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      ‘The One and Only Dick Gregory’ Review: A Peek at a Comic Legend

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      The documentary examines the many lives of the stand-up and activist who inspired a generation of performers.In a remarkable article from October 1960, Ebony magazine asked why there were no Black stars in comedy, blaming racist double standards held by audiences and television bookers as well as a new sensitivity (the term “politically correct” had not been coined) that wouldn’t tolerate performers trafficking in stereotypes from the minstrel era. Three months later, Dick Gregory, mentioned briefly as a “newcomer,” made the question irrelevant in one night.When the manager at the Playboy Club in Chicago discovered the crowd was made up of white Southern businessmen in town for a convention, he suggested that Gregory postpone. The comedian refused, went onstage and killed. He did so well, his contract there was extended, and led to national press and an appearance on “The Tonight Show.” Gregory became a crossover star, a pioneering comedic social critic who inspired a generation of stand-ups.“The One and Only Dick Gregory,” an aptly titled new documentary, does justice to this fabled performance, setting the scene and the stakes. But what stands out most about this revolutionary moment in comedy is what a small role it plays in the overall portrait here. Gregory, who died in 2017, lived so many lives that he presents a challenge for anyone trying to document them. The director Andre Gaines tries to capture as many as possible, to a fault. By covering so much ground, it doesn’t have room to dig too deep. But along with some very funny footage of a master of his craft, it offers a convincing argument that while Gregory became famous for his comedy, what made him such a riveting cultural figure is what he did after he left it behind.Gaines recruits a talent-rich cast of comics (Wanda Sykes, Dave Chappelle) to describe the performer. Chris Rock is particularly insightful and blunt, comparing Gregory’s relaxed, patient, cigarette-wielding delivery with that of Chappelle. Gregory was ahead of his time in his material on police brutality and racism, but just as he became a star, his activism heated up. A demonstration for voting rights in Mississippi was a turning point, and the movie covers his work and relationships with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the N.A.A.C.P. leader Medgar Evers. By the 1980s, Gregory had stopped playing clubs and became an early health and wellness guru while still waging a broad array of political fights, going on fasts and long runs to earn attention for causes like fighting hunger and obesity.There’s clearly a price to pay for living as active a life as Dick Gregory did. He was rarely home to see his family (his kids are astute talking heads), and toward the end of his life, legal troubles led to financial collapse and the loss of his home. The last half-hour is jarringly downbeat if slightly underexamined, with Gregory returning to clubs and appearing in a Rob Schneider movie, “The Hot Chick,” that allows him to get much-needed health care coverage.The legend of Dick Gregory gives way to a peek of him as a more complex man, albeit one much funnier than most everyone else. On the reboot of his talk show, Arsenio Hall asked him what drove him. Gregory retorted: “My bills.”The One and Only Dick GregoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on Showtime platforms. More

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      ‘The Phantom’ Review: The Death Penalty for a Doppelgänger

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      This documentary examines the circumstances of a 1983 killing in Texas, for which it contends the wrong man was convicted and executed.“The Phantom,” a documentary from Patrick Forbes, examines a case that in recent years has been cited as an example of a likely wrongful conviction that ended in the death penalty. Carlos DeLuna was executed in Texas in 1989 for the murder of a Corpus Christi gas station convenience store clerk. At his trial, he implicated another man, Carlos Hernandez. The prosecution dismissed Hernandez as a phantom.But the movie, based on an account by a Columbia law school professor, James Liebman, and his researchers, amasses evidence that Hernandez, who died in 1999, was no apparition. It indicates that he had a history of violence and that the investigation was hasty. The film’s most damning suggestion is that the conviction didn’t simply involve mistaken identity — two men named Carlos, who knew and resembled each other and were both in the area of the crime, getting mixed up — but, in the film’s argument, required an almost willful insistence on turning a blind eye to what was known.Adapting research that is, by now, hardly breaking news, Forbes has some solid strategies for making the material cinematic. Shooting in glossy wide-screen, he uses an effective blend of reconstructions and interviewees to take viewers through the night of the killing. Earlier in the film, he has people involved in the original trial, like a witness, Kevan Baker, and a prosecutor, Steve Schiwetz, discuss details of the case in a courtroom, and even playact versions of their words from the proceedings (the dialogue isn’t verbatim, judging from the trial transcript). A bow-tied, suspendered, haunted-looking medical examiner contributes to the ghostly ambience.The PhantomNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      El Paso Walmart Killings Examined in '915: Hunting Hispanics' doc.

