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      ‘Rebel Hearts’ Review: Sisters Act Up

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      This flashy, feel-good documentary follows a group of progressive Catholic nuns in 1960s Los Angeles.Few institutions notoriously resist change like the Roman Catholic Church, which to this day upholds rules of celibacy and continues to forbid the ordination of women. So for some, it may be surprising to learn that the church’s iron-fisted rule has long been met with resistance.Such a struggle is captured in “Rebel Hearts,” Pedro Kos’s feel-good documentary about a particularly gutsy group of nuns who took inspiration from the social upheavals of the 1960s to fight against exploitation by their male superiors.Combining archival footage with paper doll-esque animation and a flurry of talking-head interviews gathered over two decades by Shawnee Isaac-Smith, one of the film’s producers, this documentary traces the controversies and trailblazing feats of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart, whose social activism and participation in civil rights and workers protests upended notions of the fragile, cloistered nun.Led by Anita Caspary, these women — and the liberal college they ran in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles — were considered dangerous by Catholic hard-liners like Cardinal James Francis McIntyre, the entrepreneurial head of the Los Angeles Archdiocese who the documentary claims staffed his many religious schools with unpaid, unqualified young nuns. Caspary and her unruly flock (including the pop artist Corita Kent, whose screen prints and drawings were often the cause of scandal) collectively sought autonomy — voting, for instance, to rescind the habit requirement.An unrelenting pop music soundtrack vests the story with a cheesy rah-rah sensibility, while the film’s breakneck pacing hinders proper reflection of any single event or anecdote. The onslaught of information certainly impresses by illuminating a rich and not-often-discussed slice of feminist history, but the execution is distractingly flashy and gratingly unfocused.Rebel HeartsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lourdes’ Review: Pilgrims Find Fellowship on Quest for Miracles

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      This intimate documentary reveals the hopes and fears of those seeking healing.Thierry Demaizière and Alban Teurlai start their documentary with imagery that is as elemental as it gets. A stone wall, slate gray, its surface sheathed, it seems, in clear water. Then, human hands, some gnarled with age, others smooth and childlike, touch the wall, sometimes with fingertips, sometimes palms.This wall is at the shrine of Lourdes, in the French Pyrenees, where in 1858 a young woman saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary and discovered a spring of reputedly curative water. The town is now host, between the months of March and October, to pilgrimages by thousands of people seeking physical and spiritual healing, and their families. The movie takes an intimate look at a few who visited the shrine of Lourdes in 2017.There’s a lot heartbreak to be seen here. A teenage girl with a skin condition, accompanied by her father, seems just as riven by the school mockery she endures as by her ailment itself. A male prostitute, whose tortured musings we hear in voice-over, assists some priests in preparing communion. A devoted mother transports her adult son, who had a brain injury in a road accident, “to see the Virgin,” as he puts it. One very young child, too sick to even travel, is prayed for by his father and brother.The movie also shows the volunteers and health care workers who look after the pilgrims during the devotional season. The movie allows these figures moments of frankness — there’s much about their jobs that’s tiring and unappetizing — but the viewer will be mostly impressed by their compassion.What do the pilgrims want? By this late date in the history of the place, few expect a cure. “There aren’t that many miracles, if you think about it,” Lydie, the aforementioned mother, admits. They seek the possibility of miracles — and hope and fellowship and understanding.LourdesNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Now Sparks Can Confuse Fans on the Big Screen

