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      ‘Breaking Bread’ Review: Peace Meals

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      This documentary follows the preparations for a food festival at which chefs from Arab and Jewish backgrounds team up to create dishes together.“Breaking Bread” opens with a quote from Anthony Bourdain, who said that “food may not be the answer to world peace, but it’s a start.” The premise underlying this documentary, directed by Beth Elise Hawk, is that all cultures can unite over the spectacle of mouthwatering food on camera.The movie follows preparations for the 2017 A-Sham Festival in Haifa, Israel, an event that celebrates the cuisine of a region where geopolitical boundaries are more defined than culinary ones. At the film’s start, the festival’s founder, Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, identifies herself as a Muslim, an Arab, an Israeli, a Palestinian, a woman, a scientist and a cook (she won the Israeli version of “MasterChef” a few years ago). She says in the film that borders “mean nothing to hummus.”The contestants live in Israel but come from diverse backgrounds. At the festival they are generally paired with someone whose origins differ from their own to create an assigned dish. For example, Ali Khattib, from an Alawite village in the Golan Heights, and Shlomi Meir, who runs an Eastern European restaurant in Haifa, work together to make a traditionally Syrian soup with a base of bulgur wheat soaked in yogurt.A lot of the observations in “Breaking Bread” — the repeatedly offered notions that food is a common language or that politics has no place in the kitchen — seem trite and perhaps overly optimistic. The movie would ideally be shown with an accompanying tasting menu.Breaking BreadNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      How Poly Styrene Broke the Mold

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      A biracial woman in a predominantly white, male scene, the X-Ray Spex frontwoman brought fresh perspectives and sounds to punk. A new documentary explores her impact.Poly Styrene beams out from the screen, smile wide, braces cemented across her teeth. In most images of first-wave punk musicians, their eyes are filled with negativity and contempt. In footage from a new film, Styrene’s are bright with possibility.The singer and creative force behind X-Ray Spex died from cancer in 2011, 34 years after her London band released its seismic first single, “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” The world is still catching up. A new documentary due Feb. 2 titled “Poly Styrene: I Am a Cliché” — taken from one of her song titles that mixed self-aware humor and cultural critique — is the latest ambitious project to chronicle her story, following an oral history book and a roving exhibition of her visual art, both from 2019.“My mum believed she was psychic,” Styrene’s daughter, Celeste Bell, who co-directed the film with Paul Sng, said in a video interview. “You can see that in her lyrics. She had this uncanny ability to predict what was going to happen.”Perhaps Styrene saw the future by paying attention. She set dynamite to the patriarchy on “Oh Bondage Up Yours!,” and “Germfree Adolescents,” the band’s sole album released just months before its 1979 split, is filled with blazing anthems that address identity, consumer culture, environmental ruin, information overload and punk itself. (Its title track, a dubby postmodern love song, was her most successful single.) She wore Day-Glo colors and brought in saxophones and science fiction. She could sing cool hooks or turn her voice into a rocket. Over bionic riffs, her lyrics told rich stories, forming a folk music of her own creation. The effect was sonic Pop Art.A biracial woman in a predominantly white scene, Styrene was not a typical punk. And “I Am a Cliché” is by no means a typical punk film. Bell, who was finishing a master’s degree in political philosophy in 2015 when she began to face her role as caretaker of Poly Styrene’s legacy, appears onscreen and narrates her mother’s complicated life — from teenage runaway to punk sensation to Hare Krishna, all while struggling with bipolar disorder, all before her mid-20s — through her perspective as the (frequently neglected) child of a totemic, explosive figure in punk history.Was she a good mother? Not exactly. But while Bell poses the question and answers it early, she spends the duration of the film bearing out what her mother was always searching for in her lyrics — a complexity scaled large enough to show the truth.Styrene and her daughter, Celeste Bell, who co-directed the film.Tony BarrattThe film’s timing is apt: Styrene’s influence on and relevance within culture keeps growing. Where her brash vision once seemed futuristic, it now feels shockingly attuned to reality. Artists from the vanguard of pop, like FKA twigs, and the heart of punk, like the New Orleans group Special Interest and the London trio Big Joanie, cite her as a formative inspiration. Her influence can also be traced through the still-emerging impact of the riot grrrl movement. It spans decades and generations.The singer, songwriter and rapper Neneh Cherry, who appears in “I Am a Cliché,” said in an interview that she found her own voice by singing along to X-Ray Spex, and recalled listening to the band with her parents, the jazz musician Don and the textile artist Moki Cherry, who “absolutely got” Styrene’s fearlessness and honesty.“When we used to listen to her, they would be like: That’s what we’re talking about,” Cherry said. She noted that it was singing along to her father’s piano playing and entering “a Poly place, tonally,” that her voice first emerged. “Inside of hers is how I found my own voice,” she explained. “I also started listening to her when I was at a space in my life where — I knew who I was, but I didn’t always know how to be who I was, or how to feel that great about it. Poly was and still is like medicine for me.”The feminist punk icon Kathleen Hanna first heard X-Ray Spex in 1989 — the year before her band Bikini Kill formed in Olympia, Wash. — and was awed by the breadth of ideas in her writing.