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      ‘Controlling Britney Spears’ Reveals New Details of Her Life Under Conservatorship

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      A new documentary by The New York Times features interviews with key insiders and people with firsthand information about how the conservatorship controlled the pop star’s life.The New York Times Presents/FX/Hulu‘Controlling Britney Spears’Producer/Director Samantha StarkSupervising Producer Liz DayWatch on Friday, Sept. 24, at 10 p.m. on FX or stream it on Hulu.Britney Spears expressed strong objections in June to the court-sanctioned conservatorship, which was largely led by her father, that controlled her life. But how the conservatorship worked had never been fully understood.Now, after her impassioned speech to a Los Angeles court over the summer, key insiders have come forward to talk publicly for the first time about what they saw. They provide the most detailed account yet of Spears’s life under the unusual legal arrangement that, for the past 13 years, stripped away many of her rights.A new documentary by The New York Times, “Controlling Britney Spears,” reveals a portrait of an intense surveillance apparatus that monitored every move the pop star made. This new film, by the makers of the Emmy-nominated “Framing Britney Spears,” features exclusive interviews with members of Spears’s inner circle who had intimate knowledge of her life under the conservatorship.“It really reminded me of somebody that was in prison,” said a former employee of the security firm hired by Spears’s father to protect her. “And security was put in a position to be the prison guards essentially.”Watch our documentary on Friday, Sept. 24, at 10 p.m. ET on FX or stream it on Hulu.Courtesy of Felicia CulottaSenior Producer Rachel AbramsProducer Timothy MoranDirector of Photography Victor Tadashi SuarezVideo Editors Lousine Shamamian, Pierre Takal, Diana DeCilio, Geoff O’Brien“The New York Times Presents” is a series of documentaries representing the unparalleled journalism and insight of The New York Times, bringing viewers close to the essential stories of our time. More

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      ‘The Most Beautiful Boy in the World’ Review: A Cautionary Tale

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      The 1971 film “Death in Venice” showcased the delicate androgyny of Bjorn Andresen’s face and form, but the changes it wrought on his life are indelible.Almost 30 years ago I interviewed the onetime child actor Bill Mumy, who was about 40 by then. He had played Will Robinson on “Lost in Space” when he was a kid and was now enjoying a creatively prosperous adulthood. Which has not often been the case for child actors. Citing himself and Jodie Foster, he insisted that what made a difference for them was preparation — professional training at an early age.Growing up, Bjorn Andresen wanted to be a musician and spent time singing and playing. But his actual fate was something for which he could not have prepared: The film director Luchino Visconti hand-picked him to play Tadzio, the ravishing albeit inadvertent angel of death to Dirk Bogarde’s Aschenbach in Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice.”We meet Visconti early in this often spellbinding documentary directed by Kristina Lindstrom and Kristian Petri. In archival footage, Visconti visits Stockholm. He says he’s been all over Europe looking for a teen boy who embodies the perfection of Mann’s vision. This pursuit would be considered very odd and possibly actionable today.Once he picked Bjorn — the audition reel in which he asks the then-15-year-old strip to the waist is unsettling — he was protective of him on set. However, after the movie’s premiere, and the director’s proclamation that Bjorn was “the most beautiful boy in the world,” it seemed as if nobody could, let alone would, shield him.Certainly not his grandmother, who, according to Andresen, “wanted a celebrity for a grandchild.” Andresen is in his sixties now, with long hair and a beard that camouflages his face. He often wears shades to obscure the eyes Visconti once rhapsodized over. Following Bjorn over the course of a year or so, the movie shows him continuing to act. He appears, memorably, in the 2019 film “Midsommar,” although you’d never associate Tadzio with that horror movie without studying its credits. In low-key sequences, he unpeels his personal tragedies. He explores the disappearance of his beloved mother, recounts the death of one of his own children and has a melancholy return to Tokyo, where, post “Death,” he had pop music stardom foisted on him.It was there that his “bashonen” (a Japanese word for the quality of a young man of androgynous beauty) was a rampant cultural sensation. One sees Bjorn/Tadzio’s face and hair, or some slight variant of it, in manga and anime to this day.Andresen’s determination to rise above misfortune, and his hopes for himself, make this movie less than a total tragedy. But it’s an often shudder-inducing cautionary tale.The Most Beautiful Boy in the WorldNot rated. In English, Swedish and Japanese with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Village Detective: A Song Cycle’ Review: Soviet Film Hero Emerges

