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      ‘No Ordinary Man’ Review: The Life and Death of Billy Tipton

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      This documentary sheds light on a prominent jazz musician whose death became a spectacle when it was discovered he was transgender.The documentary “No Ordinary Man” examines the life and death of Billy Tipton, a jazz musician who came into prominence in the 1930s, and whose career lasted for over 40 years. Billy was described by his friends as a consummate gentleman, and he cherished his family, with three children he adopted with his partner, Kitty. Billy lived his life quietly, but his death in 1989 became a nationwide spectacle after it became clear during funeral preparations that he was transgender. Members of his family made appearances on talk shows, including “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” where they attested they did not know Billy was transgender.The directors Aisling Chin-Yee and Chase Joynt use a variety of strategies to present a reconsideration of Billy’s life and memory. In interviews, transgender historians share their knowledge of his career, and they place the chaos that ensued after his death in the broader context of transgender representation in media. The filmmakers also script imagined scenes from Billy’s life, employing transgender actors to perform the role of Billy. The actors are asked to reflect upon their impression of Billy, and how his experience relates to their own. Most movingly, Billy’s son, Billy Tipton Jr., discusses his memories of his father.This is a respectful tribute that is a shade too morally and cinematically safe in its execution. It feels as if any revelation or assumption made about Billy among its speakers could rattle the private — and absent — person at the film’s center. The result is a movie that feels bittersweet, a collection of impressions for a man who may have never been fully known.No Ordinary ManNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Plane Crash Complicates HBO Max Documentary on Diet-Inspired Church