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      Charlie Minn’s tactical breakdown zeros in on a mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart that killed 23 people.On the morning of Aug. 3, 2019, a man armed with an automatic rifle entered a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, shooting 46 people in the span of six minutes. Twenty-three people died as a result of their injuries. Many victims of the El Paso shooting identified as Latino, and in a manifesto, the shooter, Patrick Crusius, had explicitly stated his animus against people of Mexican origin. In the documentary “915: Hunting Hispanics” (the number is the El Paso area code), survivors share their memories of that catastrophic morning.The interviews contained in this film are not glossy. Subjects aren’t always wearing makeup, they ramble, they weep. The camera occasionally seems out of focus and the editing cuts from angle to angle with little sense of internal rhythm. At the beginning of the film, this unvarnished approach is disorienting. But the longer the director Charlie Minn pursues his lines of questioning, the more his film coheres as a military history of a domestic terrorist attack.Minn retraces the path of the shooter and the response of those left in his wake as if charting moves on a battlefield. Maps show the path of the attack and the order of the victims. Interviews with survivors add on-the-ground detail to the brutal events, and cellphone footage shows the desperate escape attempts, grievous injuries and efforts to preserve or revive life among the fallen. The events of mass shootings are often presented as devastating clashes of old-fashioned good and evil — complete with heroic martyrs and devilish madmen. The value of this demystifying film is its tactical breakdown of a form of violence that has become increasingly common in the United States. Here, both prevention and survival are a result of communal strategy.915: Hunting HispanicsNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Being a Human Person’ Review: Watching a Surrealist

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      This documentary on the Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson takes an unexpected turn.The Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson began his feature career in the early 1970s with distinctive but conventionally linear narratives. Interview clips from his early fame, included in “Being a Human Person,” a new documentary directed by Fred Scott, show a fresh-faced, sometimes glib fellow seemingly poised for industry success.In the early ’80s, though, Andersson reconfigured his working method. He bought a townhouse in Stockholm and made it into a studio and a home. In this space he concocted anecdotal, surreal cinematic reflections on not just human absurdity but human suffering, rendering them in single-shot tableaus. This movie tracks the making of what he announced as his last feature, “About Endlessness,” in 2018.The revelation of Andersson’s method, his painstaking use of trompe l’oeil both painterly and cinematic, is fascinating enough. But the chronicle takes an unexpected turn.Working from home has its advantages, but also affords near-instant access to a wine bar next door, where Andersson, now in his late 70s, starts spending what his colleagues consider a concerning amount of time. These artisans of Northern Europe are polite and kind; as much as Andersson’s behavior disturbs them, the film never shows anyone raising their voice. An audio recording of a phone call Andersson makes after walking out of a rehab and having difficulty finding a taxi is intense, and a little scary.“He’s not really a family person,” his own daughter observes. A producer notes, resigned, “He has no intention of stopping drinking.” A trip to Spain for a festival both strokes Andersson’s ego and recharges his batteries — he’s shown looking at the works of one of his heroes, Goya, at the Prado. By the movie’s end, he hasn’t so much pulled himself together as soldiered on — and changed his mind about closing his beloved home studio.Being a Human PersonNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Stand-Ups Get Experimental in Five Adventurous New Specials

