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      ‘The Outsider’ Review: Inside the Making of the 9/11 Museum

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      A new documentary focuses on one man involved in the museum’s creation. But it’s not clear why his voice deserved to be heard above others’.Documentaries often cast their subjects in a congratulatory light, but “The Outsider” portrays Michael Shulan, the first creative director of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, as in effect the last honest historian of Sept. 11, 2001 — a man who wanted to pose “big questions,” per the voice-over, that America might not have been ready to ask.As the directors Steven Rosenbaum and Pamela Yoder tell it, Shulan was hired by the museum because he had become an inadvertent expert in Sept. 11 images. Shortly after the attacks, he helped turn a SoHo storefront he owned into a crowdsourced photo gallery. (The movie is weirdly vague about his background, but a New York Times story from 2001 described him as a writer.)The documentary — shot from 2008 to 2014, the year the museum opened — follows Shulan and several others involved in creating the museum as they decide what to exhibit and how to present it. Different goals (remembrance, education, preservation) are in tension. Shulan prefers an open-ended approach, in which visitors might come away with individual impressions of every photograph. The filmmakers cast Alice M. Greenwald, who came from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and is now the 9/11 museum’s chief executive, as Shulan’s adversary: “Michael wanted to engender questions,” the narrator says. “Alice wanted to provide answers.”Both perspectives have their purposes, but the filmmakers never clarify why they find Shulan’s vision more valid than Greenwald’s or the other curators’ — or why Shulan deserves some sort of monopoly on the memory of Sept. 11. Arguments will continue over the propriety of transforming Ground Zero into a tourist attraction. But it’s grotesque to turn that process into a monument to one man’s professional advancement.What’s especially peculiar about the focus on Shulan is that, in other respects, “The Outsider” is an ensemble piece, distributing screen time among a half a dozen people planning for the museum’s opening. (In another miscalculation, the film relegates families of the deceased to the periphery.) During a scene in which Shulan argues with a colleague, Amy Weisser, about a particular photograph, it’s even harder to see why the filmmakers tilted the scales toward him.The press notes suggest that Shulan emerged as the hero in the editing stage, which means the apparent self-aggrandizement shouldn’t necessarily be blamed on him. “The Outsider” might have unfolded as a dispassionate, Wiseman-esque institutional portrait, without the bizarre personality-based angle or amateurish, true-crime-doc voice-over. The Times reported last month that lawyers for the museum had requested changes for “inaccuracies and distortions.” The filmmakers demurred, but a complete overhaul is nevertheless in order.The OutsiderNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘Under the Volcano’ Review: Making Music in Paradise

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      This documentary looks at the recording studio George Martin created in the Caribbean that nurtured the stars of the MTV era.Between this film and “Rockfield: The Studio on the Farm,” there seems to be a minor vogue for documentaries about recording studios this year. The pretext for doing “Under the Volcano” — about the short-lived AIR studio on Montserrat in the Caribbean — is better than solid: The state-of-the-art facility, built by the Beatles producer George Martin, was in the immediate vicinity of the Soufrière Hills volcano.Sure, it was supposedly dormant, but it wasn’t always. Sting notes that the volcanic ash from prior eruptions made the ground on the island unusually fertile and lush.Martin’s desire to create an ideal environment for musicians is touching. Although a certain patrician colonialism did seem inherent in the idea. Jimmy Buffett relates how he and his helpmates were flummoxed by the slow service at a local bar, and how he solved the issue by buying the place. Buffett seems to think it’s a charming story.Fortunately, Earth, Wind & Fire shows up for a session, and the director, Gracie Otto, switches the film’s perspective to the Montserrat residents who worked at the studio and their interactions with various stars of what became the MTV era.Filmed separately, the three members of the Police relate how the environment could both exacerbate and ameliorate tensions between the musicians during recording sessions. Almost 40 years later, it’s hilarious to see Stewart Copeland speak of Sting with still-fresh feelings of exasperation, irritation and admiration. Fans of Elton John will find the manic work ethic he applied to the album “Too Low for Zero” fascinating.It wasn’t the volcano but a hurricane in the late-80s that killed the dream. The volcano did spew a few years later, further devastating the island. Martin, to his credit, sponsored charity concerts to aid in the island’s rehabilitation.Under the VolcanoNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Smartest Kids in the World’ Review: Putting School to the Test