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      Bill Morrison, the poet laureate of lost films, turns the story of footage found near Iceland into a history of a slice of Soviet cinema.The main title of this movie could be referring to two different people. The first would be Fyodor Ivanovich Aniskin, the avuncular hero of a banal 1969 Soviet film, played by the frequently avuncular actor Mikhail Zharov. Consulting on a case in which a musician, new to his hamlet, complains of a purloined accordion, Aniskin notes that the man does not yet understand the values of their small town.The other “village detective” might be Bill Morrison himself. For Morrison, who is the producer, director and editor of this strangely intoxicating film, is a cinematic investigator of the first stripe. The values of his own corner of film revival place as much emphasis on ruin as on restoration. His astonishing 2017 feature, “Dawson City: Frozen Time,” unearthed an uncanny swatch of buried film history from the end of the line of the Klondike Gold Rush. Other films, like “Decasia” (2002), are audiovisual tone poems reveling in the beautiful rot of old reels in varying states of disrepair.Like “Frozen Time,” “The Village Detective” tells the story of a find. After a preface in which two films featuring Zharov, one from the 1930s and another from the early 1970s, conduct a kind of dialogue with each other, Morrison tells, in onscreen titles, of a 2016 email from a friend, the Icelandic musician and composer Johann Johannsson.On a trip home, Johannsson heard of an Icelandic lobster trawler catching a forgotten film canister in its net. We learn that the canister was picked up on the border of the tectonic plates that hold North America and Europe — the West abutting the East, so to speak. Underneath these plates is molten lava; the hydrogen sulfide emanating from that lava is a very high-quality preservative. Film preservationists in Iceland were practically salivating over the possibilities.What was found, and what we see, in mesmeric images transferred from celluloid that was steeped in mud, was the Soviet movie from 1969, “Derevensky Detektiv,” savaged by critics but a huge popular hit — so much so that Zharov continued to play Aniskin in sequels for the last decade of his career. He died in 1981 at the age of 82.As Morrison demonstrates through exhaustively selected clips, the actor’s story is also a, if not the, story of Soviet cinema. His film debut, as an extra, was in 1915, in a pre-Soviet film about Ivan the Terrible. He appeared in movies by important Soviet directors such as Boris Barnet and V.I. Pudovkin — and by many less important filmmakers. As he grew a bit stout in his thirties, he began to resemble the players of friendly-but-hapless supporting roles in American studio films. He’s got a touch of Alan Hale Sr., you could say.He did some of his best work in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible, Part II,” which got its director in hot water with Stalin. And when Zharov’s in-laws were imprisoned as part of the so-called “doctors’ plot” to assassinate Stalin (no such plot existed; the whole affair was an antisemitic fraud), Zharov was ostracized for not denouncing them.Morrison weaves this history into a treatment of Zharov’s 1969 star turn that renders its stodgy corniness poetic. (The accordion-centered score, by David Lang, is essential to this near-alchemical process.) The movie ends on a droll semi-cosmic joke that one expects its dedicatee, Johannsson, who died in 2018, might have appreciated.The Village Detective: A Song CycleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In English, with some Russian and Icelandic, subtitled. In theaters. More

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      Balanchine, the Teacher: ‘I Pushed Everybody’

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      He used to say he would be remembered more for his teaching than his ballets. The film “In Balanchine’s Classroom” provides a glimpse of that.The setting is a ballet class, and the year is 1974. George Balanchine throws up his arms in exasperation at the sight of a dancer executing a step incorrectly at the barre. We may not be able to see her, and what she’s doing wrong, but we feel how hard Balanchine is taking it. It’s not just his words — “that’s bad” — but the punctuation of his body, emphatic, agile, alive.His hands slap his thighs. He raises an arm like a stiff branch to show how far a leg should be raised. It’s not high; it’s parallel to the floor.“Go enough,” he says, before lifting it a couple of inches. “To go up later. See? ’Cause if you go high, you fall down.”His arm crashes down, hitting his leg. Then his zinger: “Newton’s Law.”The new film “In Balanchine’s Classroom,” directed by Connie Hochman, focuses on the teaching of the groundbreaking choreographer — and how it instilled his dances at New York City Ballet with articulate, musical brilliance. It’s both enthralling and heartbreaking. To love Balanchine is to love this film; to love this film is to love ballet, specifically Balanchine’s kind and his kind of dancer: daring, fast, strong, free, at one with the music. Each is different from the next. That mattered to him.