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    Caveh Zahedi Has So Many Stories to Tell

    After plunging into a TV series, a filmmaker low on funds but loaded with rich personal narratives pours them into micro-podcasts.Caveh Zahedi was in a closet in a Brooklyn Heights apartment on a recent Sunday, trying to figure out how to end the story he was telling. He had been talking about a college class he’d taken with the filmmaker Michael Roemer. When Roemer saw Zahedi’s class project, a film titled “Sex and Violence,” he said, “‘I think you need serious help; you really need to be in therapy,’” Zahedi recalled. He cried on the spot when he heard those words. More

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    Rita Moreno: Pathbreaker, Activist and ‘A Kick in the Pants’

    The actress discusses being the subject of a new documentary, and spending eight-plus decades in the spotlight.Rita Moreno was all of 6 when she made her professional debut, duetting with her Spanish dance instructor on a stage in Greenwich Village. “I remember every detail,” she said. She wore a traditional, resplendently ruffled dress. “We danced a jota — that was a country dance. And we played castanets. My mom let me put on lipstick — I was so thrilled.” It was 1937.For the next eight-plus decades, Moreno, who will turn 90 in December, has found her way to the spotlight. And she is still dancing, as we see in the opening moments of a new documentary, “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It,” which shows her kicking up her strappy heels at her own Cuba-themed birthday party.She also set up the party. “Boy, I hate doing this,” she says in the film, unwrapping silverware by the chafing dishes. “You can tell I’m not a real star, because somebody else would be doing this.”“That’s why you must never really believe anything about your fame,” she continues, with a curse. “It goes up and down.”Moreno, who is Puerto Rican by birth and Hollywood by steely determination, occupies a singular place in the cultural firmament. The joy, and the luck of it, is not lost on her. “I damn near peed my pants!” she told me, describing a rarefied moment in her career. (Irreverence keeps her afloat.) She is indisputably well-crowned: She had minted her EGOT status by 1977, including being the first Latina actress to win an Oscar, for her indelible turn as Anita in “West Side Story.” The trophies haven’t stopped piling up; if there were an EGOT for lifetime achievement awards — Kennedy Center Honors, Presidential Medal of Freedom — she would have earned that too.The actress is the subject of the documentary, “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It.”Act III ProductionsThose accolades were largely for Moreno’s triple-threat talent. What has been less heralded is her depth as a pathbreaker — as a person of color, as a mother (and now grandmother), and as an irrepressible (sometimes ignitable) activist and personality.“She’s obviously an icon for all the noteworthy reasons — but she’s a kick in the pants too,” said Representative Jackie Speier, the California congresswoman and her friend of two decades.And as Moreno’s career propels forward — she will next be seen in Steven Spielberg’s remake of “West Side Story,” which she also executive produced — her unorthodox status only grows. There are few compatriots whose longevity stretches from before the studio era (Louis B. Mayer signed her to her first contract, calling her the “Spanish Elizabeth Taylor”) to reboots, the meme age and beyond.For Mariem Pérez Riera, the Puerto Rican filmmaker who directed the documentary, Moreno was foundational. “I’ve known about Rita since I’ve known about movies,” she said.On-screen and off, Moreno is the first to giddily admit that she loves attention. And she wields it expertly, with a burnished supply of boffo Showbiz stories and zingy one-liners, even if she sometimes forgets a word (at her age, “nouns and I have become mortal enemies” — that’s one of the zingers). The bellowing voice that welcomed a latchkey generation with “Hey you guys!” on “The Electric Company” is still supple enough to sing, pull off an accent, and toggle between profane and poetic; she narrated Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir, at the justice’s request, and then they became friends. There is categorically no wilt in her game.“She really is a born performer,” said her daughter, Fernanda Gordon Fisher. “She doesn’t have to try at all, it just happens — that’s her substance, that’s what she needs. It feeds her soul, it feeds her energy.”Moreno, center, in the 1961 film “West Side Story.”United ArtistsAnd in Steven Spielberg’s 2021 version of the film.Niko Tavernise/20th Century StudiosStill, convincing Moreno to do the documentary took nearly a year. “I just didn’t know if I wanted to entrust anyone with my life,” she said. “Because if I was going to do this, I was prepared to be completely truthful.”During the yearlong production, she added, “That’s one of the things I remember reminding myself of: Rita, don’t try to charm the camera.”She agreed to be filmed without makeup — and even more reluctantly, without a wig. She gave the documentary team a key to her home in Berkeley, Calif., so they were there when she woke up, and followed along as she drove herself to the studio for “One Day at a Time,” the sitcom on which she starred as the scene-stealing Cuban grandmother. (Her grandson on the show was played by Pérez Riera’s son, and the documentary was the brainchild of Brent Miller, a producing partner of Norman Lear, the series’ creator.) More