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      This documentary aspires to offer a study of education worldwide, but it lacks in economic and cultural context.As summer ends and families agonize over how to send children back to school safely, we receive an education documentary that was plainly produced before the pandemic. “The Smartest Kids in the World” aspires to offer a study of teaching methods worldwide, but the documentary (on Discovery+) contains little rigor. It’s a dippy lecture in motion.Inspired by Amanda Ripley’s book of the same name, the documentary introduces four American teenagers planning to study abroad for a year. We are told that their chosen destinations — the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland and South Korea — far surpass the United States in education. This calculation comes from PISA, an international learning assessment. On what this mystery exam contains, however, the director, Tracy Droz Tragos, spends no time at all — the first of many curious omissions.As the students become immersed in overseas high schools, the movie pairs their stories with talking-head speculations from Ripley, who rhapsodizes over the foreign systems. In Finland, class autonomy empowers students. Switzerland offers enriching pre-professional opportunities. And the value South Korea places on education inspires a drive for excellence. Ripley’s ideas are interesting, but they are conveyed in swift succession and in broad and basic terms, giving the impression of a series of flashcards dispensed for memorization.Sometimes, Ripley’s notions diverge from the students’ experiences. When Jaxon, struggling with his Dutch curriculum, chooses to drop out and return to the U.S. early, the documentary declines to probe the cultural barriers to his ambitions. Later, Brittany, studying in Finland, marvels that the country pays its students to attend college — a crucial gesture at the economics of success that is left hanging in the air, unanalyzed.Listening to students is “the key to understanding how we’re doing and what’s possible,” Ripley proclaims early in “The Smartest Kids in the World.” The documentary fails to follow this advice, and its smartest points suffer for the mistake.The Smartest Kids in the WorldNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      ‘On Broadway’ Review: History and Celebrity, Stages and Lights

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      The neon lights are bright, and so is the spirit of this brief but loving history of Broadway.A sunset view of the New York City skyline, speckled with lights, while George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” plays. Old Broadway marquees. Moving snapshots from a Broadway of more recent past — a flight of Hogwarts wizards, the swinging and snapping Temptations, the triumphant gaze of a brown-skinned Alexander Hamilton.“On Broadway” sure knows how to work a theater-lover’s heart.The documentary, directed by Oren Jacoby, welcomes stage stans into a brief but loving history of Broadway that still reckons, if somewhat myopically, with some of the less attractive parts of its past and present. The film provides a fascinating textbooklike chronology of these stages from the 1960s until today, how economic downturns and cultural shifts changed the star status and fiscal success of the Great White Way.“On Broadway” could have easily become an extended post-pandemic “Broadway returns!” PSA, but thankfully Covid-19 is only mentioned in a brief epilogue of text. The story of these theaters’ resilience and resurrection throughout the pandemic is already there in the documentary’s account of Broadway’s long history of failures and deathbed moments, from which it always bounced back.“The key to Broadway is every day you have to pay your rent,” the director George C. Wolfe says at some point in the film, discussing the colossal financial risks that shows face and how exorbitant ticket prices have become standard. That the documentary manages to critique its subject while still declaring its love is commendable. Broadway is, after all, a commercial enterprise. The documentary weaves an account of the 2018 opening of the play “The Nap” — from awkward, stilted early read-throughs to the big premiere — into its narrative to illustrate the uphill battle that is bringing a show to Broadway. “The Nap” is transparently used as the shining example of what Broadway is at its best: It’s an American premiere without any celebrities and a transgender lead actress — and it was a critical success.But for the documentary’s heraldry of this little Broadway darling, it also isn’t that interested in it; the story of the play is briefly and haphazardly slotted into the larger narrative.The bigger problem of “On Broadway” is that it is (understandably) seduced by Broadway’s superficial glamour. So there are mostly big names interviewed, like Helen Mirren, Hugh Jackman, John Lithgow and Alec Baldwin. The archival clips also focus just on familiar faces: James Earl Jones, Bernadette Peters, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber. It’s hard for the film to see past the veil of celebrity that obscures the lesser known (and thus less glamorous) but vital theater-makers and artists who also make Broadway what it is.And yet, by the end of the film, what stuck most with me was the fresh surge of affection I felt for Broadway — even the bad shows. Even the commercial schlock. At heart “On Broadway” may be just another valentine to Broadway, but I get it; I’m also happy to bask in the warmth of those lights.On BroadwayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Times Analyzed 3,000 Videos of Capitol Riot for Documentary