“What do you see?” he says in a voice-over. “You see a person doing it. This person, not the other one. This particular person. This particular leg is lifted or neck is bent. I care about these people, you see.”Balanchine, right, working on “Bayou” in 1952.Sam Falk/The New York TimesBalanchine is irreplaceable. His ballets are still performed, most regularly by City Ballet, the company he formed with Lincoln Kirstein, but are they performed in the same way? It’s that question that makes the film heartbreaking. Each year since Balanchine’s death in 1983, his legacy has become more vulnerable. The pandemic sped that up.In many ways, “In Balanchine’s Classroom” is a call to action, an opportunity to study what he left behind: his teaching, which was the basis for all that followed. He not only revolutionized ballet, but he also made it reflect the feeling of the time while giving it a sense of timelessness.“I feel the sadness too,” said Hochman, a dancer who studied at the City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet as a child in the 1960s. “But I like to always remember that Balanchine was such an optimist.”“He sometimes was pulling his hair out trying to get his point across,” she added, “but he just stuck with it because he really believed in his dancers and he loved them so much.”Since Hochman began work on the documentary more than 10 years ago, several of the dancers she interviewed, including Jacques d’Amboise, have died. Esteemed teachers like Suki Schorer, a former principal who started teaching at Balanchine’s request in the early 1960s and continues to do so at the School of American Ballet, are getting older. That the film preserves their voices, and many more, is invaluable. (Hochman is also building an archive of the dozens of dancers that she interviewed for the film. A selection of snippets is available online.)Merrill Ashley, a former principal who appears in the film, said that Balanchine used to say that he would be more remembered for his teaching than for his ballets. “I don’t think that’s happened, but I think it should happen,” she said in an interview. “And I think this will be an important tool to show the world how he taught, and that it was important to him. He was a teacher.”“I like to always remember that Balanchine was such an optimist,” Hochman said.Ernst Hass, via Zeitgeist FilmsAnd he didn’t teach through counts and imagery alone. What this film shows so lucidly is how his philosophy of movement lived inside of his body. Rare archival footage of him teaching and rehearsing show not only his speed and accuracy but the generosity of his own dancing body as he demonstrates what he wants. Balanchine is clear, but he’s not polite. He devours space.One of Hochman’s greatest challenges was to unearth film of Balanchine. The classroom material comes from Jerome Robbins and Christine Redpath, then a dancer in the company and now a repertory director. In diving into the digital collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Hochman combed metadata. If she found something with words like “‘rehearsal’” and “‘Balanchine works with dancer,’” she made a note of it.One chunk of material she found is exceptional: footage from a shoot for a 1981 TV production of “The Spellbound Child,” or “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges,” set to Ravel. The rehearsal was filmed, which meant “hours and hours of Balanchine working on that ballet,” Hochman said. “They were making a blueprint of the path of the dancers and the camera angles. It was wonderful.”It’s a fantasy ballet, full of creatures and objects that come to life; Balanchine, who created the first version of it for the Opéra de Monte-Carlo in 1925, revived it in 1975 for City Ballet’s Ravel Festival. In one rehearsal, he asks a dancer if she “could run starting forever.” She isn’t sure what he means — who would be? — so he shows her, lunging on the floor and moving forward and back slightly as if he is about to take off but some invisible force keeps him from doing so.“Something like that,” he says.“What do you see?” Balanchine says in Hochman’s film. “You see a person doing it. This person, not the other one.”Zeitgeist FilmsBalanchine, here and in footage of class, is an energetic force: The film may be blurry or grainy, but his intention is not. “Did you see moths in your life?” he asks a group before taking off in a serpentine swoop as if it were suddenly a moonlit night. Whoosh! He is so fast, so urgent. It’s all the more mesmerizing in the digitized films of him teaching class, as flickering lights render him ghostly, otherworldly.“It’s so magical,” Hochman said. “But when you watch it, I think on a subliminal level, you feel that this just barely captured what happened, because dance evaporates — everything goes, but we just have this little hint. The deterioration actually adds to the meaning of it.”Why would a dancer who never took a class from Balanchine want to make a film about his teaching? Hochman, who went on to become a member of the Pennsylvania Ballet, loved class. And when Pennsylvania Ballet would perform in New York, Schorer, her former teacher, would come to see her dance.