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      Ofra Bikel, Filmmaker With a Focus on Criminal Justice, Dies at 94

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      Her award-winning documentaries for PBS’s “Frontline” series shed light on serious flaws in several cases and helped lead to the release of 13 prisoners.Ofra Bikel, a crusading filmmaker for PBS’s “Frontline” investigative series whose documentaries about the criminal justice system in the United States exposed deep flaws in the convictions of 13 people, died on Aug. 11 at her home in Tel Aviv. She was 94.Her niece Tamar Ichilov confirmed the death. She left no immediate survivors.After making an eclectic mix of “Frontline” documentaries, including ones about the war in El Salvador, people over 75 who were beset with spiraling medical costs and the Solidarity movement in Poland, Ms. Bikel’s focus shifted mainly to criminal justice cases.“I hate injustice,” Ms. Bikel told The New York Times in 2005. “It just bugs me.”One case, in particular, consumed her for seven years.In 1990, she started looking into a case in Edenton, N.C., where seven people, including Bob and Betsy Kelly, a married couple who owned the Little Rascals Day Care Center, were charged with sexually abusing 29 children.Mr. Kelly was convicted and received 12 consecutive life sentences, but his conviction was overturned. His wife pleaded no contest after 30 months in jail. The other five defendants, including three of the Kellys’ employees, also spent long periods in prison before their releases.The case, which lacked physical and conclusive medical evidence, relied on testimony from many children who defense lawyers said had been manipulated by therapists.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Serena Williams Reflects on Her Life and Legacy in a New Docuseries

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      “In the Arena: Serena Williams,” an eight-part documentary on ESPN+, revisits the highs and lows of the star’s career and considers her impact on tennis and beyond.In March 2001, Serena Williams, then just 19, was booed mercilessly by the crowd during the tournament final of the Indian Wells Open in California. The jeering included racist slurs, and it was arguably the most terrifying and scarring thing that ever happened to Williams during her spectacular career.In “In the Arena: Serena Williams,” an eight-part documentary streaming on ESPN+ — the final episode premieres on Wednesday — the retired star looks back on how she was shaped by the experience.“Having to go through those scathing, nasty, awful things just because of the color of my skin opened a lot of doors for other people,” she said. “I have been able to provide a platform for Black girls and Black women to be proud of who they are.”I welcomed Williams’s newfound ease in talking so explicitly about race and her continued impact on women’s sports. One of the most visible athletes of all time, she has been the subject of countless interviews and biographies during her career, but she did not often seem eager to reveal much about her private life. This has changed in the past few years with projects like the HBO documentary “Being Serena” (2018), about her pregnancy and struggle to return to tennis, and her active posting on Instagram. She was also an executive producer of “King Richard,” the 2021, Oscar-winning biopic of her father, Richard Williams.But “In the Arena” reveals still more layers of its subject. Directed by Gotham Chopra, it features candid interviews with Williams and her relatives, friends and tennis contemporaries, including her sisters, Venus Williams and Isha Price; her fellow legend Roger Federer; and the former tennis star and current television commentator Mary Joe Fernández. Serena is also an executive producer.The series is a follow-up to “Man in the Arena: Tom Brady” (2021), which was also directed by Chopra and was produced by Brady’s 199 Productions. But tennis is far more solitary than a team sport like football. Spectators’ eyes are laser-focused on the players and their bodies, a reality that was originally made more fraught because of Williams’s race and class status in the predominately white world of tennis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Chimp Crazy,’ ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ and the Fault Lines of Family Life