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    Lydia Lunch’s Infinite Rebellion

    “Good luck figuring me out,” the 62-year-old artist said. A new documentary called “The War Is Never Over” does its best.For nearly two hours on a recent afternoon, Lydia Lunch sat in her bright Brooklyn apartment and spoke with bracing speed, and at an alarming volume, about rape, murder, incest, genocide, racism, sadism, torture and — for a thunderous encore — the apocalypse. Because she has spent more than four decades broadcasting her belief that such brutal subjects lie at the heart of the human experience, critics have often cast her as a nihilist.“It’s the problems that are nihilistic, not me,” said Lunch, 62. “I’m the most positive person I know. To me, pleasure and joy are the ultimate rebellion. For some reason, few people seem to know that.”“The War Is Never Over,” a new documentary about the artist opening Friday, will offer more people the chance to get a fairer sense of Lunch’s life and work. Directed by her longtime ally Beth B, the movie provides enough context and nuance to counter a common view that Lunch’s output hits just one note: a deeply discordant one.Not that her oeuvre has made such broader assessments easy. From the start of Lunch’s career with the beyond-abrasive no-wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks through her psycho-ambient and jazz-noir recordings, spoken word pieces, essay collections, film performances and visual art works, subjects like chaos and ruin have obsessed her.By contrast, hanging out with Lunch is a delight. She’s a doting host, offering a well-appointed cheese plate while regularly checking on a guest’s hydration and comfort. Her home is decorated to look like a tasteful bordello, with overstuffed red-and-black furniture that mirrors the color scheme of the dress she wore. While the subject matters covered in our interview toggled reliably between cruelty and catastrophe, her delivery of many lines along the way had the timing of a skilled comedian, suggesting that a finer description of what she does might be stand-up tragedy.“With a comedian, the audience waits for the punchline,” she said. “In my work, the audience waits for me to punch them in the face.”“I am not, nor have I ever been, a musician,” Lunch said. “I’m a conceptualist.”K Fox/Kino LorberYet, as the film makes clear, a sincere heart beats behind even Lunch’s most gob-smacking declarations. She traces the source of both her righteousness and her rage to two formative events during her childhood in Rochester, N.Y. Though she was just 5 and 8 years old when that city experienced the racial uprisings of 1964 and 1967, they had a life-changing effect on her.“We were one of only two white families living in a Black neighborhood, so this was happening right outside my front door,” she said. “I had a reckoning that something was not right with the world. Consciousness came into me in that moment.”At the same time, something was very wrong within her own family. Lunch said that her father, a door-to-door salesman and grifter, sexually abused her, and her parents fought constantly and bitterly. At 16, she ran away to New York, making her way to the downtown clubs she had read about in rock magazines, where she saw the shock-tactic bands Suicide and Mars. “They were so extreme and so perverse,” Lunch said with awe. “They directed what I was to do.”She hoped that would take the form of spoken word pieces but, at the time, music provided a far more welcoming audience. “I am not, nor have I ever been, a musician,” she said. “I’m a conceptualist. To me, a chord is something I put around somebody’s neck if I want to throw them out the window.”Still, the sonic assault she devised altered the musical landscape. With Teenage Jesus, she subverted the common purpose of rhythm — to create a groove that moves the music forward — to instead favor a static series of hellacious thuds. The result made the music feel less performed than inflicted. To achieve her trademark beat she said, “I had to imprison the drummer to make him play his instrument like a monkey would.”To up the ante, she made sure the guitar she used was only tuned once a month, “so it would develop these harmonics that made it automatic