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      On May 29, a single-pilot jet plane crashed into a lake near Nashville, killing all seven people on board. Among them were Gwen Shamblin Lara, a weight-loss guru and the founder of the Remnant Fellowship Church of Brentwood, Tenn., and her husband, William Lara, who was known as Joe and had once portrayed Tarzan in both a television series and the movie “Tarzan in Manhattan.”The leader of a midsize congregation, Ms. Lara, 66, had for the past several years been the main subject of a documentary project that sought to get beyond the gilded veneer of the Remnant Fellowship and investigate its inner workings. Set to debut on HBO Max in the fall, the multi-episode project, “The Way Down,” details the church’s origin in Ms. Lara’s religious-based weight-loss program, the Weigh Down Workshop.The diet program brought Ms. Lara fame — through appearances on popular shows like “Larry King Live” — and fortune, thanks to best-selling books touting her strategies to lose weight. But it also made her a controversial figure, with critics saying Weigh Down focused more on unconventional theology than on healthy eating habits. The documentary examines those issues, along with allegations that the church shunned and even harassed members who wanted to leave and that it functions more as a cult than a traditional religious institution.Ms. Lara in 2011. Her church grew out of the Weigh Down Workshop, a religious-based diet program she started in 1986.Sanford Myers/The Tennessean, via ImagnAt the time of the crash, the finishing touches were being put on the series. Suddenly, the filmmakers were faced with a new set of questions. What was the extent of Mr. Lara’s flying experience (he was operating the aircraft), and were his medical records up to date? What would happen to the church now that its founder and leader was dead? (A day after the crash, the church released a statement saying Ms. Lara’s daughter and son “intend to continue the dream that Gwen Shamblin Lara had of helping people find a relationship with God.”)And what would happen in the bitter custody case, involving Mr. Lara’s daughter with his ex-wife, which formed a crucial story line in the documentary?The filmmakers also said that since the crash, they had found that more people were eager to speak to them — former congregants who said they had previously been unwilling to go against the church publicly because they still had family members who are affiliated, and relatives of those killed in the crash who were skeptical of the church and now felt compelled to share their stories.On May 29, a single-pilot jet plane crashed into a lake near Nashville, killing all seven people on board including Ms. Lara.George Walker IV/The Tennessean, via Imagn“Within 24 hours I had heard from every single source, and the first thing everyone said was ‘I don’t want to be disrespectful, but please tell me this doesn’t change anything,’” regarding the documentary, said the producer Nile Cappello, an investigative journalist who started researching Remnant Fellowship in 2018.Ms. Cappello added that for those who had already spoken out against the church, some at great personal sacrifice, what she heard most frequently was worry the documentary would be curtailed in some way, “that we have opened up these wounds for nothing.”Though archival footage of Ms. Lara preaching and making media appearances is shown in the documentary, neither she nor any representatives from Remnant Fellowship were interviewed on camera by the filmmakers.“I never thought she would give us an interview,” the series director, Marina Zenovich, said of Ms. Lara. “Never.”Remnant Fellowship did not return calls seeking comment about the series for this article.While the filmmakers scrambled to incorporate news of the crash and its aftermath into the documentary, HBO Max altered its plans too. Now, rather than release a four-part series at the end of September, the first three episodes of “The Way Down,” will become available on Sept. 30, concluding with a “To Be Continued” message. The final two episodes will debut in early 2022, giving the filmmakers time to deal with the new footage. The documentary now begins with local news coverage of the crash.Marina Zenovich directed “The Way Down,” which will conclude early next year with two episodes that can incorporate new footage.Coley Brown for The New York Times“There is a fuller story to be told,” said Lizzie Fox, senior vice president of nonfiction at HBO Max. “We just want to make sure that we can allow enough time for the story to progress and the investigation to pursue some answers and give us time to interview all the subjects. With a limited docu-series, if there’s ever a chance to have a second part, I think it’s something that people tend to get excited about.”Ms. Zenovich is a documentarian who has spent most of her career focusing on men like Roman Polanski, Lance Armstrong and Robin Williams. But the world of evangelical religion was new terrain, one she decided to embark on because of the compelling character at the story’s center.“It’s deeply upsetting,” she said. “But I decided to do it because I was fascinated by Gwen.”Ms. Lara, who trained as a dietitian, began her Weigh Down Workshop in 1986. It was a diet plan that set aside common health guidelines and instead focused on a reliance on God, urging members that in order to understand true hunger they should eat only when their stomach growled. By the mid-2000s, her advice had become very popular within religious communities, and Ms. Lara’s books sold millions of copies. She parlayed that success into Remnant Fellowship, a church she founded in 1999 with her husband at the time, David Shamblin, after splitting with the Church of Christ. The Weigh Down philosophies remained a central tenet of her new congregation.Nile Cappello, right, the producer of the documentary, started researching Remnant Fellowship in 2018.Coley Brown for The New York TimesAs ex-members describe it in the documentary, the church was less a place of worship and more an all-encompassing power that took over every aspect of their lives, from where they worked and how they dressed to whom they married. Body image and appearances were central components, and the documentary chronicles Ms. Lara’s own transformation, from a bubbly young dietitian with girl-next-door looks into a very thin, heavily made-up avatar whose hair seemed to grow in height in relation to her power.Ms. Lara’s broader popularity eventually began to wane in part because of her rejection of the Holy Trinity, views that prompted a Christian publisher to cancel her upcoming book and others to stop promoting her weight loss program.“Gwen’s whole control is using misogyny against other women,” Ms. Cappello said, adding that Ms. Lara was one of the few female religious leaders in the evangelical Christian movement but had an entirely male leadership team. Ms. Lara also demanded that her congregants adhere to traditional familial gender roles in order to maintain their standing in the church.Among the allegations raised in “The Way Down” are accusations that individuals unable to lose weight were marginalized by the church community and that members were encouraged by Remnant leadership to stop taking prescribed medication including birth control and psychiatric drugs.Now the filmmakers are scrambling to tell a more comprehensive story of the church, its founding and its impact on Brentwood.“It was never about not continuing,” said Ms. Zenovich, who is particularly compelled by the stories of those who left the church. “It’s about shifting how we were going to tell the story.” More

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      ‘We Intend to Cause Havoc’ Review: Zambia Rock, Rediscovered

