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      ‘In the Rearview’ Review: Shuttling Ukrainians to Safety

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      Maciek Hamela’s documentary offers a compelling perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine through the stories of people fleeing the country in a van.Maciek Hamela’s perceptive documentary “In the Rearview” seats us in a van shuttling groups of Ukrainians from conflict areas to safety. That simple viewpoint, along with roadside scenes of pickups and drop-offs, captures the moments when ordinary life ended and the deadly chaos of the Russian invasion began.Filmed in 2022 when Hamela volunteered as an evacuation driver, the van passes checkpoints, burned-out cars and disemboweled buildings while steering clear of mined roads and bombed bridges. But the van presents a safe space where passengers can talk about who and what they left behind, sleep, or just sit in silence.Instead of dwelling on danger, these serial portraits of everyday Ukrainians — sometimes family members neatly dressed for cool weather, carrying the odd belongings or cat — show people who have made their decision to leave but are still processing what that means.Travelers young and old talk about what happened in gripping, brief monologues: a lost husband, a surrogate pregnancy left in the lurch at a clinic, an abandoned cow, or torture at the hands of the enemy. The children look cherubic but sometimes glazed-over; unprompted, one girl reflexively proffers a paper with her identifying information to someone at the front of the van.Many passengers seem to be heading to the Polish border from remote Ukrainian villages. But the van’s familiar interior has a way of underlining how many other millions across history have had to escape military aggression. Hamela’s work as driver and documentarian reflects that reality while offering a spirit of resilience.In the RearviewNot rated. In Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      9 Great Songs Recorded at Electric Lady Studios

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      A new documentary spotlights the Greenwich Village creative hub. Listen to tracks by Jimi Hendrix, Patti Smith, Frank Ocean and more that were recorded there.Patti SmithVagabond Video/Getty Images.Dear listeners,I’m a sucker for any documentary that features scenes of people at a recording studio’s mixing board, isolating tracks from a great, intricately layered song.* Over the weekend, I watched a new film that, I am happy to report, features plenty of such footage: “Electric Lady Studios — A Jimi Hendrix Vision,” a recently released documentary that charts the origins of the famed, still vital Greenwich Village landmark.Located at 52 West 8th Street and formerly an avant-garde nightclub, the property that would become Electric Lady was purchased by Jimi Hendrix and his manager in 1968. Over the next two years, they poured somewhere around $1 million of their own money into its construction. (When the cash flow dried up, Hendrix would go play some live gigs and return with enough dough to pay the contractors.) Hendrix initially dreamed up Electric Lady as his own personal recording studio, a place where he and his friends could experiment freely without incurring exorbitant hourly rates. But, tragically, Hendrix did not live long enough to use it much at all. Construction was finally completed in August 1970; Hendrix died, at 27, on Sept. 18 of that year.Word had already gotten out that Electric Lady was special, combining state-of-the-art technology with a groovy atmosphere that made it a more comfortable place to hang out than most cramped, sterile recording studios. Thanks to some early bookings by marquee artists like Carly Simon, Led Zeppelin and Stevie Wonder, Electric Lady managed to stay afloat in those precarious first years after Hendrix’s death. More than 50 years later, it has survived ownership changes, gentrification and huge shifts in recording technology, remaining a crucial link between popular music’s past and present. Today, it’s arguably as busy as it’s ever been: Taylor Swift, Zach Bryan and Sabrina Carpenter are just a few stars who have recently laid down tracks there.Today’s playlist traces Electric Lady’s decades-long history via nine very different songs recorded within its hallowed walls. I’ve arranged them in chronological order, so you can gradually hear the way the sounds of pop music have changed over time. I hope that you’ll also hear certain echoes between now and then — similarities in the soft-rock confessions of Simon and Swift, or the genre-blurring explorations of Wonder and Frank Ocean.These are, of course, just a sampling of the thousands and thousands of songs that have been recorded at Electric Lady throughout the years. Next time you find yourself scouring a favorite LP’s liner notes or Wikipedia credits, don’t be too surprised if you see that familiar address.This is our place, we make the rules,Lindsay* (The Fleetwood Mac episode of “Classic Albums” where Lindsey Buckingham pulls up individual vocal and instrumental tracks from “Rumours” is my personal gold standard.)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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      ‘Sugarcane’ Is a Stunning, Sobering Look at the Mistreatment of Indigenous Communities