“I was really blown away by the lyrics and how much there was a critique of capitalism,” she said in an interview, and how that extended, sometimes subtlety, to critiques of sexism and racism within punk. “Poly obviously is a poet. It was such a perfect marriage of emotion and technique. I was like, How have I never heard of this band before? It seemed better than the Sex Pistols.”Lora Logic and Styrene onstage with X-Ray Spex. The band released one album in 1979 and promptly split.Erica Echenberg/Redferns, via Getty ImagesSTYRENE WAS BORN Marianne Joan Elliott-Said in 1957 to a Somali father and an English mother, who raised Styrene and her siblings alone in a Brixton council estate. In her teenage years, struck with art and rebellion, Styrene fled home to hitchhike to hippie music festivals, stoking an ecological consciousness she would bring to punk. She immersed herself in theater, fashion, poetry and music. A bookish autodidact who left school at 15, she gravitated toward philosophy, the occult, Freud and Jung. As a cinephile she favored the retrofuturism of “Barbarella.” Her rock idols were David Bowie and Marc Bolan. She loved soul and reggae, and Bell said she cited singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Carole King and Joan Armatrading as huge inspirations.Styrene’s first pre-punk single was a pop-reggae song called “Silly Billy” about teenage pregnancy. It was produced by a man 16 years her senior named Falcon Stuart who would become her boyfriend and the manager of X-Ray Spex. (Bell said she received conflicting stories about Stuart, who died in 2002, over the years, noting in the film: “Sometimes she’d say he was the love of her life; other times, that he’d ruined it.”)When punk hit, Styrene, at 19, was galvanized. Enamored of the Sex Pistols — a previously unseen clip of Styrene dancing in the crowd at one of their gigs recurs in the film — she placed an ad in Melody Maker searching for “yung punx” to “stick it together,” and assembled a crew that included the bassist Paul Dean and, briefly, the saxophonist Lora Logic (until Styrene kicked her out).The band signed with Virgin for the classic “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” — its opening declaration, “Some people think little girls should be seen and not heard/But I think, oh bondage, up yours!” became feminist punk scripture — before moving to EMI for “Germfree Adolescents.” (Styrene was an uncredited producer on the album, Bell said.) The LP took them to “Top of the Pops” and the BBC, which broadcast a television documentary called “Who Is Poly Styrene?” where the singer famously described that she picked her stage name because it is plastic and disposable: “That’s what pop stars are meant to mean, therefore I thought I might as well send it up.”The early BBC film and “I Am a Cliché” both depict Styrene’s mental health struggles, which the pressures of fame exacerbated. In 1978, she was misdiagnosed with schizophrenia; she was in a psychiatric hospital the first time she saw herself singing on television. Bell believes her mother’s condition was worsened by the media’s sexist scrutiny of her body as well as the destabilizing nihilism in punk.“A lot of people think X-Ray Spex were a lot more underground than they were. But my mum did have that brush with celebrity,” Bell said. “There is a kind of fame where you can never escape from it, and that was the kind of attention that my mum had, even though it didn’t last very long. It didn’t last very long because she got out.”Bell and Styrene. “She could have made a lot more money,” Bell said, “but she prioritized her health and her spiritual longings over fame and success.”Fabrizio RainoneStyrene went on to release the gentle, tabla-flecked solo album “Translucence” in 1981, and, around then, met the musician Adrian Bell. They married three months later and she gave birth to Bell. Not long after, Styrene eschewed the material world she had observed in her songs by joining the Hare Krishna movement and moving with her daughter to Bhaktivedanta Manor, a country house George Harrison had donated to the group in 1973. But her mental health struggles persisted. She left the temple, and Bell, then 8, went to live with her grandmother.Bell said her mother never had a steady job after X-Ray Spex. She lived off meager royalties, continuing to write and release music. Heartbreakingly, in the film, Bell recalls her mother saying “being broke and famous is the worst of both worlds.”By the early 2000s, Bell and her mother had reconciled. Styrene moved to seaside Hastings, which energized her, and she began to write a retrospective diary of her punk past. (Excerpts are threaded throughout the film.) Styrene had recently recorded a new solo album, “Generation Indigo,” when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Bell said her mother believed in reincarnation, viewing death as “the next great adventure.”“My mum didn’t have an easy life,” she said. “She had a lot of barriers to break through as a mixed race woman, but she did, and she did it on her own terms. She took the DIY ethic and really lived it.”In her diary, Styrene called herself “an ordinary tough kid from an ordinary tough street.” Her daughter said that she fought back when other children mocked her appearance: “She was always getting beat up. She’d been chased down the street by skinheads.”Styrene explored her heritage directly in early poems, which led to intersectional statements on tracks like “Oh Bondage Up Yours!” — an indictment of the bondage aesthetic in punk fashion, which she loathed, as much as a liberationist rallying cry. She asked, presciently, in the X-Ray Spex song “Identity”:When you look in the mirror do you see yourself?Do you see yourself on the TV screen?Do you see yourself in the magazine?When you see yourself, does it make you scream?WHEN HANNA FOUND Styrene, her forebear’s influence was musical as well as philosophical. “She could do a vulnerable high-pitched voice and also a loud bellow,” she said. “She used the roundness in her voice, the piercing in her voice. There’s not a fear of pop music with Poly.”For Alli Logout, the vocalist for Special Interest, Styrene was thrilling proof that a person of color had helped invent punk while critiquing it; that vulnerability can exist in chaos; and that punk can be incisive but fun.“My original exploration with music in general was a sadness that I didn’t see any Black bodies occupying that space,” Logout, who uses they/them pronouns, said of their earliest experiences headbanging at metal shows in their small Texas town. But leafing through a stolen book on punk history, “I remember very clearly seeing a picture of Poly Styrene and her braces and being like, what?” Watching a live “Bondage” video, “I felt the otherness that she encapsulated by just being fully herself. Whenever I heard that song, I knew that it was the attitude that I have to present myself in every single day.”Styrene’s fashion sense has also proven to be influential.BBC ArenaBeginning in middle school, the singer-songwriter Shamir felt such a connection to X-Ray Spex that by the fall of 2016, he decided to get Styrene’s face tattooed on his thigh. “Poly was one of the main influences on me to keep the spirit of punk alive as a Black person,” he said in an interview. “She’s constantly staring at me when I wake up in the morning.”“So much of the time, what’s considered punk to everyone else is rage, but I don’t think anyone would categorize her as rageful,” he noted, saying Styrene communicated via different emotions. “I learned from that in a lot of ways.” He added, “You’re always going to be in the margins, but that doesn’t mean you have to be quiet. A lot of times we have to be the loudest in order to be heard slightly.”As Bell organized her mother’s archive, she was struck by the intensity of her process, uncovering many drafts of a single set of lyrics, or a mixed-media collage, like a piece that layered various forms of contraception packaging atop feminist comic strips to explore the nature of modern relationships. (Styrene created all of the band’s art herself.) “She walked away at the height of their popularity,” she said. It’s a decision Bell finds gives the film a hopeful message: “She could have made a lot more money, but she prioritized her health and her spiritual longings over fame and success.”Ultimately, Bell said with conviction, “All my mum wanted, musically and artistically, was to be taken seriously.” More