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      This new documentary takes its title from the acronym of WITCH, a once-popular Zambian combo.“Zamrock” is the tag applied to the music of several rock bands from Zambia dating from the early 1970s into the ’80s. Once known as Northern Rhodesia, the country in southern Africa achieved its independence in 1964. Zambian rockers applied British Invasion psychedelic accents to infectious rhythms derived from both their own continent’s musical traditions and James Brown.A new documentary directed by Gio Arlotta, “We Intend to Cause Havoc,” takes its title from the acronym of WITCH, a once-popular Zambian combo. Arlotta, who is from Italy, came upon the band’s music by happenstance, then conducted a pilgrimage to find its makers. In the footage here, he travels with a couple of European musicians, Jacco Gardner and Nic Mauskovic, who visit archives and studios and hook up with the only surviving member of the original group, the charismatic singer and songwriter Emmanuel Chanda, whose stage name was Jagari (after, yes, Mick Jagger).Chanda is now a fervent Christian who works at a private gemstone mine, hoping to earn not necessarily riches but sustenance for his family. The music business in the United States was never a picnic for artists, but in Zambia “distribution” was practically synonymous with getting ripped off by pirates. Chanda is not bitter; nor is the guitarist Victor Kasoma, once of the band The Oscillators. Both men are eager to jam with the enthusiastic and slightly callow visiting Europeans.The movie picks up when the narration shifts from Arlotta’s to tag-team Chanda and the knowledgeable Eothen Alapatt, the head of a label that reissues Zamrock. The music itself is exciting enough that it washes out some of the unpleasant taste of the film’s early “white people discovering stuff” tone. And Chanda himself is incredibly winning, especially when he takes the stage.We Intend to Cause HavocNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV and Altavod. More

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      Cannes Film Festival: ‘Val,’ ‘The Velvet Underground’ and Famous Jerks

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      Two documentaries take different approaches to their star subjects. One, about the actor Val Kilmer, prefers to be hands-off. The other, about Lou Reed, welcomes complications.CANNES, France — As the documentary “Val” begins, a young, bare-chested Val Kilmer lounges on the set of “Top Gun” and claims that he’s nearly been fired from every movie he’s made. Then Kilmer’s lips twist in a smirk. He’s not playing for sympathy. He’s bragging.At the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, two documentaries debuted about famously prickly pop-cultural figures, but despite that promising first scene, “Val” would rather recontextualize the actor as a misunderstood softy. Perhaps you remember the stories about Kilmer, a major 1990s movie star whose career fizzled amid rumors that he was difficult to work with. Well, “Val,” directed by Ting Poo and Leo Scott, lets the 61-year-old actor retell those tales more sympathetically, in his own voice.Or, to be more precise, the voice of his son Jack, who delivers the documentary’s first-person narration. Throat cancer has ravaged Val Kilmer’s signature purr, and Jack Kilmer, an actor, is an acceptable voice substitute who nevertheless sounds far more easygoing than his father ever did. Kilmer has been recording himself since childhood, and over decades of home movies, he and his son paint the picture of an undervalued artist who always wanted to give his all, even when Hollywood wasn’t interested.Jack’s narration is so good-natured that it may take you a little while to realize that Kilmer dislikes nearly every film on his résumé that a fan might want to hear about. “Top Secret,” his first film, was “fluff” that Kilmer says he was embarrassed to appear in, and he practically had to be strong-armed into making the jingoistic Tom Cruise movie “Top Gun.” On “Batman Forever,” Kilmer claims the studio machine thwarted his attempts to deliver an actual performance, so he instead patterned his Bruce Wayne on soap-opera actors.All the while, Kilmer was recording elaborate audition tapes for the likes of Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, efforts that “Val” devotes nearly as much screen time to as the roles he actually booked. Here’s the funny thing, though: Kilmer was a much better actor in the movies he hated! In the clips of “Top Gun,” you see Kilmer at his most loose and playful because he isn’t taking anything about the movie seriously, but when we watch his “Full Metal Jacket” audition — or when he practices lines from “Hamlet,” a dream role he never got to play — Kilmer’s charisma calcifies, and he becomes far too preening and pretentious.Much of the footage in “Val,” directed by Ting Poo and Leo Scott, was shot by Kilmer over the years.Amazon StudiosSo was he as big a jerk as had been rumored? “Val” sidesteps the story about his stubbing his cigarette out on a cameraman or the “Batman Forever” director Joel Schumacher’s claim that the actor was “psychotic”; here, Kilmer simply says he quit playing Batman because the suit was too arduous. In a segment about the notorious 1996 flop “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” Kilmer portrays himself as the troubled production’s serene moral compass; you’d never know that a fed-up Brando threw Kilmer’s cellphone in the bushes and reportedly said, “Young man, don’t confuse your ego with the size of your salary.”Much is made, too, of Kilmer’s romance and marriage to the actress Joanne Whalley, though we hardly hear her speak in all of Kilmer’s home-video footage. After they divorce and he fights for more time with their children, the film lets his noble, aggrieved phone calls to Whalley play out nearly in full. I’d expect that unchallenged point-of-view from a celebrity memoir. I’m not sure I buy it in a documentary.By contrast, the new Todd Haynes documentary “The Velvet Underground,” which also debuted at Cannes on Wednesday, is all too happy to confirm every story you’ve ever heard about the singer-songwriter Lou Reed being a self-obsessed jerk. Like Kilmer, Reed claimed that anyone who beefed with him was simply interfering with his artistic process, but unlike “Val,” this film isn’t afraid to show how badly Reed wanted to be famous, and how much he resented collaborators who could wrest the spotlight from him.Todd Haynes’s documentary examines Lou Reed (center, with a reclining Andy Warhol in sunglasses), and his band, the Velvet Underground. Apple TV+Reed died in 2013, and other important figures in the film like Andy Warhol (credited with steering the early career of Reed’s band, the Velvet Underground) and the singer Nico have long since passed. Haynes isn’t interested in incorporating a lot of archival clips to bring those lost voices to life; instead, this artsy documentary lets the living members of the band, like the instrumentalist John Cale and drummer Moe Tucker, do more of the heavy lifting.“The Velvet Underground” is no conventional music documentary: For one, it uses hardly any performance footage, though some of the band’s most iconic songs, like “Candy Says” and “I’m Waiting for the Man,” play often in the background. Haynes is more invested in conjuring a vibe, placing the viewer smack in the middle of the mid-60s milieu that produced seminal figures like Reed and Warhol.And though Haynes is clearly a fan of his subject, he isn’t afraid to complicate that vibe, either. One of the film’s most welcome talking heads is the critic Amy Taubin, who recalls what was so beguiling about Warhol and Reed’s artistic scene, then adds a spiky observation: If you weren’t pretty enough, Taubin claims, all those men eventually lost interest in you.Let’s face it, famous people are narcissists: If you’re going to will yourself into fame and then stay there, it’s practically required. Haynes explores that concept in a way “Val” can’t quite bring itself to do. Even if “The Velvet Underground” is less of a comprehensive documentary and more of a perfume that lingers for a while, evoking a time and place, at least it’s not afraid to add a few sour notes in pursuit of a more full-bodied scent. More