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      “Sugarcane” follows survivors and investigators after the horrifying treatment of Indigenous Canadians was discovered at residential schools.When it comes to stories that hold the potential to slide from sensitive to sensational, documentarians can take several approaches. There’s the talking-head driven journalistic approach, in which the story and its analysis are laid out, beat by beat. There’s also the more lurid approach that films about cults and crime can employ, with re-enactments and ominous musical cues.But a third way — and the one that Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat take in “Sugarcane” (in theaters), to their great credit — is to invite the audience to dwell alongside those affected by the story, letting their experiences and emotions guide the film. This one tells a horrifying story: In 2021 and 2022 in a series of cascading discoveries, unmarked graves were found on the grounds of a number of Indigenous Canadian residential schools. On investigation, they revealed horrifying mistreatment of Indigenous communities, where parents were virtually forced to send their children to the schools as part of the government’s quest to “solve the Indian problem.”The film’s jumping-off point is the graves discovered at St. Joseph’s Mission, a residential school in British Columbia, near the Sugarcane Reserve of Williams Lake. NoiseCat’s father and grandmother were survivors of St. Joseph’s, and his journey to learn their immensely painful stories is one strand of the documentary.There are others, too. Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing are two investigators working with the Williams Lake First Nation to uncover the truth about what happened at St. Joseph’s, and their determination helps fill in many of the disturbing details that were covered up at the time of the abuse. Rick Gilbert, a former chief of Williams Lake First Nation, was also educated at St. Joseph’s but is a faithful Catholic and reluctant to acknowledge the full extent of the atrocity — even when DNA tests appear to confirm that his father was one of the priests. He is summoned to the Vatican as part of an audience with Pope Francis regarding the discoveries. But his own story takes a long time to come out.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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      With ‘Sprint’ and ‘Simone Biles: Rising,’ Netflix Fills Olympic Content Gap

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      New seasons of documentaries about running, gymnastics and basketball are being filmed this summer as part of a partnership with the International Olympic Committee.The four-person crew from Box to Box Films, the production company responsible for the hit Netflix motorsports docuseries “Formula 1: Drive to Survive,” has often shot in lavish settings like Monaco and Miami.But one recent morning, it congregated in a far less glamorous spot: a set of flimsy bleachers next to a running track in the Paris suburb of Eaubonne, where it waited about an hour for a practice session to begin.“This is our life,” Warren Smith, a top executive at Box to Box, said of the waiting. It could have been worse: Across town, a second crew was filming a runner having a haircut.The footage from France will eventually be part of the second season of “Sprint,” a Netflix documentary following the American 100-meter stars Sha’Carri Richardson and Noah Lyles and a dozen or so other track athletes.The series is one of three projects being filmed during these Summer Games as part of a partnership between Netflix and the International Olympic Committee, a latecomer to the sports-documentary genre that is now an eager participant.Just as “Drive to Survive” forged a deeper connection between fans and Formula 1 auto racing, the I.O.C. hopes these projects will pique awareness and interest among a new (read: younger) generation of Olympic fans. They include the track series, a gymnastics one called “Simone Biles: Rising” and one about the U.S. Olympic men’s basketball team.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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      ‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes’ and the Moment Star Worship Curdled

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      The documentary blends audio interviews with footage from her life to provide a revealing look not so much at the actress, but at celebrity culture.This summer, thanks mostly to the rise of Glen Powell, I’ve been in a lot of discussions about the state of movie stardom. The jury’s still out on whether we have “real” movie stars today, but it’s clear that the process of becoming a celebrity is different now from what it used to be. Social media and the popularity of small-screen entertainment have changed the game.That question of stardom permeates “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” (premiering Saturday on HBO and Max), an intriguing documentary about one of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, mostly in her own words. In the 1960s, Taylor gave interviews to the prolific journalist Richard Meryman, who died in 2015. Meryman, who had been known for his interviews with celebrities, was researching a book. Recently, more than 40 hours of tapes containing Taylor’s interviews were found in his archive.That audio, in which Taylor is reflective and candid, is the backbone for this documentary. The director Nanette Burstein takes a smart approach to the material, layering the conversation — along with audio from a handful of older interviews with Taylor and some of her friends — on top of archival footage from her life. Taylor became a familiar screen presence while still very young, with her first screen role, in “There’s One Born Every Minute,” hitting theaters when she was 10, in 1942. Soon after, she starred in “Lassie Come Home” and “National Velvet” and turned into a figure of fascination for the audiences. Thus the cameras followed her everywhere.For the Taylor enthusiast, the film is unlikely to reveal much new information. But that’s not really the point. The movie covers each of her eight marriages and many of her projects, but Taylor’s narration focuses largely on her feelings at the time. Because we’re often seeing footage of her public appearances as she talks about her interior life, the result is almost like a behind-the-scenes track, a fresh disclosure of the disjunction between what we think we know about stars — who they are, how they feel — and what’s actually going on inside.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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      ‘War Game’ Review: It Can’t Happen Here (Right?)