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      The charged cultural conversation about pets and children — see “Chimp Crazy,” “childless cat ladies” and more — reveals the hidden contradictions of family life.“Monkey love is totally different than the way that you have love for your child,” Tonia Haddix, an exotic animal broker, says at the beginning of “Chimp Crazy,” the documentary HBO series investigating the world of chimpanzee ownership. “If it’s your natural born child, it’s just natural because you actually gave birth to that kid. But when you adopt a monkey, the bond is much, much deeper.”“Chimp Crazy” arrives in a summer of cultural and political obsession about the place of animals in our family lives. When JD Vance became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, his 2021 comment about “childless cat ladies” resurfaced, positioning them as adversaries of the traditional family. New York magazine published a special issue questioning the ethics of pet ownership, featuring a polarizing essay from an anonymous mother who neglected her cat once her human baby arrived. In the background of these stories, you can hear the echoes of an internet-wide argument that pits companion animals against human children, pet and tot forced into a psychic battle for adult recognition.These dynamics feel supercharged since 2020, the year when American family life — that insular institution that is expected to provide for all human care needs — became positively airtight. The coronavirus pandemic exaggerated a wider trend toward domestic isolation: pet owners spending more time with their animals, parents more time with their children, everyone less time with one another — except perhaps online, where our domestic scenes collide in a theater of grievance and stress.When a cat, a dog or certainly a chimp scampers through a family story, it knocks it off-kilter, revealing its hypocrisies and its harms. In “Chimp Crazy,” Haddix emerges as the avatar for all the contradictions of the domestic ideal of private home care: She loves her chimp “babies” with such obsession that she traps them (and herself) in a miserable diorama of family life.Haddix, a 50-something woman who describes herself as the “Dolly Parton of Chimps,” believes that God chose her to be a caretaker. She was a registered nurse before she became a live-in volunteer at a ramshackle chimp breeding facility in Missouri, where she speaks of a male chimp named Tonka as if she is his mother. Haddix also has two human children; she just loves them less, and says so on television.As she appoints herself the parent to an imprisoned wild animal, she asserts an idealized form of mothering — one she describes as selfless, unending and pure. “Chimp Crazy” is the story of just how ruinous this idea of love can be, for the woman and the ape.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best Movies From 1999, According to Our Critics

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      In our view, these eight comedies, dramas and more have attained classic status 25 years later. Let us know your own picks.On the 25th anniversary of what many argue is the greatest year in movie history, we asked film staff writers and critics to share the movie from 1999 that they love the best or feel is most overlooked. After reading their picks, let us know your choices.Best Comedy‘Being John Malkovich’Capping a decade of high-concept comedies, Spike Jonze’s “Being John Malkovich” (available on most major platforms) raised the stakes with the most outlandish premise yet: When a downtrodden puppeteer (John Cusack) takes an office job to make ends meet, he discovers a hidden portal there that allows him to enter the mind of medium-famous character actor John Malkovich. Jonze’s smartest instinct is to resist piling onto a concept that’s already perilously clever. Instead, the movie is underplayed, intimate and even a little scuzzy-looking. But that approach to Charlie Kaufman’s surprising screenplay leaves room for viewers to wonder as they watch: Why are we so certain that our lives would improve with even a modicum of fame? And are these bodies the wrong containers for what we feel inside? KYLE BUCHANANBuchanan’s other 1999 favorites: “eXistenZ,” “Three Kings,” “Election,” “The Talented Mr. Ripley”Best Drama‘Beau Travail’Claire Denis’s film focuses on the French Foreign Legion soldiers stationed in Djibouti.Pathé TVA haunting exploration of desire and violence, Claire Denis’s “Beau Travail” (available on major platforms) takes place in the East African country of Djibouti, a onetime French territory. There, French Foreign Legion soldiers practice drills, their bodies synced and individualities subordinated. At times, they dance with African women, their gazes uneasily summoning up the history shared by the formerly colonized and their colonizers.Loosely inspired by Herman Melville’s novella “Billy Budd,” Denis’s beguiling tour de force takes shape after one soldier (Grégoire Colin) rescues another, an act that disturbs a sergeant (Denis Lavant). The soldier “seduced everyone,” the sergeant says in voice-over. “Deep down I felt a sort of rancor, a rage brimming.” With minimal dialogue, ravishing visuals and meticulous attention to sensuous detail, Claire Denis elliptically charts what binds these men — tracing lines between love and hate, past and present, nation and self, masculinity and militarism — in a film that remains as disturbing as it is seductive. MANOHLA DARGIS

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      In ‘I Like It Here,’ Documentary Maker Ages Wistfully in the Hudson Valley