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      For these sets, Chris Gethard, Rory Scovel, Carmen Christopher, Josh Johnson and Jessica Watkins borrow from improv, documentary and more.“You gotta get a gimmick if you wanna get applause.”When Stephen Sondheim placed this timeless showbiz advice in the classic musical “Gypsy,” he was referring to stripping. If dancing seductively while taking your clothes off is not enough to win over an audience, imagine the challenge of telling jokes in a crowded stand-up scene. In her debut, “Specialish,” Jessica Watkins puts it this way: “You need more than comedy. You need a shtick.”For Watkins, this meant pushing a cart across America on highways and through woods, sleeping in a tent and filming this lonely trek while doing sets in small spaces from New York to California. An odd mix of stand-up special and “Nomadland,” her effort is both exceptional and characteristic of the try-anything moment in comedy, one in which many performers are fusing forms, mixing onstage with off, merry with melancholy, written jokes with music, improv or other elements.Bo Burnham’s buzzy “Inside” (Netflix) packaged a solo show inside a musical. Next month, Tig Notaro releases a fully animated stand-up special. But the fastest growing comedy hybrid is the stand-up documentary. Shots of the comic backstage once bookended the jokes, but now scenes of the life of the comic regularly introduce, respond to and buttress the performance. It’s no surprise that the winners of the 2020 Oscar for best documentary feature made Dave Chappelle’s next movie, “This Time This Place,” a chronicle of, among other things, performing in his hometown Yellow Springs, Ohio, during the pandemic.“Specialish” (available on major digital platforms) is an example of the strengths and pitfalls of this high-concept approach: While it added scenic drama and beauty to her strenuous journey, it eventually overwhelmed the comedy. In explaining why she’s pushing a cart on her trip, she quips, “I wanted to look more homeless.” Such punch lines hit less hard than interludes in her life. The stand-up often seems incidental if not out of place, even a distraction from the main event.Carmen Christopher, left, and Chris Gethard in “Half My Life.”Comedy DynamicsIn recent months, Rory Scovel, Chris Gethard and Carmen Christopher put out more modestly focused specials that mix stand-up with behind-the-scenes footage. Each is experimental in different ways. In “Live Without Fear” (available on YouTube), Scovel, a dynamic and inventive performer who has delivered some of the funniest sets I have ever seen, set himself the task of making up six shows completely on the spot: stand-up merged with improv. His goal was to capture the spontaneity of creation while weaving in post-show commentary on what went wrong.Shot by Scott Moran with sensitivity to the rhythm of jokes, Scovel’s performances are riveting high-wire acts, not as refined as a normal set but displaying the drunken thrill of a party conversation starting to take off. Scovel brings titanic aggression leavened by patience, toying with words, searching for the funny parts, filibustering a premise and biding his time, waiting for inspiration to strike. Many of his best improvisations begin with simple observational premises — the weirdness of the phrase “getting on your high horse” — then move into puns (“pot-smoking horses”) followed by absurdity (“That’s where the show ‘Mr. Ed’ comes from”) and a coda with bizarre rage (“Tell me I’m wrong!”).If Scovel courts failure, Christopher hugs it tightly in “Street Special,” a deadpan, self-consciously awkward special, one of the first produced on Peacock. Carrying his own microphone, Christopher set up shop on New York street corners during the pandemic, surprising nervous pedestrians with jokes. At the start, he interrupts outdoor diners at the East Village spot Veselka by announcing that he just got engaged. After some lonely applause, annoyed glances and some quintessential New York indifference, he said he was kidding, that he has been single for seven years and that he just wanted to see what it felt like to have people excited for him.This cringe comedy will divide viewers. He satirizes certain kinds of hack comedy but finds an oddball spirit all its own. Christopher doesn’t just capture the anxious atmosphere of pandemic-era city life. He exploits it to jack up the tension in a joke.He also shows up as the opening act in Chris Gethard’s special “Half My Life” (on major digital platforms), a chronicle of a road trip alongside a portrait of a comic in a midlife crisis. Gethard is a New York comedy institution whose many projects include the popular podcast “Beautiful/Anonymous,” which features conversations with a stranger. But now, with a newborn at home, he sounds surprisingly ambivalent about his two-decade career, calling himself the king of the “near sellout” and wondering aloud about his passion for performing. “I think I still love comedy, but my back hurts and I’m tired,” he says.In his work, Gethard is known for wandering down dark avenues, but “Half My Life” actually evolves into a lightly fun special. He’s smart enough to drill down on his best bit — a series of jokes about Gatorland, an amusement park in Orlando that competes with Disney World — and concludes by becoming what is surely the first stand-up to perform for an audience exclusively of alligators.Josh Johnson follows jokes with R&B songs on his new album.Mindy TuckerIf there’s a fusion of forms that approaches the popularity of the documentary-stand-up mix, it’s that of the marriage between comedy and music. While many comics use music in their jokes, the new album by Josh Johnson (on Apple Music) is the first I have heard that puts stand-up bits side by side with earnestly produced songs. Johnson is a rising star, a “Daily Show” writer who emerged from the pandemic with this album, as well as a sharply observed special on Comedy Central that is a better showcase for his joke writing. The album, billed as “part millennial escapism, part Negro spiritual,” is a mixed bag that follows a joke about how love should be regulated (“There’s nothing someone hasn’t done for crack that they haven’t done for love”) with an R&B song.Sometimes, the connections between the comedy and the music are hard to detect. It’s right there in its title — “Elusive.”The great thing about standup is that it’s a bare-bones art. Anyone with a voice can do it. And traditionalists have a point when they roll their eyes, insisting that comics should just get to the jokes. These specials have more unnecessary or unfinished elements than the best comedy. (Scovel’s “Live Without Fear” includes a side plot about the history of the theater he performs in that doesn’t quite come together.)But it’s a mistake to be too cynical about efforts to push the form or to borrow from new sources, because that’s what will keep comedy growing. Even if the new adventurousness in specials is rooted in gimmickry, I still welcome it. The stand-up special is too young an art to become set in its ways. More