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      Sundance Wrap-Up: 6 Movies We Like and One We Disagree on

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      Even virtual, the festival gave our chief film critics a lot to talk about.For the second year in a row, the Sundance Film Festival canceled its in-person plans and went virtual, wrapping up on Sunday evening. It was quite a feast, with more than 80 documentary and narrative features. Here are six our chief film critics especially liked, and one they disagree about.Manohla Dargis‘All That Breathes’Directed by Shaunak Sen, “All That Breathes” is an immersive, haunting documentary portrait of two Muslim brothers in New Delhi who have dedicated their lives to rescuing birds, many affected by humans and climate change. With intimacy, a great score and some fantastic macro cinematography — the birds loom large here — the movie pays tribute to the brothers even as it underscores that individuals alone can’t save nature.At times, Sen’s emphasis on visual lyricism over information opens up unanswered questions. And while he draws attention to anti-Muslim sentiments, it is never clear how Sen would like viewers to connect these terrifying threats with the grim specter of species extinction. Even so, there is no denying the movie’s power or its subject; there’s also no denying the heartbreak of its images. The raptors perched on mountains of garbage, the monkeys navigating overhead tangles of wires, the solitary turtle struggling to ascend a mound of debris — in the story of interspecies coexistence, the animals have already lost.‘Descendant’Emmett Lewis in “Descendant,” about the discovery of the last recorded American slave ship.Participant, via Sundance InstituteIn her latest documentary, Margaret Brown tells the story that begins — though doesn’t end — with the discovery of the Clotilda, the last recorded American slave ship. In 1860, decades after the importation of enslaved peoples had been made illegal in the United States, the ship sailed to Alabama. The men who owned and operated the Clotilda arrived at night and, after bringing their captives ashore, torched the ship to hide their crime. The ship sunk, disappearing from view.Brown tracks the fascinating efforts to recover the Clotilda, but her truer, more vivid subjects are those who survived slavery. Some helped establish Africatown, a community north of Mobile where much of the documentary takes place. There, Brown visits with descendants, people for whom slavery isn’t an abstraction but a living memory that generations have carefully preserved and passed down. The movie loses some of its focus midway, but the story of the Clotilda and where Brown takes this documentary are very moving.‘Dos Estaciones’Teresa Sánchez plays the owner of a tequila factory in “Dos Estaciones.”Gerardo Guerra, via Sundance InstituteFor much of this elliptical, visually arresting Mexican drama, María García (Teresa Sánchez), a stolid and stoic loner, holds the center. María, a monument to an old-fashioned way of life, if one who presents as nonbinary, owns the Jalisco tequila factory that gives the movie its title. But times are tough: a fungus is ruining the agave crops, and foreign-owned companies pose a threat to artisanal producers like María, who’s alone physically and existentially.The director Juan Pablo González immediately grounds you in María’s life both with the seductive, velvety beauty of the cinematography and by focusing on the material conditions of her everyday life, including the mesmerizing, labor-intensive production of tequila, which you follow from field to bottle. At one point, romance looms, and for a time the story shifts to a hairdresser, Tatín (Tatín Vera) a transgender woman, who with María, and several other characters, creates a vivid, textured, altogether unexpected world.A.O. Scott‘Leonor Will Never Die’Sheila Francisco plays a local filmmaker coming out of retirement.Carlos Mauricio, via Sundance InstituteThe titular heroine of this wonderfully unclassifiable movie — played by the Filipino singer and theater actress Sheila Francisco — is a sweet-natured, absent-minded woman of around 70. She lives (and frequently squabbles) with her grown son, stays on (mostly) friendly terms with her former husband and is haunted by the memory of her other son’s death. She is also a locally renowned action filmmaker, whose complicated emergence from retirement frames the director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s heartfelt, zany tribute to the magic of movies and the power of love.Leonor’s final script becomes a movie within the movie, but Ramirez Escobar’s metacinematic shenanigans don’t stop there. I counted at least four distinct layers of reality in “Leonor Will Never Die,” but there might be more. In any case the fun lies in the ways they collide and overlap. This may sound like a too-clever postmodern genre mash-up, but somehow the combination of family melodrama, pulpy violence and surreal comedy add up to the disarmingly tender portrait of an artist on the edge of the afterlife.‘A House Made of Splinters’Children in a temporary shelter in Ukraine, in the documentary “A House Made of Splinters.”via Sundance InstituteThe reality that Simon Lereng Wilmont’s documentary explores is almost unbearably heartbreaking. In Lysychansk, in eastern Ukraine, an institution provides temporary shelter for children whose lives have been disrupted by alcoholism, domestic violence and unemployment, social problems that war with Russia has made worse. The children find safety and companionship with one another and an endlessly patient staff while waiting to return to their parents or, more likely, to be transferred to orphanages or foster care.Granted extraordinary access to his subjects, Wilmont proceeds with exemplary tact and sensitivity, weaving a heartbreaking tapestry that also glows with empathy and even shows glimmers of mischief and delight. To be reminded of the vulnerability of young bodies and souls is wrenching, but there is also something thrilling about the honesty and tenacity of the kids and the dedication of their caretakers. It’s as if a Frederick Wiseman film had been reimagined by William Blake.