art,” she explained. “Amazing guitar players could not play my parts.”Her next group, 8 Eyed Spy, mixed West Coast surf music with groundbreaking punk-jazz, but she broke the band up because “we were becoming too popular. My ideal audience would be reduced to one,” she said. “Because that would be the right one.”At 16, Lunch ran away to New York, making her way to the downtown clubs she had read about in rock magazines and joining her own bands.David Corio/Redferns, via Getty ImagesIn 1980, her debut solo album, “Queen of Siam,” created the audio equivalent of an early John Waters film, displaying an equal genius for sleaze. Still, music couldn’t contain the scope of her verbiage, so she began to publish books and to stress spoken word pieces that centered on her main theme: the universality of trauma. An early piece, “Daddy Dearest,” detailed the extremes of the physical and sexual abuse she experienced from her father. But part of what made such works stand so far out was that, instead of cowering from the violence, she used it as fuel, recognizing the power she had over those who desired her and, then, relishing the chance to use it against them.“I was never having suicidal dreams,” she says in the film. “I was having homicidal dreams.”In a parallel way, Lunch co-opted the role of the sexual predator, both in the brutalism of her work and in a period of ferocious promiscuity in her personal life which she now views as a point of pride.“Lydia totally turned the tables,” Beth B said in an interview. “She figured out the power that comes from owning your sexuality as well as your trauma. It can empower you to create new fantasies for yourself that free the female psyche and challenge the societal norms put on women.”Lunch said her ability to pull this off psychologically hinged on her “understanding that the abuse didn’t start in my house and that mine was not the worst.”“Abuse is endemic,” she said. “It goes back to the cave. I’m talking blood trauma. Every nationality has had war, violence, murder. It’s just that some of us are more astute at decoding it.”She considers it key, as well, that she forgave her father years ago. (He died in the early ’90s). “When I told him that my rage came from him, he said ‘I know,”’ Lunch said. “You never get that. They always deny.”Her processing was aided by the fact that “there are certain emotions I just don’t experience,” she added. “I have never experienced shame or humiliation. I have never felt guilt.”“Because of the aggression in my work, people tend to miss the poetry,” Lunch said.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesLunch’s bulletproof persona has given many the impression that she’s devoid of vulnerability. But, she countered, “is it not vulnerable to reveal as much as I have of my life? Just because I’m not crying when I’m telling the story doesn’t mean it’s not there,” she said.In a similar way, Lunch believes that “because of the aggression in my work, people tend to miss the poetry,” and that many people take her words too literally. “I might be speaking in triple tongue,” she said. “I might be speaking sarcastically. I might mean exactly what I say, or I might mean the opposite.”Not that such misconceptions have a chance of stopping her feverish output. During the pandemic, Lunch recorded two albums and she will begin playing shows again with her band Retrovirus, which cherry-picks pieces from throughout her career, in New York next month. She has been hosting a podcast with her Retrovirus bandmate Tim Dahl since 2019, “The Lydian Spin,” which allows her to push beyond the metaphors in her writing and the hyperbole of her sound to speak more plainly.She is also directing her own documentary about the relationship between artists and what she believes to be their common psychological issues, titled “Artists – Depression/Anxiety/Rage.” Creating so broad a legacy of work has been central to Lunch’s mission to drive home her multi-dimensionality.“I am as male as I am female,” she declared. “I am as submissive as I am dominant. And I am as sublime as I am ridiculous. Good luck figuring me out.” More

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    ‘Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story’ Review: She Did It Her Way