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      Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On Jan 6., as rioters were attacking the U.S. Capitol, Times journalists on the Visual Investigations team were downloading as many recordings of the violence as they could find.Over the next six months, the team, which combines traditional reporting techniques with forensic visual analysis, gathered over 3,000 videos, equaling hundreds of hours. The journalists analyzed, verified and pinpointed the location of each one, then distilled the footage into a 40-minute documentary that captured the fury and destruction moment by moment. The video, the longest the team has ever produced, provides a comprehensive picture of “a violent assault encouraged by the president on a seat of democracy that he vowed to protect,” as a reporter says in the piece.The visual investigation, “Day of Rage,” which was published digitally on June 30 and which is part of a print special section in Sunday’s paper, comes as conservative lawmakers continue to minimize or deny the violence, even going as far as recasting the riot as a “normal tourist visit.” The video, in contrast, shows up-close a mob breaking through windows, the gruesome deaths of two women and a police officer crushed between doors.“In providing the definitive account of what happened that day, the piece serves to combat efforts to downplay it or to rewrite that history,” said Malachy Browne, a senior producer on the Visual Investigations team who worked on the documentary.“It serves the core mission of The Times, which is to find the truth and show it.”Haley Willis, a producer on the team who helped gather the footage, said that some of the searches required special techniques but that much of the content was easily accessible. Many of the videos came from social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Parler, a platform that was popular with conservatives and later shut down. The team also collected recordings from journalists on the scene and police radio traffic, and went to court to unseal body camera footage.“Most of where we found this information was on platforms and places that the average person who has grown up on the internet would understand,” Ms. Willis said.In analyzing the videos, the team members verified the images, looked for specific individuals or groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and identified when and where each one was filmed. Then they put the videos on a timeline, which allowed them to reconstruct the scenes by the minute and track the key instigators.David Botti, a senior producer, said the team wanted to use this footage to explain how the riot happened, to underscore just how close the mob came to the lawmakers and to explore how much worse it could have gotten. For example, the investigation tracked the proximity of the rioters to former Vice President Mike Pence and an aide who was carrying the United States nuclear codes.“It’s rare to get an event of this magnitude that’s covered by so many cameras in so many places by so many different types of people filming with different agendas,” Mr. Botti said. “There was just so much video that someone needed to make sense of it.”Dmitriy Khavin, a video editor on the team, said he wanted viewers to feel like they were on the scene. But he also recognized the images were graphic, so he tried to modulate the pace with slower moments and other visual elements like maps and diagrams.“This event was overwhelming,” Mr. Khavin said. “So we worked a lot on trying to make it easier to process, so it’s not like you’re being bombarded and then tuning out.”Carrie Mifsud, an art director who designed the print special section, said her goal was similar, adding that she wanted to stay true to the video’s foundation. “For this project, it was the sequence and the full picture of events,” she said. Working with the graphics editors Bill Marsh and Guilbert Gates, she anchored the design in a timeline and included as many visuals and text from the documentary as possible to offer readers a bird’s-eye view of what happened.“My hope is that the special section can serve as a printed guide to what happened that day, where it started, and the aftermath, Ms. Mifsud said.For the journalists on the Visual Investigations team, it was challenging to shake off the work at the end of the day. Mr. Khavin said images of the riot would often appear in his dreams long after he stepped away from the computer.“You watch it so many times and look at these people and notice every detail and digest the anger,” he said. “It is difficult.” More

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      ‘Not Going Quietly’ Review: Into the Long Fight