‘Marte Um (Mars One)’Cícero Lucas in a scene from “Marte Um (Mars One).”Leonardo Feliciano, via Sundance InstituteThis Brazilian charmer isn’t especially flashy, buzzy or provocative. It’s a gentle, closely observed family drama, shot in warm colors in Contagem, a city in the state of Minas Gerais. The main characters — Wellington (Carlos Francisco), Tercia (Rejane Faria) and their children, Eunice (Camilla Damião) and Deivinho (Cícero Lucas) — each contend with crises that test their individual sense of identity and their bonds with one another.Unfolding in the wake of Jair Bolsonaro’s election to Brazil’s presidency in 2018, their stories brush against social and political sore spots (involving race, work, sexuality and religion) that will hardly seem foreign to North American audiences. But “Marte Um,” beautifully directed by Gabriel Martins, isn’t a culture-war polemic or an ideological fable. It’s a stirring example of — and a passionate argument for — the kind of humane realism that keeps movies alive, and that never goes out of style.Dargis vs. Scott‘Sharp Stick’Kristine Froseth plays a naive Angeleno opposite Jon Bernthal’s married man in “Sharp Stick.”via Sundance InstituteDargis I was looking forward to Lena Dunham’s “Sharp Stick,” about the sexual coming-of-age of Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth), a woman in her mid-20s. But the only thing that kept me watching is Dunham; if anyone else had directed it, I would have bailed.There’s no point in enumerating all the reasons I dislike it — OK, the unfunny Los Angeles stereotypes were exasperating. But my biggest issue was the cloying and childlike Sarah Jo, whose narratively expedient naïveté worked my last frayed nerve. When I wasn’t overwhelmed with irritation, I did appreciate that Dunham has revisited the vexing, oft-troubling figure of the desiring, desirable young woman, a character that evokes Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll and so on.Scott My position in arguments about Lena Dunham is always “yes, but.” Yes, Sarah Jo’s unworldliness is overstated, some aspects of her sexual awakening seem like wishful thinking, and the tonal shifts from silly to sexy to earnest to icky can be a lot. But “Sharp Stick” is interesting to think about partly because Dunham herself is thinking, rather than (as so many of her Sundance peers and followers have done) recycling clichés about lust, female empowerment and family dysfunction. The unstable, scattershot quality of this movie is to me evidence of her curiosity and a willingness to push out of her own comfort zone, if she even has one. More

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      In a New Documentary, Janet Jackson Is Hiding in Plain Sight

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      A four-hour film on Lifetime and A&E touches on the highs and lows of a long career, but doesn’t dig deep into one of pop’s great risk-takers.Throughout her two-decade-plus heyday, Janet Jackson was an astonishingly modern pop superstar — a risk-taker with a distinctive voice, a vivid sense of self-presentation and an innate understanding of the scale of the labor required to make world-shaking music. She was the embodiment of authority and command, practically unrivaled in her day and studiously copied by later generations.But throughout “Janet Jackson,” a four-hour documentary that premiered over two nights on Lifetime and A&E, the highs and lows of Jackson’s career are often presented as a kind of collateral asset or damage. Her brothers were famous first; Jackson was the spunky younger sister who came after. When her brother Michael, then the most famous pop star on the planet, faced his first allegations of sexual impropriety, Jackson lost her opportunity for a lucrative sponsorship with Coca-Cola. When a wardrobe malfunction derailed Jackson’s performance at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, it is her career that’s tanked, and not that of her collaborator, the rising star Justin Timberlake.It’s a curious choice for the first official documentary about one of the most influential musicians of the last few decades. But what makes it even more curious is that Jackson herself is the executive producer (along with her brother, and manager, Randy). It is a bait and switch, using the lure of access and intimacy — cameras followed her for five years, we’re told — as a tool of deflection.“Janet Jackson” is a sanctioned documentary with the feel of a YouTube news clip aggregation. Jackson is interviewed extensively, but largely provides play-by-play, rarely color commentary. In some parts, especially when she’s shown in conversation with Randy, she’s the one asking questions, especially when the pair return to the family’s Gary, Ind., home. At almost every emotional crossroads, the film drops a whooshing thwack sound effect, an unconscious echo of the “Law & Order” cha-chunk, and cuts to commercial. That choice renders fraught moments melodramatic, and melodramatic moments comic.In between elisions, “Janet Jackson” is bolstered by some phenomenal archival footage, mainly shot by Jackson’s ex-husband René Elizondo Jr., who toted a camera throughout their time together — as romantic and professional partners — with an eye toward some future omnibus archive. We see Jackson in the studio with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, in a tug of war of wills while working out the sound of “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814,” her second album with them and the follow-up to the career-making “Control.” During the recording for the 1995 single “Scream,” we see Jackson and Michael talking about lyrics, and Michael asking for her to tap into the voice from her rock hit “Black Cat.” There’s sleepy but telling footage of a meeting with Coca-Cola as Jackson is being offered that sponsorship, and also scenes from the table read of the 1993 film “Poetic Justice,” in which Jackson starred alongside Tupac Shakur.As for drama — there is no drama, this film insists. Everything is fine. Joe Jackson, the family patriarch, is presented as a beacon of hard work and discipline, not abuse, without whom the children’s success would have been impossible. Jackson’s exes — James DeBarge, Elizondo, Jermaine Dupri — are largely forgiven for their improprieties. Her third husband, Wissam Al Mana (they split up in 2017), is never named, but the son they share, Eissa, is mentioned and briefly shown. As for the Super Bowl performance that derailed her career, well, Jackson and Timberlake are great friends, she says.Or maybe something else is going on. “She continually suffers privately, and doesn’t