    This dishy, affectionate portrait of the famous writer finds grit beneath the glitz.The British novelist Jackie Collins wrote thick, steamy, devourable books that, in the 1970s and 80s, enthralled millions while threatening to topple their bedside tables. In these fantasies, sexually voracious glamazons with names like Lucky and Fontaine called the shots and drank them, too.“Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins Story,” Laura Fairrie’s fond and frisky documentary, sifts a vast trove of archive material to pin down this gifted storyteller. Diaries reveal a shy and insecure teenager whose life was changed after joining her older sister, the actress Joan Collins, in 1960s Hollywood. Hobnobbing at parties with Garland and Brando was heady stuff for a 16-year-old; but Jackie, a keen observer and a wily eavesdropper, drank in the gossip that would fuel the most successful of her 32 books, “Hollywood Wives.”Interviews with Collins’s friends, family and colleagues reveal her genius for prying into others’ intimacies. There are marriages (one fabulous, one disastrous), some sibling friction and a look at the ferocious self-promotion that made her an international sensation. Many disapproved: The 1966 publication of Jacqueline Susann’s “Valley of the Dolls” had softened the ground for racy female authors, but Collins’s debut, “The World is Full of Married Men” (1968), still roused the stuffy from their sofas. (“UGH,” read a newspaper headline at the time.)The dishiness is fun, but “Lady Boss” is most penetrating when it lifts the carapace of glamour Collins had constructed, both as alter ego and as armor against her critics. The novels seem quaint today; but, back then, their merger of filth and feminism drew legions of fans to a woman who lived like her heroines: apologizing for nothing and beholden to none.Lady Boss: The Jackie Collins StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on CNN platforms. More

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    ‘Fathom’ Review: A Whale of a Conversation

    Scientists attempt to communicate with humpback whales in this Apple TV+ documentary.“Fathom,” a curiosity-driven documentary by Drew Xanthopoulos, is fascinated by two types of waves. It opens with a small boat on an overwhelming vista of water, then cuts to a computer analysis of the visual patterns in whale songs two scientists have left their lives behind to record.On the fringes of Alaska, Dr. Michelle Fournet wants to communicate with humpback whales — to not just listen, but converse — using a playback machine of growls, swops and whups that’s taken her a decade to develop. (An early attempt sounded like the cetacean Minnie Riperton.) Nine-thousand miles south, Dr. Ellen Garland tracks the spread of one whale tune from Australia to French Polynesia, testing her hypothesis that whales have a shared culture similar to how humans fall under the thrall of an earwormy pop hit.As the title implies, Xanthopoulos is intrigued by the lengths — or, in this case, depths — a person will go to understand another species. At times, the doc feels like science-fiction without the fiction. Swap whales for aliens and these two doctors aglow with the thrill of discovery could double for Jodie Foster in “Contact” or Amy Adams in “Arrival.”Since the film is more focused on the quest itself than its conclusions, the second half pivots to apply the doctors’ theories of connection to the assistants who’ve agreed to follow them off the grid. In a nod to her own research, Dr. Garland teaches a Ph.D. student a wire-winding technique passed down through four generations of biologists, while Dr. Fournet wrestles with feeling more adrift in a city than she does at sea.“I have to remove myself from society and live in a world that is dominated by animals,” Dr. Fournet says. “And it doesn’t feel like a sacrifice. It feels like a release.” Sure, mankind has also evolved to be a social beast — but whales have more than a 40-million-year head start.FathomNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV+. More

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    ‘Wolfgang’ Review: Light as a Soufflé, and About as Substantial

    David Gelb’s biographical documentary says much about what Wolfgang Puck has done, and very little about who he is“I don’t like to think about the past too much,” Wolfgang Puck confesses early in the Disney+ documentary “Wolfgang,” a red flag that we’re not going to encounter much in the way of intense self-scrutiny in the scant 78 minutes that follow. A fairly vapid and shallow affair, even by the low standards of the celebrity bio-doc subgenre, “Wolfgang” provides copious archival montages of “the first celebrity chef” (Julia Child apparently didn’t count), but precious little understanding of what actually makes him tick.Puck’s early years are skimmed, aside from an extended anecdote about losing his first kitchen job, told in great detail and illustrated with re-enactment footage, so we fully understand this as The Story That Defines Him. The real juice here is Chef Wolfgang’s rise to fame, and much of that material is fascinating: how the open kitchen design of his Spago restaurant elevated the chef from a “blue-collar job” to a celebrity, how his staff read Hollywood trade papers to best assess who got the premium tables, how instrumental he was to the development of fusion cooking.Some much-needed tension is provided by Patrick Terrail, the owner of Ma Maison (Puck’s first kitchen of note), as he and his chef maintain conflicting accounts of how much credit Puck deserved for that restaurant’s success. But most of the picture hums along with the singularity of purpose of an infomercial, and even its coverage of Puck’s flaws — he spread himself too thin, he was an absentee father and husband — have the ring of a job applicant’s description of their biggest flaw: that they just work too hard, and care too much.“Wolfgang” is directed by David Gelb, who all but defined the celebrity chef documentary with “Jiro Dreams of Sushi.” He hits many of the same notes; the food photography is delectable, and Puck is full of bite-size wisdom like “We have to have focus in life” and “If you believe in something, you have to follow your dreams.” But “Wolfgang” ultimately plays like exactly what it is: “Jiro” Disney-fied, and thus drained of its nuance, complexity and interrogation.WolfgangNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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    ‘Summer of Soul’ Review: In 1969 Harlem, a Music Festival Stuns

    Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Mavis Staples and others shine in a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival from Questlove.There’s no shortage of system shocks in “Summer of Soul.” This is a concert movie that basically opens with a 19-year-old, pre-imperial-era Stevie Wonder getting behind a drum kit and whomping away — sitting, standing, kicking, possessed. It’s a movie that nears its end with Nina Simone doing “Backlash Blues” in a boxing match with the keys of her piano, her hair indistinguishable from the conical art piece affixed to her head.The movie’s got Sly and the Family Stone and B.B. King and Ray Barretto and Gladys Knight & the Pips, in top, electric form. But no jolt compares to what happens in the middle of this thing, which is simply — though far from merely — footage from the 1969 edition of the Harlem Cultural Festival, footage that Ahmir Thompson, better known as Questlove, has rescued and assembled into nearly two-hours of outrageous poignancy. It’s all been cooking before this midway moment. But it’s once you’re there, engulfed in it, that you trust Thompson’s strategy.Sometimes these archival-footage documentaries don’t know what they’ve got. The footage has been found, but the movie’s been lost. Too much cutting away from the good stuff, too much talking over images that can speak just fine for themselves, never knowing — in concert films — how to use a crowd. The haphazard discovery blots out all the delight. Not here. Here, the discovery becomes the delight. Nothing feels haphazard.After the energetic asides about Mayor John Lindsay’s earnest support of the festival and Maxwell House’s sponsorship; after an exuberant montage of the outfits and stage patter of the festival’s charismatic and, it must be said, dashing mastermind, Tony Lawrence; after a poignant, illuminating passage on the overlooked, much fretted over quintet the Fifth Dimension, Thompson plunks us down in the middle of a meaty gospel passage.The Edwin Hawkins Singers kick it off with their rendition of “Oh Happy Day,” which at the time was a massive hit. Then the Staple Singers — Pops and his daughters Cleotha, Yvonne and Mavis — come on and dress “Help Me Jesus” in rockabilly robes. Not far behind is the pulpit dervish Clara Walker, whose exhortative way with a tune doubles as furnace and fan.Now, these performances took place over six summer Sundays. So I don’t know what any particular day’s official, chronological lineup was, but Thompson and his editor, Joshua L. Pearson, have done some mighty hefty truncation. Minutes after Walker and her Gospel Redeemers, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson appears, looking as beatifically beatnik as he’d ever get. Backing him is the Breadbasket Orchestra and Choir, and he begins to tell the many Harlemites densely packed before him that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s last words were to the Breadbasket’s leader, Ben Branch. King told him that he wanted him to play the gospel pillar “Take My Hand, Precious Lord.” And here now to grant that wish is Mahalia Jackson, who many a time sang it at King’s request.Mavis Staples and Mahalia Jackson, performing at the festival, which took place over six summer Sundays.Searchlight PicturesIt’s important to note, that during this passage, Mavis Staples and Reverend Jackson have also been narrating the scene from the present. Speaking today, using her front-porch husk, Staples remembers that Mahalia Jackson, her idol, leaned over and asked for her accompaniment. Mavis Staples was around 30; Mahalia Jackson was in her late 50s and wasn’t feeling well.Staples goes first, alone and a-blast. Jackson follows her with equal force and in defiance of whatever had been ailing her. Then together — Jackson refulgent in a fuchsia gown with a gold diamond emblazoned below her bosom; Staples in something short, lacy, belted and white — they embark on the single most astounding duet I’ve ever heard, seen or felt. They share the microphone. They pass it between them. Howling, moaning, wailing, hopping, but well within the song’s generous contours and, somehow, in control of themselves. My tears weren’t jerked as I watched. The ducts simply gave way, and the mask I wore at the theater where I sat was eventually covered in runny, viscous salt.They’re singing for the festival’s attendees. They’re mourning all of the death — of leaders, of followers, of troops and civilians. They are, if you’re willing to see it this way, lamenting what is obviously a generational transition from one phase of Black political expression to another, from resolve to anger, from the grandiloquence of Jackson’s pile of hair to Staples’s blunter Afro. They are singing this cherished classic of bereavement in order to mourn the present and the past. Listening to them now, in the summer of 2021, plumb earth and scrape sky, you weep, not only for the raw beauty of their voices but because it feels as if these two instruments of God were also mourning the future.I don’t remember how long this performance lasts. It doesn’t really even have an ending, per se. It just simply concludes, with each woman heading back to Reverend Jackson, into the band. But when it’s over you don’t know what to do — well, besides never forget it. It’s an extraordinary event not just of musical history. It’s a mind-blowing moment of American history. And for five decades, the footage of it apparently just sat in a basement, waiting for someone like Thompson to give it its due.The whole movie is dues-giving. It’s true that nothing matches the high of Mahalia Jackson and Mavis Staples. Yet nothing that surrounds them feels puny or like an afterthought. Thompson has an assortment of people watch footage from the festival — attendees who were kids and teenagers at the time, performers who were there, folks like Sheila E., who learned her craft from some of these artists. And I was almost as devastated by the sight of Marilyn McCoo’s putting her hands to her face as she watches her younger self with the rest of the Fifth Dimension, recounting how in-between they felt as Black artists who Black people didn’t always think were Black enough. Their sound was light and round and reliant upon strings and harmonies that were commercial for 1969 but not cool. In this film, among Simone and Max Roach and Hugh Masekela, the Fifth Dimension don’t at all seem like outsiders. They seem like family.Throughout this thing, Thompson is dropping explanatory information and montages that are crosscut with more information. A passage about the national climate of ’69, for instance, is mixed in with the Chambers Brothers’ festival performance. And you’re sitting there in awe at how the film hasn’t lost you. It’s got its own rhythm. The images, the music, the news, the reminiscences, the commentary often come at you at once. And with another director what you’d be left with is noise, with mess. This is certainly where Thompson’s being a bandleader — a band-leading drummer; a band-leading drummer who D.J.s — matters. The onslaught operates differently here. The chaos is an idea.On one hand, this is just cinema. On the other, there’s something about the way that the editing keeps time with the music, the way the talking is enhancing what’s onstage rather than upstaging it. In many of these passages, facts, gyration, jive and comedy are cut across one another yet in equilibrium. So, yeah: cinema, obviously. But also something that feels rarer: syncopation.This festival took place the same summer that Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon. The movie deftly accounts for the dissonance between the two events. It’s the answer to the brief, shrewd passage in Damien Chazelle’s “First Man” that intercuts the landing with Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon.” These two movies would make a searing double feature of the same moment in American progress, on the ground and up in space. Of course, it’s hard not to leave this movie fully aware that, at that point, in 1969, with the country convulsed by war, racism and Richard Nixon, the power of those artists assembled in New York right then makes a firm case that Harlem was the moon.But the movie’s sense of politics isn’t so despondent. Thompson winds things down with Sly and the Family Stone doing “Higher.” That band was male and female, Black and white — weird, rubbery, ecstatic, yet tight, hailing from no appreciable tradition, inventing one instead. It’s been more than half a century, and I still don’t know where these cats came from. They simply seem sent from an American future that no one has to mourn.Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)Rated PG-13 (some cursing and lustiness, lots of spirit catching). Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More