘Prism’ Review: Taking a Clear View of Bias in Moviemaking

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      In this documentary, three filmmakers put together their own segments that ponder their profession’s culpability.In “Prism,” the directors Rosine Mbakam, An van. Dienderen and Eléonore Yameogo join forces to ask, “Is the very technology of cinema biased?”In 2015, van. Dienderen made “Lili,” a short film that interrogated cinema’s use of China Girls. That’s the name for the test images — typically of a white woman and a color bar — used since the 1920s for film processing calibrations. “Prism” is the result of van. Dienderen’s invitation to Mbakam and Yameogo to ponder their profession’s culpability with her, via Zoom and apart in their own segments. Their answers are personal, cultural, theoretical. Their pieces speak to each other, concurring but diverging too.Densely thoughtful, “Prism” has beautiful and poignant moments. In van. Dienderen’s section, a camera tracks through an art school campus to a television studio where it finds a Black woman, a white man and a color bar. In her layered piece, Mbakam questions two of her former film school professors, both white men. She also reconstructs Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s “Portrait de négresse” as a living sculpture in which the model’s gaze meets the camera’s with a steady and gorgeous defiance. In Yameogo’s contribution, the actor Tella Kphomahou interviews Diarra Sourank, a cinematographer, and the French-Senegalese director Sylvestre Amoussou about the challenges faced as Black filmmakers.While a great deal here is sober, Yameogo’s piece teases a “60-Minutes”-style conceit that provokes and amuses. In it, Kphomahou interviews a camera. As the actor poses questions, smiling wryly, the camera appears to be paying Cyclopean attention to its hot-seat predicament.PrismNot rated. In French and English with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Jacinta’ Review: A Neverending Cycle of Hurt

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      This haunting documentary by Jessica Earnshaw traces the journey of a young woman struggling with addiction after her release from prison.When we first meet Jacinta — the 26-year-old subject of this distressing documentary portrait that bears her name — she’s on the verge of being released from her eight-month stint at the Maine Correctional Center. Jacinta’s mother, Rosemary, is also serving a sentence there; both women are recovering from drug addiction, and both have gone to prison multiple times. Oddly, the pair — scrappy soul sisters more than mother and daughter — seem at peace with their incarceration. And when it’s time for Jacinta to leave, both women teeter from ambivalence to desperation.The remainder of the film grapples with an issue that might seem counterintuitive to the average viewer: Why might Jacinta dread her freedom? It’s not a simple answer, but the director, Jessica Earnshaw — a photographer turned documentarian who followed Jacinta over three years — responds generously by unfurling a long history of inherited trauma and regret.Earnshaw’s lo-fi, vérité approach gives the documentary the impression of a collection of home videos tracing Jacinta’s post-prison journey. Though she strives to stay sober for the sake of her doting daughter, Caylynn, who lives with her grandparents in the New Hampshire suburbs, home is with her father in a mill town bursting with familiar faces tempting her to relapse. As Jacinta gradually succumbs, Earnshaw weaves in interviews, often in voice-over, with Jacinta’s close ones that explain her early run-ins with the law, her experiences with sexual abuse, and her unwavering admiration for her mother, who taught her to fight, shoplift, and use drugs.Though Earnshaw relies on a cloyingly sentimental score to underscore the tragedy of Jacinta’s situation, this durational portrait is undeniably affecting, highlighting as it does Caylynn’s gradual disillusionment with her mother and the jarring ease with which Jacinta falls back into her old ways. This is not a happy story. The lucidity with which these subjects speak to their own mistakes and sorrows will leave you haunted.JacintaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Justin Bieber: Our World’ Review: A Pop Star Enshrouded

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      Alternating like clockwork between live numbers and soft insight dulls this documentary’s rhythm.Justin Bieber’s life beyond pop stardom — namely his personal post-teen transformation — is almost completely obscured in “Justin Bieber: Our World.” The film opens with his supportive wife Hailey in bed with him just before he plays a New Year’s Eve gig in 2020, his first full concert in three years.But this show is different because it has to be: It takes place on the rooftop of the Beverly Hilton Hotel as Covid-19 cases were surging in Los Angeles. The doc encapsulates the shared exhilaration of watching Bieber perform during this socially distanced concert spectacle, but it’s only for the biggest Beliebers. And even they, too, may wish it didn’t play out in such tedious mechanical fashion. Alternating like clockwork between live numbers and soft insight dulls the film’s rhythm, diminishing the excitement it’s going for as it counts down the days to showtime.The director Michael D. Ratner only grazes the surface of a newly grounded and grateful Bieber; the star’s heartthrob-to-husband evolution is safely teased out in self-captured vlogs and calculated crew member testimonials. Mostly, Ratner stays fixed on pandemic-era concert planning, from daily swab tests to an infected crew member.Another obstacle comes in the form of bad weather just before the show — anything, it seems, to avoid a deeper, more personal look at Bieber (though we do learn he was a fan of the mustache, just not in certain pictures). If “Our World” has anything to say, it’s that the chaos caused by a global health crisis can be a guarded pop star’s greatest diversion.Justin Bieber: Our WorldRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More