involve any of you,” says Wayne Scot Lucas, her longtime stylist.That seems to include Benjamin Hirsch, the film’s director and the one peppering Jackson with questions. In several segments, Hirsch uses the audio of his query in order to provide a more complete picture of the incomplete answer he receives. His asks are gentle but direct, with only a shadow of the awkwardness that comes with pushing a famous and famously private person in an uncomfortable direction. Often when he’s probing, Jackson is in the back seat of an S.U.V., being chauffeured to a location designed to trigger a memory; the most vulnerable aspect of these scenes is the physical proximity, a space-sharing closeness that’s a proxy for actual feeling-sharing closeness.When the spotlight is ceded to others, especially Jackson’s behind-the-scenes collaborators like Lucas and the dancer Tina Landon, little flickers of clarity emerge. And a fuller appreciation of Jackson’s artistry comes from Jam and Lewis (who also serve as music supervisors on the documentary), and her former choreographer Paula Abdul. Plenty of other superstars are corralled — Whoopi Goldberg, Mariah Carey, Samuel L. Jackson, Barry Bonds (!), Missy Elliott — simply to shower Jackson with platitudes, a colossal missed opportunity.It’s churlish to linger over what’s not covered here, but given that official documentaries can tend toward the hagiographic, there’s perilously little analysis or appreciation of Jackson’s music or videos, just assertions of their greatness. The one exception is Questlove, who discusses advocating for her election to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Jackson’s life has spanned many traumas, but this film mostly recalls them gauzily, and doesn’t argue strongly enough for her triumphs. What’s more, the editing is choppy, and the lighting is often garish — a tabloid-style production for an artist who merits vanity treatment.But the pall is coming from inside the house. Even at her pop peak, Jackson was often reluctant, and years of public scandal that tarred her even from a distance have not seemingly inclined her to do much beyond shrug and retreat.By that measure, the film is a success. And sometimes the reticence is rendered literal. When Jackson’s mother is asked about Michael’s death, she falters a bit, and someone off camera, seemingly Jackson, asks her if the questioning is too much for her. She indicates that it is, and they move on. And when Jackson is discussing her father’s death — “I got the opportunity to thank him, thank God” — it’s the rare moment where emotion gets the best of her. After just the faintest shudder, though, she erects a wall: “OK, Ben, that’s enough.” And yet. More

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      ‘The Exiles’ and ‘Nanny’ Win Top Prizes at Sundance

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      The horror/drama “Nanny” from the first-time feature filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu nabbed the U.S. Grand Jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, which was primarily virtual for the second year in a row. The film about a Senegalese nanny working for a privileged family in New York City generated strong reviews and is still looking for distribution.“The Exiles,” about three exiled dissidents from the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, won the Grand Jury prize for U.S. documentary. “Utama,” a Bolivian character portrait, nabbed the top award for world dramatic film, while the Indian documentary “All That Breathes” took the world documentary Grand Jury Prize.Anna Diop in “Nanny,” one of the standouts in this year’s lineup.via Sundance Institute“Cha Cha Real Smooth” nabbed the Audience Award in the U.S. dramatic competition just days after it sealed a $15 million distribution deal with Apple — the biggest sale of the festival. The crowd-pleaser was written, directed by and stars Cooper Raiff in his sophomore effort. Dakota Johnson also stars.In the documentary space, the surprise screening of “Navalny,” which CNN and HBO Max will release later this year, won both the audience prize in the U.S. documentary competition and the Festival Favorite award. The film tracks the aftermath of the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and one of Vladimir Putin’s harshest critics. Directed by Daniel Roher, “Navalny” debuted to rave reviews and brought additional attention to the dissident who has been jailed in a Russian prison for over a year.In his speech after winning the audience prize, Roher said he hoped the film would help people “learn about the courage it takes to bring down an authoritarian regime.”Other audience awards went to “Girl Picture” (World Cinema Dramatic), “The Territory” (World Cinema Documentary) and “Framing Agnes” (Next).“Today’s awards represent the determination of visionary individuals, whose dynamic work will continue to change the culture,” said Joana Vicente, the chief executive of the Sundance Institute.The festival made a last-minute decision to go virtual because of concerns over the highly contagious Omicron variant, and the awards were announced in a two-hour string of tweets, which included speeches from each of the winners.“Whether you watched from home or one of our seven satellite screens,” said the festival director, Tabitha Jackson, “this year’s festival expressed a powerful convergence; we were present, together, as a community connected through the work.”In addition to Apple’s purchase of “Cha Cha,” other high-profile sales included two by Searchlight Pictures: the horror film “Fresh” from the director Mimi Cave and “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” starring Emma Thompson as a repressed widow who hires a sex worker. Both films will bypass theaters and debut on Hulu in the U.S.Sony Pictures Classics picked up “Living,” the remake of the Akira Kurosawa film “Ikiru” starring Bill Nighy as a civil servant who discovers he has a fatal illness; and IFC Films will release “Resurrection,” starring Rebecca Hall, in theaters before it debuts on the streaming service Shudder. More

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      Sundance Film Festival: ‘Nanny’ Leads a Parade of Scares