“I did a solo in ‘Raymonda Variations’ and Suki came backstage,” Hochman said. “She’s very spirited and very blunt, and she said: ‘It was lovely, Connie, but you don’t get it. It’s about opposition.’ And she started right there in the dressing room trying to get across to me what the variation was about. The Balanchine dancers knew something that I didn’t know. It was like a fog.”Balanchine was a surprise guest at a 1972 School of American Ballet rehearsal, with Hochman and Fernando Bujones.Virginia BrooksShe wanted to get to the bottom of it for herself. And even more important, she wanted to preserve the dancers’ perspectives on Balanchine and his training, and to show how Balanchine cherished his dancers’ individuality.Even if you never had the luxury of seeing the company when he was in charge (I depressingly did not), “In Balanchine’s Classroom” shows that he would stop at nothing to make dancers more precise, stronger, more musical and also more themselves. “I wanted to have a certain way of dancing,” he says in another voice-over. “I want to have clean dancers. So I pushed everybody.”Balanchine studied at the Imperial Ballet School in St. Petersburg, Russia, starting at age 9. (He left the Soviet Union in 1924.) That classical training, Ashley said, is what he passed onto them. “When people say he’s not teaching classical ballet, that is just ludicrous,” she said. “He is going back to the very essence of what ballet was.”What happens when there is no one left to correct the myths? Ashley is not alone in worrying about his legacy as a teacher and about misconceptions surrounding some of his ideas: He wanted the hand to be rounded with the fingers separated like petals, but sometimes it ends up looking like a claw. And there’s a the notion that he didn’t want his dancers to put down any weight in their heels when they danced. What Balanchine actually wanted was for dancers to feel as though there was nothing more than a piece of onion skin between the heel and the floor. “A piece of paper, that’s it,” Ashley said. “Your heel can touch the floor, but your weight can’t be in the heel.”While City Ballet can still feel like a glorious bouquet — Balanchine used to say his dancers were like flowers that bloomed at different times to create a garden — it’s not hard to imagine that he could transform today’s dancers into something transcendent. “This is how I see it: He chose people with strong personalities that he enjoyed,” Hochman said. “The rigors of ballet technique could not squelch them.”A moment from Balanchine’s “Serenade,” as seen in “In Balanchine’s Classroom.”Zeitgeist FilmsHochman draws out some of those personalities: How did they become so devoted? What was the spark? There’s something particularly affecting in Heather Watts’s story. A free spirit from California, Watts, in an interview, said he used to call her his little flower child. She was something of a problem — “discipline was not my middle name,” she admits in the film — but he wouldn’t give up on her.One day, when she was late for a costume fitting, Balanchine told her it was her last chance. Around that time, she got to perform a lead role in “Serenade,” and after the performance, Balanchine delivered the words that shifted her focus: “You were good.”“In that moment,” Watts says in the film, “he becomes the only voice in my head that can guide me to what I most want.”Hochman shows Watts (and others, too) coaching younger dancers: passing on her knowledge that in a Balanchine ballet there is no such thing as safe. Sometimes Watts finds that the dancers she works with improve but then settle into a place of safety. “You have to keep going,” she said. “And that’s what he did with us.”Dancers today like to use the expression that choreography is in their bodies. To Watts, that means trouble. “You’re not dancing on the edge of a volcano,” she said. “And you’re not hanging on that note like your life depended on it.”She thinks about the role of Dewdrop in “The Nutcracker.” In it, Balanchine challenged her to run as fast as she could, to bend as much as possible and to fly — to not touch the ground.“He dared me not to touch the ground,” Watts said. “That’s exhilarating. That’s an exhilarating dare.” More

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      An Eerie, Thrilling Trip to the Toronto International Film Festival

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      With theaters at 50 percent capacity, our critic found herself somewhat isolated as she took in highlights like “The Tsugua Diaries” and “Hold Your Fire.”