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      Looking back at the lives he and his friends led, the documentarian Ralph Arlyck delivers a memoir, an essay on mortality and a portrait of his community.“I got taxied into the world in the middle of the last century,” a man’s voice says at the start of “I Like It Here” (at the Firehouse theater in New York). We’re gliding slowly across a green rural landscape. “This is where I live now,” he continues. “I’m 78.”The voice is Ralph Arlyck’s, and the movie is his, too. Arlyck is a veteran documentarian, and “I Like It Here” is part memoir, part personal essay on aging and mortality, part portrait of his community and home in the Hudson Valley. There’s no plot, per se. But I’ve seen the movie twice, and both times I found myself moved near tears.“I Like It Here” feels like a cousin to Agnès Varda’s documentaries, particularly the curiosity and humor of “Daguerréotypes” (1975, Criterion Channel), in which she records the daily lives of her neighbors on the Rue Daguerre. Arlyck also introduces us to several of his friends, most of whom he’s known for decades. They’ve grown old alongside one another, sharing lives that intersect and diverge. Most have started to recognize they’re the age their parents and grandparents were when they thought of them as “old.” It’s a realization that’s equal parts unsettling and amusing.Arlyck’s recollections of his own family history, his marriage and his career as a filmmaker are part of the film. But they’re woven into the present narrative perfectly, without seeming at all self-indulgent. Instead, he’s doing precisely what great memoirists do: invite us into their stories as a way of making space for us to reflect on our own.“I Like It Here” is loaded with gentle humor as a counterbalance to the pathos inherent in any reflection on mortality by a man who knows most of his life is behind him. Near the beginning of the film, we see hands pull a box of 36 new pencils from a desk drawer. In voice-over, Arlyck notes that he doesn’t go through pencils very fast, and it occurs to him that this is probably the last box of pencils he’ll ever purchase. It’s almost a morbid thought, but it’s also kind of funny, and he treats it as such. Pencils: they mean nothing, and everything.The “here” of the title — Arlyck likes it here — opens up in complexity as the film progresses. It’s that green landscape from the beginning, where the neighbors and horses and Arlyck and his family live. But it’s also the planet, and an ineffable moment in time that he’s been lucky enough to inhabit. He and his friends talk about being aware that the end is coming, and have mostly gotten used to the idea. But late in the movie, he expresses a wistfulness that there’s nobody he can bargain with to stay longer than his time. “I’m having fun,” he says, while we see his grandchildren playing. “I’d actually rather not leave just yet.” More

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      Alan Cumming on ‘Chimp Crazy’: ‘I Really Do Understand the Deep Love’

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      A documentary series by a director of “Tiger King” tells a wild tale about human-chimp relationships. The actor and activist landed right in the middle.In 1997, Alan Cumming appeared in the film “Buddy,” playing an animal handler hired by an eccentric socialite (Rene Russo) who maintained a menagerie in her Long Island home. One of his co-stars was Tonka, a male chimpanzee on the cusp of adolescence. Cumming felt a special bond with Tonka.“He was very gentle,” Cumming, 59, said during a recent video call. “When the other chimps would get a little overwrought, he was a calming influence, a mediator.”Soon after filming ended, Tonka retired. (Once chimps go through puberty, they are considered potentially too strong and sexually aggressive to work on camera.) In 2017, Cumming, a supporter of the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals and a longtime vegan — “I thought if Mike Tyson could do it, I could do it,” he said — learned that Tonka was being held in substandard conditions at a former breeding facility in Festus, Mo.What happened next is the principal subject of the HBO series “Chimp Crazy,” which premiered on Sunday, a wild and occasionally woolly four-part documentary from Eric Goode, a director of “Tiger King.” (The three remaining episodes will air weekly.)PETA secured the release of six chimpanzees from the facility in 2021. Tonka was not among them. Eventually, PETA offered a $10,000 reward for news of Tonka’s whereabouts. Cumming matched that amount.While the twisty four episodes tell several fraught and often violent stories of chimp-human interactions, its permed, lip-plumped focus is Tonia Haddix, the owner of the Festus animals, including Tonka, and an exotic animal broker who describes herself as the “Dolly Parton of chimps.” (Given the reputation of “Tiger King” as a series that exposed animal mistreatment, Goode approached her through a proxy, a former circus clown who posed as the series’s director.) Cumming claims to feel sympathy for the women Goode turns his cameras on, even as they failed the animals in their care.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Netflix Documentary ‘Daughters’ Shows Reality of Girls Separated From Imprisoned Fathers