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      When a character took a severed human leg out of a fridge in the horror movie “Fresh,” I laughed then hit pause. I had that luxury because, like everyone else this year, I didn’t have to fly to Utah for the Sundance Film Festival but attended this impressively sanguineous edition at home. So I just fast-forwarded to the leg chopper’s grisly comeuppance. As to the movie, it will do fine without my love: It’s already racked up positive reviews and will be released on Hulu, which is owned by Disney because, well, sometimes dreams really do come true.That human shank was part of a colorful parade of body parts on display at this year’s Sundance, which included a veritable charnel house of severed limbs, decapitated heads and disemboweled guts. The specter of the horror maestro David Cronenberg haunts “Resurrection,” a not entirely successful creepfest with an excellent Rebecca Hall, while other movies owed a conspicuous debt to Jordan Peele’s 2017 Sundance hit “Get Out,” notably “Master” (about a Black student and professor at a white-dominated college) and “Emergency,” an entertaining nail-biter about three friends trapped in a white nightmare.A scene from the comedy-turned-thriller “Emergency.”via Sundance InstituteI didn’t love “Fresh,” which uses a captivity freakout to dubious feminist ends, though I may have enjoyed it with more company. Watching horror movies alone isn’t the same as being in a theater filled with other people, including at Sundance. There, the audience tends to be already super-amped-up and excited just to be in the room, seeing a movie for the first time and often with the filmmakers in attendance. The hothouse atmosphere of festivals can be misleading and turn mediocrities into events, certainly, but the noisy clamor of such hype is always outweighed by the joys of experiencing discoveries and revelations with others.This is the second year that Sundance has been forced to jettison its in-person plans because of the pandemic. The festival had instituted sound vax and mask protocols, and the Utah county where Sundance takes place has a higher vaccination rate than either New York or Los Angeles. But Utah also had the third-highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the country as of Monday, as The Salt Lake Tribune recently reported. And, frankly, given how often I had returned home from Sundance with a bad cold or the flu (including a whopper of a mystery bug that flattened me in 2020), I didn’t bother to book another overpriced condo.Rebecca Hall in “Resurrection,” a creepfest with a debt to David Cronenberg.Wyatt Garfield, via Sundance InstituteInstead, I moved into my living room, hooked my laptop to my TV and streamed from the festival’s easy-to-use website. In between movies, I texted some of the same colleagues I hang out with at Sundance when we’re in Park City. In 2020, we had shared our love for “Time,” Garrett Bradley’s documentary about a family’s struggle with the American prison system. (I sat out the festival’s 2021 edition.) This year, we again traded must-sees and must-avoids. “I told you how awful it is,” my friend chided me about “You’ll Never Be Alone,” a shocker about a witch. She had, sigh. We also kept returning to a favorite: “Wow Nanny,” she texted. Oh, yes.A standout in this year’s U.S. dramatic competition, “Nanny” was another one of the selections that I deeply regretted not seeing with an audience, for both its visceral shocks and its lush beauty. In this case, I would have stayed put in my seat, just as I did at home, where pesky domestic distractions can make paying attention a struggle, especially when a movie isn’t strong enough to fully hold you. That was never a problem with “Nanny,” which kept me rapt from the start with its visuals and mysteries, its emotional depths and the tight control that the writer-director Nikyatu Jusu maintains on her material.Set in New York, the story centers on Aisha (the excellent Anna Diop), a Senegalese immigrant who’s recently accepted a nanny position. Her new workplace, a luxurious sprawl as sterile as a magazine layout, sets off immediate alarm bells, as do the overeager smiles and obsessive instructions of her tightly wound white employer, Amy (Michelle Monaghan). The setup recalls that of “Black Girl,” the Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 classic film about the horrors of postcolonialism. It’s an obvious aesthetic and political touchstone for Jusu, who nevertheless quickly and confidently spins off in her own direction.Like a number of other selections in this year’s festival, “Nanny” is a horror movie with a profound difference; unlike too many other filmmakers, Jusu never becomes boxed in by genre. Instead, horror-film conventions are part of an expansive tool kit that includes narrative ellipses, an expressionistic use of bold color and figures from African folklore, including a trickster in spider form and a water spirit called Mami Wata. Here, clichés like the oppressive house, controlling employer and vulnerable heroine prove far more complex than they appear, having been skillfully reimagined for this anguished, haunted story.Women in peril are familiar screen figures, but this year there was some honest variety in the kinds of directors putting knives to throats. At one point — in between streaming, smiling, grimacing, weeping and occasionally eww-ing at all the blood and guts — I realized that I hadn’t bothered to count the number of women and people of color in this year’s program. I was seeing enough fictional stories and documentaries with a range of different types of people that I hadn’t started compulsively profiling the filmmakers. Yes, there were a few Sundance reliables, the eternally cute and kooky white children of Indiewood, but not enough to trigger you about the old days when the festival was clogged with Tarantino clones.The drama “Call Jane” was one of two Sundance films about the Jane Collective, a group that helped women in Chicago obtain safe abortions.Wilson Webb, via Sundance InstituteThe auteurist touchstone at Sundance these days is Jordan Peele, whose radical use of the genre continues to feel relevant to the traumas of contemporary life. The preponderance of frightful tales in this program is obviously a matter of availability, cinematic copycatting and curatorial discretion. Given all the onscreen evisceration this year, I would imagine that the festival director Tabitha Jackson and the director of programming Kim Yutani have strong stomachs and senses of humor. That they’re also feminists surely, if gratifyingly, goes without saying and may help explain why there are three movies in the slate about abortion.The two I saw — the well-acted drama “Call Jane” and the solid, informative documentary “The Janes” — aren’t horror movies in the usual sense, but like more conventional examples of the genre, they also turn on the body, and specifically the female body, in peril. Each movie revisits the Jane Collective, a group of women and some men who from 1968 to 1973 helped women in Chicago obtain safe abortions before the procedure was a Constitutional right. And while the image of one member (Elizabeth Banks) in “Call Jane” learning how to administer abortions by practicing on pumpkins may not have been a Halloween joke, I laughed anyway.On a conspicuous, quantifiable level, this year’s program reaffirms that a genuine diversity of filmmakers also yields a welcome cinematic multiplicity. It can be easy to think of representation as an abstraction, as a political cudgel, a tedious rallying cry, a bore. Again and again this year, the sight of all these bodies, particularly of women — including Emma Thompson letting it all hang out beautifully in the gentle comedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” — was a reminder that these representations aren’t boxes that were ticked off. They are the embodied truths, pleasures and terrors of women and people of color who, having long served as canvases for fantasies of otherness, have seized control of their own images. More