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      ‘Her Socialist Smile’ Review: Helen Keller, Radical

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      This new documentary is a fascinating and challenging exploration of Keller’s political thought.Helen Keller is one of the closest things the United States has to a secular saint. Born in 1880, she lost her hearing and her sight before she was 2 years old. With the help of her equally legendary teacher, Anne Sullivan, she learned to read, to write, to sign and to speak. Her writing was beautiful, opening to readers a window into her world.She lived a long life, dying in 1968 at the age of 87. And she spent much of that life espousing socialism. The new documentary “Her Socialist Smile,” written, directed and shot by John Gianvito, is a fascinating and challenging exploration of Keller’s political thought.Gianvito’s formal approach is a species of leftist avant-gardism. He begins the movie with a beautiful color view of a tree, its branches covered in snow. The image switches to black and white; the narrator, Carolyn Forché, fiddles with a music stand upon which she places the texts she’s going to read. Long passages of Keller’s writings appear onscreen, which the viewer reads in silence. When Forché narrates, the onscreen image is related to the natural world that so enchanted Keller. We learn of Keller’s high regard for “The Communist Manifesto” while watching a slug crawl on a mossy rock.The approach, which one supposes can be called “dialectical,” is not without wit; one piece of archival footage, detailing the American Legion’s destruction of leftist literature, is from an early iteration of “Fox News.” (The newsreel one.)Despite the movie’s sometimes haughty, preaching-to-the-choir approach, lay viewers should not be too deterred. Much of Keller’s thought is today echoed in progressive circles that are now more than peripheral to the mainstream, and it’s fascinating to consider.Her Socialist SmileNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Witches of the Orient’ Review: Symphony of a Sports Team