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      This documentary follows the activist Ady Barkan, who toured the U.S. to help demonstrators draw attention to public health policies after his diagnosis with a fatal neurological disease.In 2016, Ady Barkan was working as an advocate for economic justice when he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., a neurological disease that deteriorates motor function. Doctors told him he had only three or four years to live. The documentary “Not Going Quietly” begins shortly after this grim diagnosis, as Ady embarks on a new political campaign, this time focused on public health policy.In the film, Ady leaves the comfort of home and family to travel across the United States on a speaking tour as part of his “Be a Hero” campaign. He leads rallies in Congressional districts where politicians support what Ady deems inhumane health policies. In Washington, his push for health care access leads Ady to protest Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court appointment. Through this fight, his illness progresses, limiting his ability to move and speak.The most intriguing scenes in the documentary are focused on the mechanics of Ady’s activism. The director Nicholas Bruckman captures Ady and a team of organizers as they host a training for demonstrators who intend to film themselves disrupting politicians during routine campaign stops with questions about health care. This training represents one of the few occasions that Bruckman treats Ady’s success as a result of organizing, rather than a feat achieved through sheer force of personality.Ady’s vitality has been central to his accomplishments. But Bruckman elides the significant amount of planning that it has taken for Ady and his team to build a national movement. This lack of practical detail means this documentary plays as a human-interest story, built from predictable beats of adversity and triumph. It is a warm and generous portrait, but the film lacks its central organizer’s propulsive shrewdness.Not Going QuietlyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Searching for Mr. Rugoff’ Review: Man Behind the Movies

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      A documentary looks at an influential distributor and theater owner who went after visionary films, including “Scenes From a Marriage” and “Putney Swope.”Not every documentary features its director calling his subject “kind of a terrible person.” But Ira Deutchman’s “Searching for Mr. Rugoff” happily looks at the man in full: Donald S. Rugoff, the influential distributor, New York City theater impresario and certifiable “piece of work” (to quote one testimonial).During a blazing run in the 1960s and 1970s, Rugoff went after visionary movies that made audiences sit up and take notice: “Z,” “The Sorrow and the Pity,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Scenes From a Marriage,” “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” “Harlan County USA,” “Nothing but a Man,” “Putney Swope,” “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” and, yes, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”As a former employee and later a distributor and producer, Deutchman brings firsthand insights into the indefatigable Mr. Rugoff (who died in 1989). He assembles an amused and bemused circle of fellow veterans of Rugoff’s distribution company Cinema 5, old-school commentators, Rugoff’s ex-wife and sons, and grateful filmmakers (Lina Wertmuller, Robert Downey Sr., Costa-Gavras). Deutchman, a professor at Columbia University, also visits Edgartown, Mass., for traces of Rugoff’s life after his company was taken over.As someone who grew up going to some of the theaters Rugoff once ran — which included Cinema I and II and the Beekman, among others — I got the warm-and-fuzzies from seeing the love here for moviegoing and exhibition, which he goosed with gonzo showmanship. Equally so for the brief inclusion of Dan Talbot, fellow distributor and theater maven, whose cinemas and unparalleled New Yorker Films catalog also remain at the heart of the medium. It’s all part of an essential history of film culture that continues in new and different ways today.Searching for Mr. RugoffNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Apple TV and other streaming services. More

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      ‘The Meaning of Hitler’ Review: Understanding Fascism

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      This docu-essay inspired by Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 book of the same title argues that Hitler was disturbingly ordinary.The docu-essay “The Meaning of Hitler” proceeds with caution. The film, inspired by the historian and journalist Sebastian Haffner’s 1978 book of the same title, seeks to understand the combination of personal pathology, political shrewdness and mass complicity that allowed Hitler to create the Nazi regime. It also finds disturbing 21st-century echoes.But the filmmakers, the wife-husband directorial team of Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker (“Gunner Palace”), are wary of contributing to any mystique that surrounds Hitler, not least because they find little in Hitler’s background that makes him unique. Early on, a narrator expresses concern about the project: “Is it possible to make a film like this without contributing to the expansion of the Nazi cinematic universe?”Although the film features Holocaust historians like Saul Friedländer, Yehuda Bauer and Deborah Lipstadt and the authors Martin Amis and Francine Prose, it approaches Hitler from a variety of disciplines. The psychiatrist Peter Theiss-Abendroth says that Hitler has been assigned almost any diagnosis available, but he suggests that such speculation invariably creates excuses for culpability. Bauer notes that Hitler’s psychological problems were no different from those of millions of others. The movie delves into technology to explain how advances in microphones enabled Hitler’s theatrical style of oration. An archaeologist discusses the excavation of the Sobibor death camp.So is “The Meaning of Hitler” really playing with fire? It is when it trails the Holocaust denier David Irving on a visit to Treblinka. Irving makes offhand anti-Semitic remarks so flagrantly offensive it’s difficult to see what’s edifying about including him.But that misstep aside, “The Meaning of Hitler” takes a multifaceted, often counterintuitive approach to examining the underpinnings of fascism.The Meaning of HitlerNot rated. In English and German with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Apple TV and other streaming services. More