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      Kamau Bell: Bill Cosby Is Key to Understanding America

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      When W. Kamau Bell was growing up, Bill Cosby was the “wallpaper of Black America” and an inspiration, Bell said in a recent interview. Bell’s new documentary, “We Need to Talk About Cosby,” surveys the star’s long career and cultural impact, as well as the accusations of sexual assault that culminated in his conviction, on three counts of aggravated indecent assault, in 2018. Cosby was freed from prison in June 2021 after an appeals court ruled that his due process rights had been violated.The four-part documentary — which premieres on Showtime on Sunday — consists of clips from his shows and standup act, conversations with women who accused Cosby and a parade of other interviewees who try to process the Cosby story and his legacy.As a comedian and host of shows like CNN’s “United Shades of America,” Bell said he has become known as a guy who is willing to have difficult conversations. But the one about Cosby was tougher than most, generating criticism from both sides: Some Cosby accusers didn’t talk to him because they didn’t want to be part of a project that includes Cosby’s achievements. At the same time, Bell said, he has been accused of tearing down a Black role model when he could be examining white transgressors instead.Last week, Cosby criticized the project through his spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, who added that Cosby continues to deny all allegations against him. Wyatt also praised Cosby’s work in the entertainment industry. “Mr. Cosby has spent more than 50 years standing with the excluded,” he said in a statement.As a reporter who covered Bill Cosby’s trials for The New York Times, I am familiar with the accusations against him. But the documentary sets those accusations in a deep context of American culture and Cosby’s career.Recently I spoke to Bell by video call about making the series, and about his belief that Cosby’s story is a story about America. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Hi Kamau. How are you doing?[Laughs.] You’ve covered this story a lot, so I think you probably have some sense of how I’m doing. And then add Black into it.You’ve described to me the trepidation you felt about getting involved in something that had the potential to be “toxic.” What do you mean by that?We reached out to people, and we got so many “no”s so quickly. At the time, he was still in prison, and I thought, Oh maybe we can finally have the productive Bill Cosby conversation. But with every note I got from people who were really doing well in show business, what I’m hearing is, “This is a bad idea.” Not that they would say that outright, but the feeling was, No, I don’t want to touch that. Maybe they didn’t want to touch it with me, but I think generally they don’t want to touch it.Why would they say that?I mean specifically for Black people, whether you were involved indirectly or not, it’s hard to have a productive conversation about Bill Cosby without frustrating some of your audience who still wants to support him, whether they believe he did these things or not..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How did the idea for the documentary come about?The idea came very naturally in a conversation with [Boardwalk Pictures Production]. I liked their work, they liked my work, and we started talking about comedian documentaries. Generally, there are not enough great comedian documentaries, and then through that conversation it was, “Could you do one about a comedian who has fallen?” There are any number to hold up, but Bill Cosby was the one we talked about. And I’ve been thinking about this Bill Cosby conversation for years.What did you hope to achieve?When I started making it, as we say in the doc, he was in prison. It sort of felt like the Bill Cosby story was, in large part, over. So maybe now we can have the conversation, and it’s a conversation I was already having in my head and with other people. Seeing people online trying to have it, the conversation wasn’t happening in a productive way.We have to learn something from this. If we don’t have the conversation, I don’t think we’re going to learn. The guy that I believed he was when I was growing up and when I was a young adult — that guy would want me to learn something from this.So on some level, your example, Bill Cosby, led me to try to figure this out.So what did you figure out?[Kierna Mayo, the former editor in chief of Ebony magazine] said something to the effect of, “Bill Cosby is key to understanding America.” To me, that’s what this is about.There are two runaway forces of oppression in America: One, how we treat nonwhite people. The other is how we have treated women through the history of this country. And if you look at Bill Cosby’s career, you can see things he did that makes this better and makes this worse. I believe there’s a lot to learn there.Kierna Mayo, the former editor in chief of Ebony, is among the interviewees who try to process the Cosby legacy in “We Need to Talk About Cosby.”ShowtimeYou use a timeline device in a powerful way that allows you to talk about the highlights of his career and also locate the timing of the accusations against him.I don’t like when documentaries tell some personal story but they don’t connect to history. Because you want to know what was happening when that happened — that helps give us the sense of why this is even more interesting.It doesn’t make sense to talk about Bill Cosby as if he was a solo man in the world. You have to really see how the boys-will-be-boys culture of Hollywood, specifically in the ’60s, invites a kind of behavior that allows predators to hide.It also lays this timeline of his career, the timeline of America and the timeline of the accusations on top of each other, which helps you see them in a new way.You raise the question about who else knew at the time about the accusations against Cosby, but you don’t come up with many specific answers. Did you try to talk to senior figures in the industry?Yeah. but we didn’t have access to any of those people. And I’m not an investigative journalist, so there’s a point at which I have to accept that I’m here to take all that we know and start to figure out what