“Would you like to move to the orchestra?” a voice from the dark whispered.I was at the Toronto International Film Festival and, moments earlier, had just realized that I was the only festivalgoer in the very capacious, very empty balcony. In normal years, this 2,000-seat theater, a festival mainstay, is packed with excitedly buzzing attendees. But normal is so very 2019 as are crowds. It felt awfully lonely up there with just me and some ushers, so I said Sure! and ran down to the orchestra, settling amid other attendees who, perhaps like me, were trying to feign a sense of togetherness — at a Covid-safe distance, of course.One of the largest film happenings in the world, the Toronto festival celebrated its 46th anniversary this year and, more gloomily, its second year of putting on a show during the pandemic. On a number of levels, it was a success: Although scaled down from its preplague era, the festival, which ends Saturday, presented some 200 movies, in person and digitally, from across the world. There were premieres, panels and lots of mask-muffled “Have a great day!” from the staff. Benedict Cumberbatch — the star of Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” and Will Sharpe’s “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain” — popped in via satellite for a chat.It was much the same while being profoundly different. More than anything, as I attended movies in the festival’s eerily depopulated theaters — sitting in rooms that, per Canadian safety rules, couldn’t exceed 50 percent capacity — I was reminded that a film festival isn’t simply a series of back-to-back new movies. It’s also people, joined together, and ordinarily jammed together, as one under the cinematic groove. There is always vulgarity, of course, the red-carpet posing, the Oscar-race hustling, and I’ve watched plenty of profane monstrosities at Toronto, Sundance, et al. But even when the movies disappoint, I am always happy at a festival, watching alongside people as crazy about movies as I am.Benedict Cumberbatch, left, and Jesse Plemons in “The Power of the Dog.”Kirsty Griffin/NetflixThere weren’t many people, but there was still a lot to like and to love in Toronto, including Cumberbatch flexing his muscles in the nude as a 1920s Montana cowboy in Campion’s magnificent “The Power of the Dog” and playing a rather more buttoned-up cat fancier in “Louis Wain.” A charming, poignant biographical account, that film portrays the life of a British artist who, starting in the late 19th century — with pen, vibrant ink and a fantastically wild imagination — helped teach the joys of cat worship to a dog-besotted Britain. The movie may make some gag, but I dug its tenderness and Wain’s work, which grew trippier the older and more mentally unstable he became.For higher-profile selections like these, the fall festivals — Telluride and Venice recently ended — serve as a legitimizing launchpad for the fall season, a way to distinguish themselves from the hundreds of movies also vying for attention. Disney can scoop up spectators by the millions. Titles like “The Power of the Dog,” which falls under the fuzzy heading of art film yet is entirely accessible to those actually paying attention, need to seduce a smaller viewership, even if Campion has long been a revered auteur. They need festival audiences, critics included, on the front lines, particularly if a movie is headed toward next year’s Academy Awards. (“Dog” is more likely to go the Oscar distance than Wain’s cats.)And, after months and months of streaming new movies in my living room, I was exceptionally happy to be at Toronto. I’ve attended the festival for years, largely because of the variegated bounty of its offerings, from the commercial to the avant-garde. When it was founded in 1976, it was called the Festival of Festivals, partly because it screened films that had played elsewhere. It was intended for the general public (Cannes is invitation-only), a mandate that helped give Toronto a democratic vibe. In the words of one of its founders, Bill Marshall, “There’s something for everyone, but not everything for everyone, but something.”A scene from “Hold Your Fire,” about hostage negotiations.InterPositive Media, via Toronto International Film FestivalIn the decades that followed, Toronto rebranded itself as the Toronto International Film Festival and opened a handsome complex called the Lightbox in a soulless area called the entertainment district, where construction crews always seem to be building glass-and-steel apartment complexes for young professionals with dogs. Even so, the event’s populist ethos continues, as does its hodgepodge programming. Here, as usual, you could catch movies that had played in Berlin, Cannes and Telluride and would soon make their way to New York and beyond. One of the best things about Toronto, though, is that it isn’t an auteur-driven festival or an Oscar-baiting one: It’s just a flood of movies — good, bad and indifferent.There were teary melodramas, cryptic whatsits and period dramas like Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” which is as watchable as it is predictable. A story in black-and-white — visually and in its beats — the movie takes place in the title city in the 1960s, just as partisan violence descends on a cozy street where Catholic and Protestant families live alongside one another in dewy harmony. Centered on a cute tyke nestled in the bosom of a loving family whose members are mostly known commodities (Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds play the grandparents), the movie is in the vein of John Boorman’s “Hope and Glory,” a far finer coming-of-age story set during World War II.Among the other offerings were movies that belong to familiar subgenres that I call the Sad Single