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      This nail-biter of a documentary imagines it is Jan. 6, 2025, and armed supporters of the losing candidate are hatching a coup and maybe a civil war. What will the nation’s leaders do?“War Game,” a nail-biter of a documentary, asks a question a lot of us don’t want to even consider: What if there’s another Jan. 6, only bigger, better organized and more ideologically cohesive? To try and answer that question, on Jan. 6, 2023, two filmmakers turned their cameras on a nonpartisan group of politicians and intelligence and military advisers who were role-playing in a fake crisis like the assault on the Capitol. Like actors in a grim sequel — Steve Bullock, the ex-governor of Montana, plays the incumbent president — they were taking part in an unnervingly familiar scenario, racing to prevent a coup and maybe civil war.This war game was created by Vet Voice Foundation, a nonprofit advocacy group for veterans that was founded in 2009. As in other war games, exercises that simulate and prepare for wars (the U.S. Defense Department uses them), this one features sets of players. On one side is Bullock’s President John Hotham and his team white-knuckling through the unscripted scenario in the (fake) Situation Room; on the other is a fictional group of extremists, the Order of Columbus, who are loyal to the losing candidate, Gov. Robert Strickland (Chris Coffey, an actor). Among the rebels is a cool cat (Kris Goldsmith, an Army veteran), who, from another location, approves moves and disinformation while elsewhere the game’s designers and consultants observe the proceedings.This particular game had one overarching rule: The president and his team have six hours to quell the revolt and ensure the “peaceful transfer of power,” parameters that, as the clock runs out, give it mounting urgency. The movie’s directors, Jesse Moss and Tony Gerber, working with Vet Voice, built sets and, using moody lighting, sleek camerawork and brisk editing, gave the game dramatic shape and momentum, paring down its six hours into a fast-moving 94-minute intrigue. The players did their part, too, of course: Bullock is definitely leading man material, even if, as the crisis deepens, he’s upstaged by Heidi Heitkamp, a former U.S. senator from North Dakota who plays his tough-talking senior adviser.Vet Voice’s appealing C.E.O., Janessa Goldbeck, a former combat engineer officer in the Marine Corps, takes on dual roles here as the game’s onscreen no-nonsense producer and the voice of the offscreen governor of Arizona. When she’s not hovering with the other game producers and consultants — these include the retired Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and the conservative standard-bearer Bill Kristol — Goldbeck fills in some details. This war game, she explains, was inspired by a sobering 2021 Washington Post opinion piece by Paul D. Eaton, Antonio M. Taguba and Steven M. Anderson, all retired U.S. Army generals.“We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time,” the three wrote, urging the Defense Department to “war-game the next potential postelection insurrection.”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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      How the Music Industry Learned to Love Piracy