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      ‘The Legend of the Underground’ Review: Gay Activism in Nigeria

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      In this stylish documentary, young men discuss their country’s laws criminalizing gay sex.The documentary “The Legend of the Underground” captures queer Nigerian activists as they discuss their country’s laws criminalizing gay sex. Together, they lament unjust arrests and police brutality. But they are not aiming for either martyrdom or altruism — instead, their goal is to improve the circumstances of their own lives.This film is stylish, like a well-curated advertisement. These men are beautiful, youthful, dressed in mesh and silks. But the movie’s almost shallow appeal to aesthetics is not disconnected from the political agenda of gay Nigerians. For these men, desirability serves multiple purposes. It may entice potential partners, but also advertisers, the global entertainment industry and the hostile Nigerian public.The movie shows the tug of war between profit and public service by contrasting the civic-minded approach of Michael, an organizer who splits time between Lagos and New York for his safety, with the actions of the prominent Nigerian activist James Brown. James wants to grow his follower count to publicize the queer cause, but he also has ambitions to become a global influencer.The filmmakers Giselle Bailey and Nneka Onuorah capture arguments as other activists wrestle with the contradictions of James’s motivations. But crucially, they don’t shy away from James. Instead, the film leaves the tension unresolved, suggesting that James’s mix of political protest and personal ambition may be new tactics from a new generation. In the Nigerian queer scene, there are no sinners and no saints. In the end, Michael dons a sweater for a night out at the club. The shirt’s glitter typeface shows a single word: Buysexual.Legend of the UndergroundNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      ‘Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over’ Review: A Punk Provocateur Endures

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      Beth B’s documentary tells the story of an iconic underground New York City misfit and her durable career.The musician, writer and spoken-word artist Lydia Lunch is an immediately provocative figure. The name alone, right? Escaping a horrifically abusive home in Rochester, N.Y., at 16, she took one look at the burgeoning 1970s punk rock scene on Manhattan’s Bowery and was determined to both join and upend it.“I had a suitcase and $200,” she recalls in “Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never Over,” a vigorous documentary directed by Beth B, whose own work as an underground filmmaker began in the same milieu as Lunch’s early efforts. Lunch’s first band was called Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, and one of their songs began with Lunch caterwauling, “The leaves are always dead.”Lunch, now 62 — who, when reflecting on her generation, says, “The ’60s failed us” — had other interests, musical and extra-musical. The abundance of her ideas, and her resourcefulness in executing them, enabled a career that’s been a lot more durable than those of many other iconoclasts of her time. Her musings on the condition of womanhood and the failings of conventional feminism are emphatic, to be sure. She asks how women “devolved from Medusa to Madonna” and offers an unusual perspective on the #MeToo movement that finds its rationale in an examination of cycles of abuse.Lunch’s entire aesthetic is centered around trauma: how abusers dispense it, how it is — and how she thinks it ought to be — received, and turned back on the world. This yields any number of anecdotes, including a tale from the musician Jim Sclavunos about how Lunch took his virginity before admitting him into one of her bands.The footage of her on the road with her current band, Retrovirus, shows her mastery of live performance and also highlights her very urban sense of sarcasm; sometimes she suggests no-wave’s answer to Fran Lebowitz.Lydia Lunch: The War Is Never OverNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More