Women With Dying Plants Movie (“True Things”) and the ever-popular Damaged Woman Film, some more outré (this year’s risible Cannes Palmes d’Or winner, “Titane”) than others (“The Mad Women’s Ball”). And then there was Edgar Wright’s frenetic “Last Night in Soho,” which is a female-friendship movie of a kind and putative empowerment story about another sad woman (Thomasin McKenzie) and her glamorous sad doppelgänger (Anya Taylor-Joy). The two meet across time in a London crawling with mean girls and unspeakably predatory men.Jacques Cousteau’s life is examined in a new documentary.Story Syndicate, via Toronto International Film FestivalAs usual, the documentaries were often a sure bet. Although “Becoming Cousteau,” about the underwater French explorer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau, is a fairly standard biographical portrait, the director Liz Garbus manages to push the movie into deeper depths. Filled with beautiful archival images of pristine waters, the movie opens as a fairly straight great-man story only to evolve into a thoughtful examination of what Cousteau’s early adventures wrought, including his lucrative work-for-hire helping to find oil in the Persian Gulf. As development progressively destroyed the undersea world that he helped illuminate, Cousteau became a fervent environmentalist — too late but still laudable.More formally audacious were two of my festival highlights: “Flee,” a Danish movie about an Afghan refugee, and “Hold Your Fire,” a jaw-dropper about a decades-old American hostage crisis. Directed by Stefan Forbes, “Hold Your Fire” looks back on a 1973 robbery in Brooklyn that went catastrophically wrong when its painfully young perpetrators were discovered midcrime. (Forbes also edited the wealth of archival material and shot the recent interviews with survivors and witnesses, like the psychologist Harvey Schlossberg, the definition of a mensch.) The incident quickly mushroomed into a televised spectacle and became a turning point in hostage negotiating; more than anything, it exhumes an instructive, bleakly relevant chapter in the city’s long racially fractious history.“Flee” is focused on an Afghan refugee, a friend of the documentary’s director. Final Cut for Real, via Toronto International Film Festival“Flee,” directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen, is a beautifully, at times expressionistically animated documentary — punctuated with shocks of unanimated newsreel-style imagery — about the filmmaker’s longtime friend, Amin (a pseudonym), a refugee from Afghanistan. The two met in high school and remained in touch, but it was only when Rasmussen started making this movie that he actually learned the real difficulties and intricacies of Amin’s story. “Flee” unwinds piecemeal as Amin — often lying on a couch, as if in a shrink’s office — recounts his harrowing travels, with a brother or alone, in a journey that, in some painful ways, is ongoing.My favorite movie of this year’s festival, “The Tsugua Diaries,” doesn’t easily fit into any obvious genre category, which is one of its attractions. Like some other titles in this year’s festival, the movie was shot during the pandemic, but it is also very much about the pandemic. Or, rather, it’s about time and its passage as well as friendship and the deep, life-sustaining pleasures of being with other people. It was directed by Maureen Fazendeiro (she’s French) and Miguel Gomes (he’s Portuguese) who are a couple, and is both formally playful — its divided in chapters, each of which take the movie back in time — and unexpectedly moving. I wept buckets, and I can’t wait to see it again. More

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      ‘In Balanchine’s Classroom’ Review: Teaching the Ineffable

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      Former ballet dancers grasp at words to describe the genius of George Balanchine in this charming documentary.In mathematics, there was Newton; in psychology, there was Freud; and in American ballet, George Balanchine was a foundational genius. He was a Georgian choreographer born in Russia who found prominence with the Ballets Russes in Paris, and moved from Europe to the United States in 1933. There, Balanchine helped to found the highly influential School of American Ballet and New York City Ballet, and he used those institutions to revolutionize the style of dance that was performed in the United States.Every day, Balanchine taught a class for his New York City Ballet company, and it was there that he demonstrated his vision of what dance should be. The documentary “In Balanchine’s Classroom” pairs archival footage from Balanchine’s studio with present-day interviews with the dancers who attended. They describe the experience as akin to being a pupil of Einstein.There is a beautiful act of translation that this documentary observes, as Balanchine’s former students — now wizened teachers themselves — attempt to render his movements into speech. Their failures to find perfect equivalents between these two languages indicate the choreographer’s plight: “Do it this way” is a meaningless directive if the mysterious “it” cannot already be done.In one amusing sequence, the director Connie Hochman shows the master at work. When describing dance, Balanchine grunts and seizes, and his bewildered apostles must turn his verbal and physical contortions into perfect pliés and pirouettes. Decades later, his students sigh, hum and gesticulate much like their instructor did. The archival footage of Balanchine’s company in its prime becomes the visual relief to their verbal frustration, the magnificent evidence that it is possible to master an indescribable method.In Balanchine’s ClassroomNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Little Girl’ Review: Growing Up and Seeking Peace