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      A recent documentary has industry bigwigs telling a galling story about the file-sharing era: Everything worked out for the best.How do you disassemble a decades-long, multibillion-dollar industry in just a few short years? This was the question at the heart of this summer’s two-part Paramount+ documentary, “How Music Got Free,” which examines the greed and myopia of the music business in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when an assortment of otherwise feckless teenagers and tech enthusiasts finally figured out how to trade songs over the internet. Depending on your perspective, it is either a delightful yarn about the money-changers in the temple getting their due or a long, sad narrative about corporations and consumers banding together to deprive artists of a fair wage.Far from demonizing the innovators of online music piracy, “How Music Got Free” regards them as digital Robin Hood figures, visionaries whose passion for technology and music leveled the economic playing field. One montage contrasts the Croesus-like wealth of artists like Master P with the hardscrabble lives of residents of Shelby, N.C., as if seeking to justify piracy in one persuasive sweep of social-realist juxtaposition. Shelby is the home of Bennie Lydell Glover, a computer wizard and CD-manufacturing-plant employee who smuggled countless embargoed records onto the internet — a pipeline of prerelease material large enough to affect the sales of artists as big as Kanye West and 50 Cent. The documentary is also quick to point out the orgiastic profits reaped by record labels during the ’80s and ’90s, when CDs could be manufactured for around $2 and sold for $20, a practice that proved doubly lucrative as the new format induced consumers to buy their record collections all over again. The old expression goes: Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered. When the damage was done — from 2006 to 2016, CD sales dropped 84 percent — an entire generation had internalized the notion that they should never expect to pay anything for the music they cherished. The carnage could scarcely be calculated.“How Music Got Free” offers a sympathetic look back at the early days of this paradigm shift, but it’s worth remembering how music moguls and corporations actually responded to piracy at the time. Their reaction might best be described as a Keystone Kops-style combination of outrage, threats and litigation that mirrored the general stages of grief. Their indignant protests had a plaintive message: “You’re stealing from your favorite artists!” The unspoken second half of that was: “That’s our job!”This is worth remembering specifically because “How Music Got Free” was produced by Eminem, among others, and features a parade of industry bigwigs including Jimmy Iovine, 50 Cent, Timbaland and Marshall Mathers himself. Today the documentary treats the rise of online file-sharing services as first an astonishment, then a nuisance, then an existential threat and then, amazingly, a panacea. The original pirates are judged to be “pioneers” who lit the only clear path forward for the music industry. That path turns out to be streaming, a neat compromise between letting consumers listen to whatever they want online and collecting just enough money for it that big record labels are satisfied with their cut. A highly weird coda praises the contemporary streaming economy as a populist breakthrough, wherein, per the documentary’s narration, “we are one step closer to an artist being able to chart their own course.” Also: “Fans can experience music in their own ways.” Also, per one Panglossian talking head: “If you like music, you have more opportunities.” Also: “The artists themselves are just having more direct relationships with the consumers,” which — what does this even mean?History is written by the winners, and Eminem, Iovine and the rest of the plutocrats involved with “How Music Got Free” are clear victors in the aftermath of the piracy wars. What is left unmentioned, of course, is the surrounding blast crater, which has functionally erased a once-thriving ecosystem of middle-class musicians. Those artists survived on the old model of physical sales and mechanical royalties; now they have been almost completely excised from the profit pool of the streaming economy. Perhaps you have read the numbers and wrangled with their penurious abstractions. Per the Recording Industry Association of America, streaming currently accounts for 84 percent of revenue from recorded music. One estimate had streaming platforms paying an average of $0.00173 per stream; more recent numbers have it as $0.0046. Either way, a majority of that princely sum is typically captured by record labels, while the artist is left to make do with the remainder. I will save you the trouble of getting out your calculator. What this means is that it is essentially impossible for all but a glancingly small number of musicians to make meaningful income from their recordings.All turned out well, and music was solved forever.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. 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      Looking for the Best in Black Cinema? Try Brown Sugar.

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      The streaming service highlights some of the finest movies starring, and often directed by, Black artists.As the name-brand streaming services struggle to show profits and broker cable-esque bundling packages to cut costs, the most successful streamers are proving to be niche services, which curate specialized libraries for a specific target audience. We’ve spotlighted several such streamers in this space, most of them focusing on clearly defined genres or sensibilities; this month, we look at a service with an eye on one particular culture.Brown Sugar, which started in 2016, promises on its site “hit movies and TV shows along with the largest collection of classic Black cinema, uncut and commercial-free.” Its library features programming about the Black experience, predominately by Black creators, and aimed primarily at Black audiences (while recognizing that those audiences are seeking all sorts of entertainment). There is a robust selection of Black cinema from the 1970s, the vaunted blaxploitation era, including titles from Ossie Davis, Rudy Ray Moore and Richard Roundtree, as well as cult titles like “The Harder They Come” and “Putney Swope,” and ’80s favorites like “Hollywood Shuffle” and “Beat Street.”That era initially dominated the service’s library, but it has since broadened its offerings to include more contemporary romantic comedies, action thrillers, heartwarming dramas, and historical and true crime documentaries. It’s also cultivated a partnership with Bounce TV that gives viewers access to such long-running and popular shows as the soap opera “Saints & Sinners,” the rags-to-riches sitcom “Family Time” and the barbershop-set comedy “In the Cut.”Subscription is a bargain, running only $3.99 per month (after a one-week free trial) or $42 for a year. Brown Sugar is available on desktop and a variety of streaming devices, including Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire. Image quality varies wildly — some films and shows are Blu-ray quality, but occasional older and less-cared-for titles may well have been mastered from VHS. But it’s worth the risk for the hidden gems the service offers.Here are a few highlights from the current library:Pryor plays an outlaw and Williams a federal agent in Sidney J. Furie’s film.Paramount Pictures‘Hit!’: “Lady Sings the Blues” was one of the first and most successful (critically and commercially) films of ’70s Black cinema; this 1973 effort reunited that film’s director, Sidney J. Furie, with two of its co-stars, Billy Dee Williams and Richard Pryor, this time for an action extravaganza that more resembled “The French Connection” than “Lady.” Williams plays a federal agent who goes after an international drug cartel after his daughter dies of a heroin overdose; Pryor is one of the team of outlaws and outcasts he puts together to get the job done when his superiors veto the mission. The result is fast-paced and funny (thanks primarily to the always-reliable Pryor), and filled with thrilling action beats.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