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      This experimental documentary shows the anime-worthy triumphs of the 1964 Japanese Olympic volleyball team.In the experimental documentary “The Witches of the Orient,” the women of the 1964 Japanese Olympic volleyball team recall their whirlwind rise to gold-medal glory. The former champions wryly and modestly narrate their own story in new interviews, while the movie uses chic archival footage to set up a mythic reconsideration of their triumphs.The team members met when they were workers at a textile factory in Kaizuka, Japan, where they were known as Nichibo Kaizuka, after the name of the company and the name of the town. To their European competitors, they were known by the racist moniker Oriental Witches. Some onlookers joked that their skills resulted from magic, but the film shows that their ability of course came from meticulous practices. Players somersaulted, dove and leapt for the ball, and their efforts were filmed by the Japanese Olympic Committee in 1964. That footage has now been recycled into this documentary.In these remarkable archival recordings, the team’s youthful faces glow against bright green, red or white uniforms, and they are shown to be as precise on the court as they are in the factory. When the director Julien Faraut begins to splice the sequences of the team’s practices with shots from a 1984 animated series that they inspired, the cuts from real events to illustrations appear seamless.Faraut filmed the members of the Nichibo Kaizuka in the present day, but he wisely centers the archival footage and the animation in his movie, building a collage from fragments of the past and present. Montages are set to a hip electronic score, complete with Portishead needle drops. If the team was derided by their prejudiced (and defeated) foes in the moment of their success, this documentary elegantly restores the glow of legend, saving the champions the trouble of having to explain their heroism in words.The Witches of the OrientNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52’ Review: Sea Hunt

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      The documentary filmmaker Joshua Zeman assembles a team to look for a solitary whale who calls out at a particular frequency.The name of the boat is Truth, which is only one of the piquant details in Joshua Zeman’s seafaring documentary, “The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52.” Another is a coda that audiences will appreciate sticking around for.The cetacean in question — known as 52 because his call broadcasts at 52 hertz, a frequency believed unique among whales — was first recorded in 1989 by the Navy and was suspected of being a Russian submarine. Identified as a whale by the marine scientist Dr. William A. Watkins, who tracked the solitary signal for a dozen years until his death in 2004, 52 has since remained as unfollowed as a suspended Twitter account.Was he even still alive? Zeman, a man who loves a mystery, determines to find out. As he assembles his low-budget, high-hopes expedition and recruits a team of experts, the film’s nerdery is unexpectedly endearing. Excited scientists strive to affix trackers to bucking sea creatures, and acoustic devices slide beneath the waves, opening like magic into the shape of inverted satellite dishes.Neither slick nor propulsive, “The Loneliest Whale” gently combines aquatic adventure and bobbing meditation on our own species’s environmental arrogance. While the boat noodles along the Southern California coastline, Zeman ponders the bloody history of whaling and the “acoustic smog” that plagues oceans teeming with clattering container ships. Not until we heard the 1970 album “Songs of the Humpback Whale,” he notes — the best-selling nature recording in history, and not just because it pairs perfectly with weed — did we care to save the whales. He hardly needs to add, if only the Earth could sing.The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Price of Freedom’ Review: Guns Across America

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      Judd Ehrlich’s documentary charts the increasing radicalization of the National Rifle Association’s rhetoric.The title “The Price of Freedom” refers to the death toll that the gun lobby would dismiss as simply the cost of Second Amendment rights. Bill Clinton, among other interviewees in this documentary, disputes that idea. If the deaths of innocents are necessary for people to exercise their freedom, the former president says, the logical conclusion is “that we don’t really have mutual responsibilities to each other. It’s a very high price.”The movie, directed by Judd Ehrlich, takes viewers through the history of the National Rifle Association, explaining competing factions in the 1970s and charting the increasing radicalization of the organization’s rhetoric. Ehrlich interweaves images of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection and commentary from Mary Anne Franks, a law professor, who says there’s now a version of Second Amendment thinking that encourages people to believe they can “stop democracy itself” and are “honoring the Constitution by doing so.”Muckraking documentaries often conclude with declined-to-comment disclaimers, but David Keene, a former N.R.A. president, is here. Toward the end, he chillingly cautions anyone who thinks the N.R.A. might disappear.Parents like Nicole Hockley and Fred Guttenberg, whose children were killed in school shootings, offer powerful testimony. So does Representative Lucy McBath of Georgia, whose son’s shooter, ultimately convicted, claimed self-defense in a case that put further scrutiny on Florida’s Stand Your Ground law. But Ehrlich also provides a note of optimism from the hunting enthusiast Wes Siler and the gun-owning academic Cassandra Crifasi, who suggest that a warped political dialogue has obscured gun owners’ widespread support for safety measures.The Price of FreedomNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More