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      This sensitive documentary by the French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz naturalistically explores the struggles of a 7-year-old transgender girl.“Little Girl,” the French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz’s disarmingly sensitive documentary about a 7-year-old transgender girl, understands the power of close-ups. The camera often lingers on the face of our fledgling protagonist, Sasha, not to gawk at her appearance, but to challenge whatever moralizing preconceptions one might have with emotion laid devastatingly bare.One could easily mistake “Little Girl” for a fictional drama that tends toward observation and realism. Lifshitz follows Sasha and her family over the course of roughly a year, homing in on her mannerisms and means of play with naturalistic camerawork that heightens the idyllic splendor of rural France, while framing her home life as a kind of safe haven away from the cruelties of the outside world. Beautiful as it may be, the French countryside remains a stronghold of rigidly traditional values.Sasha’s mother, Karine, often takes the spotlight: We see her struggle to convince dismissive school administrators to correctly identify Sasha as a girl and, in direct interviews, witness the emotional toll of such perpetually thwarted efforts as she verbalizes her frustrations and insecurities.There are no rubbernecking, pity-provoking scenes of Sasha being bullied or spurned; perhaps more affecting are the images we do see: Sasha miming the movements of a girl in her ballet class, delighting in what it feels like to move her hands with feminine softness and grace.In conversation with a psychiatrist, Sasha hesitates to respond to a question about her treatment at school. But the proof is in her face, which twists, flits and goes blank before capitulating to tears. It’s in simple moments like these that Lifshitz invites us to consider Sasha’s feelings: the stark reality of her despair, the depth of which only images can communicate, asking us to reconsider what exactly is fueling our ideological fights.Little GirlNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Name Is Pauli Murray’ Review: Ahead of the Times

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      The pioneering legal thinker influenced Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But this documentary by the filmmakers behind “RBG” misses the mark.“My Name Is Pauli Murray,” the plainly pedagogical documentary by the filmmakers Betsy West and Julie Cohen, hinges on the audience not knowing who Murray was: an activist, writer, attorney and priest. The easier to wow us with the onslaught of information, which rightfully situates Murray — a Black, gender nonconforming intellectual who died in 1985 — as a thinker ahead of the times.As the first African American student to receive a doctorate from Yale Law School, Murray was a civil rights trailblazer, and an early architect of the idea that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment should guarantee not just racial but gender equality. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of the film’s many talking heads, explicitly cites Murray in one of her related Supreme Court opinions. Also touted is Murray’s refusal to sit at the back of the bus 15 years before Rosa Parks captured national attention by doing the same.Indeed, Murray’s story is a remarkable — and extensive — one that the filmmakers stuff into an hour and a half that feels like a dull and disorganized PowerPoint lecture.Murray was also a prolific writer who left behind troves of letters, diaries, poems and manuscripts detailing personal struggles with institutional rejection on the basis of gender or race (or often both) as well as romantic relationships with women. West and Cohen attempt to humanize their subject via these documents, but the effect feels cheesy and hollow, in no small part because of the overabundance of material. Along with audio recordings of Murray, the sound of a clacking typewriter is prominent and Murray’s cursive handwriting often floats across the screen.In “My Name is Pauli,” the filmmakers touch on more compelling themes than in their Ginsburg hagiography, “RBG,” by singling out a figure whose life and work reminds us that more complex and fluid understandings of race and gender are not strictly modern phenomena. But the result feels an awful lot like an illustrated textbook.My Name Is Pauli MurrayRated PG-13. 20th-century cruelty. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More