were the circumstances through which this went down.Ultimately, the bigger thing is it’s clear that the industry overall is not doing a good job, and the people who run the industry are probably still not doing the best job they can do. That’s the bigger issue to me.At times, it seems that the “We” in “We need to talk about Cosby” refers mainly to a Black audience. Are there some complexities of the Cosby case that are particular to Black people?I would say the “We” is those of us who feel connected to Bill Cosby. Now it just so happens that a lot of those people are Black people. But let’s be clear: He was America’s dad, not Black America’s dad. He was universal. Everybody who worked on this, no matter what their race was, if they were of a certain generation, they were like, “Yeah, I watched that show and felt like I was part of that family, too.”Even this interview is complicated: For a lot of people, I will be tearing down a Black man in a white newspaper in front of a white man. And the question is, why isn’t this interview about Harvey Weinstein, or Trump, or other people who have had allegations of sexual assault? Those are the questions that are coming at me now on social media — like, why this man?What do you say to your detractors?I learned long ago you can’t win those battles on social media, so I’m sort of allowing them to happen. I’m going to handle it by talking to you and other outlets, and by making sure I talk to Black press outlets, places where maybe those people will go. But I don’t think there’s any resolving it. If those people watch it, they will learn it is a more nuanced conversation than I think they believe it is.This is another trite thing to say, but we have to be on the right side of history here. Can this be an opportunity for a large percentage of this country to actually work to make the system and structures better, from the highest levels of show business and corporate America, through working-class America, all the way down to how sex education is taught in schools? There are so many levels of this — those of us who want to be on the right side of history have to do the work to rebuild these systems. You ask many times in the documentary, “Who is Bill Cosby now?” Did you come to a conclusion yourself?Somebody who has always taught us about America and is still teaching us about America, even if it’s in ways he does not want to. And it is very important for us to learn all of the lessons of Bill Cosby if we’re actually going to be a better society.Also embedded in that, and it’s hard to say it, but in the greater context: [Cosby is] one of the key figures for Black America and America in the 20th century. And one of the greatest standup comedians of all time. And the creator of one of the best sitcoms of all time. And, throughout a lot of his career, an advocate for Black excellence. But if you want to engage with that, you have to engage with the other stuff.Cosby was released from prison before you finished the documentary. How did his release change things?I didn’t want this, but it gave it a more immediate feel — this is an active situation again. He’s out in the world again, which means all the defenders are out there in the world again and feel emboldened. So it feels both more important to tell this story and scary to tell this story, because people are invested in protecting him.The most valuable conversation to me isn’t the film — it’s the conversation that we all have after we watch the film. No matter what you think about Bill Cosby’s story, it is critical that we create a society that treats survivors of sexual assault better. More

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      Directors Guild Nominations Focus on Veterans Like Jane Campion and Steven Spielberg

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      The Directors Guild of America announced its feature-film nominees on Thursday, recognizing Paul Thomas Anderson (“Licorice Pizza”), Kenneth Branagh (“Belfast”), Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”), Steven Spielberg (“West Side Story”) and Denis Villeneuve (“Dune”). Branagh is the category’s sole first-time nominee; the others have each been nominated by the guild before and Spielberg holds the record for most DGA wins with three.All five of the nominated directors also saw their films recognized earlier Thursday by the Producers Guild of America, which suggests they comprise the upper tier of this Oscar season’s best-picture contenders. The Directors Guild’s nominees also tend to match four out of five when it comes to the Oscars’ best-director category. Last year, only DGA pick Aaron Sorkin (“The Trial of the Chicago 7”) fell out; he was replaced in the Oscar nominations by Thomas Vinterberg (“Another Round”). The year before, the Oscars went for Todd Phillips (“Joker”) instead of Taika Waititi (“Jojo Rabbit”).Campion’s inclusion marks the first time in DGA history that women were nominated in back-to-back years: Last season, both Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”) and eventual winner Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”) made the cut. And in the DGA category recognizing first-time filmmakers, four of the six nominees were women this year.Here is a rundown of the nominees in the major film and television categories. For the complete list, including commercials, reality shows and children’s programming, go to dga.org.FilmFeaturePaul Thomas Anderson, “Licorice Pizza”Kenneth Branagh, “Belfast”Jane Campion, “The Power of the Dog”Steven Spielberg, “West Side Story”Denis Villeneuve, “Dune”First-Time FeatureMaggie Gyllenhaal, “The Lost Daughter”Rebecca Hall, “Passing”Tatiana Huezo, “Prayers for the Stolen”Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Tick, Tick … Boom!”Michael Sarnoski, “Pig”Emma Seligman, “Shiva Baby”DocumentaryJessica Kingdon, “Ascension”Stanley Nelson, “Attica”Raoul Peck, “Exterminate All the Brutes”Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, “Summer of Soul”Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, “The Rescue”TelevisionDrama series“Succession,” Kevin Bray (for the episode “Retired Janitors of Idaho”)“Succession,” Mark Mylod (“All the Bells Say”)“Succession,” Andrij Parekh (“What It Takes”)“Succession,” Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman (“Lion in the Meadow”)“Succession,” Lorene Scafaria (“Too Much Birthday”)Comedy series“Hacks,” Lucia Aniello (“There Is No Line”)“Ted Lasso,” MJ Delaney (“No Weddings and a Funeral”)“Ted Lasso,” Erica Dunton (“Rainbow”)“Ted Lasso,” Sam Jones (“Beard After Hours”)“The White Lotus,” Mike White (“Mysterious Monkeys”)Television Movies and Limited Series“The Underground Railroad,” Barry Jenkins“Dopesick,” Barry Levinson (“First Bottle”)“Station Eleven,” Hiro Murai (“Wheel of Fire”)“Dopesick,” Danny Strong (“The People vs. Purdue Pharma”)“Mare of Easttown,” Craig Zobel More