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      The Netflix documentary doesn’t gloss over hard truths as it follows participants in the Date With Dad program.It’s not unusual for a documentary to be a tear-jerker. Stories of unusual connection or unusual bravery tend to make for good cinema, so when the film features real people, it’s even more affecting. But even by those standards, “Daughters” (on Netflix), directed by Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, is extraordinarily moving.The film focuses on the Date With Dad program, which Patton has led for more than 12 years as part of her community work with Black girls. The children are brought to the prisons where their fathers are incarcerated for a party with dancing, refreshments and opportunities to take photos and talk. Socials like these might be run of the mill for many Americans, but for these families they’re extraordinary: Prisons have increasingly stopped in-person visits (known as “touch visits”) between family members, resorting instead to video and phone calls. Furthermore, incarcerated people can be moved from institution to institution, sometimes far from their families. For some fathers, these events may be the only time during their sentences that they can interact with their daughters in person.The film focuses on several girls, ages 5 to 13, as well as on their imprisoned fathers. The men who are eligible to participate in Date With Dad are required to first attend a 10-week coaching program led by a mentor. These sessions are captured in the documentary, and feel a lot like group therapy. Rae and Patton spend equal time with the girls and the men, letting us listen as they talk about their hopes, their fears, their relationships with their own parents, their regrets and a lot more. Women, too, are part of the story: For many who have been pushed into operating as both mother and father, it’s a fraught decision to even allow their daughters this contact. Their strength is remarkable.There are a lot of tears in this documentary, for the subjects and the audience, too. But “Daughters” is a remarkable study in how to tell this kind of story without twisting into sentimentality. I had assumed “Daughters” would conclude with the dance, with the glad reunions, tears, joy and the promise of closer relationships, but Rae and Patton are more invested in candor than in a happy ending. They’ve constructed the film to show the range of emotions that the girls have toward their fathers, even at the dance, where some are overjoyed and weeping and others are clearly struggling with their feelings.After the dance, the film continues to check in with some of the subjects for several years, exploring how the program affected their futures but also how their fathers’ continued imprisonment profoundly shaped the girls’ lives. Plenty of it is good. But rebuilding a family torn apart by the often unpredictable prison system is hard work, and it doesn’t always go the way we want. When hope does exist, it’s hard-won. And “Daughters” lets us feel all of that, too. More

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      ‘Chimp Crazy’ Is a Jaw-Dropping Look at ‘Monkey Love’

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      From a director of “Tiger King,” the four-part HBO documentary dives into the wild, salacious and dangerous world of people who have chimpanzees as pets.The four-part documentary series “Chimp Crazy,” debuting at 10 p.m. Sunday, on HBO, has plenty of chimps, and boy is it crazy. Sad and gruesome, too, and sometimes poignant and philosophical. “Monkey love,” we’re told, is a unique, radicalizing kind of love — more profound than the one between two humans. “The bond is much deeper,” says Tonia Haddix, one of the show’s central figures. “It’s just natural; it’s like your love for God.”Can she get an amen? Actually, no: Haddix, who describes herself as “the Dolly Parton of the chimps,” is an advocate for and a participant in the private chimpanzee market. She says she has a special, spectacular bond with Tonka, an adult chimp who was in several movies and whom she considers particularly docile and soulful. She insists, repeatedly, that Tonka, among others, is more of a “humanzee” — as much a person as he is a chimp. In one scene, she and Tonka watch Instagram videos of other chimpanzees, including his offspring.“Chimp Crazy” and “Tiger King” share an executive producer and director in Eric Goode, and they also share an ecstatic tabloid salaciousness. One woman breastfed a chimp baby alongside her human daughter. A man describes the chimp his mother housed as “the Tom Brady of chimpanzees,” on account of his handsomeness.Everyone in this documentary is suffering, and some of them are ridiculous. And others of them are chimps. “Chimp Crazy” is more textured than “Tiger King,” partly because of its closer attention to the plight of animals. Intertwined with Haddix’s saga are stories of other people who thought they could raise chimps and live together in unending familial bliss — until the chimps reached adolescence, at which point they attacked someone. These attacks are horrific and often fatal, though the chimp owners are rarely deterred.Haddix’s battle with the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals shapes much of the action of the documentary, and jaw-dropping details and twists are never more than a doleful recollection away. “Crazy” is both compassionate and manipulative, and the filmmakers themselves deceive some of their subjects and become major players in Haddix and Tonka’s story. (Also a player: the actor Alan Cumming, who once acted alongside Tonka and eventually offers a $10,000 reward for information leading to the animal’s whereabouts.) There’s an endless “OMG” feeling to everything here, the kind of show that puts the outrage in outrageousness. More