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      The musical brothers Ron and Russell Mael are known for catchy songs and perplexing shifts. But they longed to be in films. This summer they’re part of two.Sparks is a band unlike any other. Ron and Russell Mael — the brothers who have made up the eccentric, unclassifiable duo for more than 50 years — have played a pivotal, if unheralded, role in multiple musical movements, from glam rock to new wave to synth-pop.Their witty, hyper-literate songs, along with the singer Russell’s good looks and keyboardist Ron’s deadpan, glowering stage presence, made Sparks icons of a sort in Europe, but never more than a cult band in the United States. With 25 albums to their name, they have often followed up their biggest moments with radical shifts in style that thrilled loyal fans but baffled more casual listeners.In 2017, the music-obsessed director Edgar Wright, fresh off the success of “Baby Driver,” went to see Sparks perform in Los Angeles. For years, he had been telling his friends that someone needed to make a documentary about the group, and as he looked at the audience, which ranged from teenagers to graying 60-somethings, and the weird mix of celebrities in attendance, he insistently repeated the idea to his friend, the filmmaker Phil Lord — who told him to make the movie himself.“I thought, if not me, then who would do it?” Wright said in a recent video conversation.Four years later, “The Sparks Brothers” is reaching theaters, an exhaustive, proudly overstuffed two-hour-20-minute celebration of a group described in the film as “successful, underrated, hugely influential and overlooked at the same time.” In addition to interviews with the enigmatic Maels, Wright conducted 80 interviews, talking with Sparks fans like Beck, Flea, members of Duran Duran, Mike Myers and Neil Gaiman, as well as collaborators and associates.Edgar Wright filming the Maels in Japan. If there’s one takeaway from the band’s story, the director said, “it’s about the persistence of vision.”Richie Starzec/Focus FeaturesOne theme in the documentary is the Maels’ lifelong interest in film, and their multiple near-misses in trying to bring their music to the big screen, including a proposed collaboration with the French comedian Jacques Tati and a project with Tim Burton. So it’s ironic that just weeks after “The Sparks Brothers” arrives, they have another movie release: “Annette,” a musical written by the Maels, directed by Leos Carax, and starring Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. The story of a comedian and opera singer who give birth to a daughter with a “unique gift,” it will open the Cannes Film Festival in July.“Even before we had a band, the merging of music and movies just seemed so perfect,” Ron, 75, said, adding, “To be sitting on a movie set in Brussels and watching Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard singing something you wrote — it’s surreal, way beyond what we expected.” (Carax was unavailable for comment.)Wright presented his idea to the Maels that night he saw them onstage, but they expressed some trepidation, for the same reasons they had turned down previous offers for a documentary.“We always say that we don’t like looking back because we think it kind of paralyzes you,” said Russell, 72, encapsulating the constant creative forward motion that has defined the band’s oddly incomparable history. “The proposition of doing a documentary is kind of the opposite of that, and in our minds we thought, is it like an obituary in some sense?”During a video call, Russell added that the endurance of the Maels’ partnership also seemed potentially problematic. “Sparks’ story isn’t the standard fare of a lot of music documentaries,” he said. “There’s no drug casualties, we don’t have that conflict of other bands with brothers in the band — so are there enough dramatic elements to make it interesting?”To Wright, on the contrary, their perseverance was exactly the point. “That’s the inspiring part,” he said. “Every other band story is about people squandering their talent, and at a certain point you lose sympathy. The fact that Sparks have lasted so long is partly because they’re always close to success but never mainstream. They’ve managed to exist in this sweet spot where they can keep going, but they never have to sell out.”To the surprise of many, the Maels were born not in Britain, but in Southern California, and were even star athletes in high school. They started playing in groups while attending the University of California, Los Angeles, inspired by the spiky spirit of the Who and the Kinks and by French New Wave cinema. Their band, Halfnelson, was championed by Todd Rundgren, but their 1971 debut album flopped. (Closing a circle, Sparks and Rundgren released the new song “Your Fandango” earlier this year.) They moved to England in 1973, after taking on the name Sparks.Russell and Ron Mael in the documentary. They got their start in the ’70s and continue to make music.via Focus FeaturesThat was the start of a crazy roller coaster career (including an appearance in the 1977 disaster movie flop “Rollercoaster”). The dramatic “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us” reached No. 2 on the British charts in 1974. After hooking up with pioneering disco producer Giorgio Moroder, “The Number One Song in Heaven” (1979) was not only a huge club record, but also created a blueprint for dance-based electro-pop of acts like the Human League and New Order.Sparks’ theatrical presentation, from their album covers to their stage production, added to the allure. “What really stuck with me,” Wright said, “is these two performers who were staring down the camera at you, in sharp contrast to a lot of acts who would smile — it was quite unnerving.”Their most notorious signature is Ron’s mustache, alternately compared with that of Adolf Hitler or Charlie Chaplin. In Paul McCartney’s 1980 music video for “Coming Up,” in which he dresses as an array of rock stars from Buddy Holly to Frank Zappa, he appears behind a keyboard with Ron’s unmistakable scowl and facial hair.Teaming up with Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s, who was dating Russell at the time, Sparks had a genuine MTV hit in 1983 with “Cool Places.” By the time the lush, pulsing “When Do I Get to Sing ‘My Way’” was the top airplay record of 1994 in Germany, they were being accused of copying the artists they had inspired.But most of these hits were followed with rapid musical left turns, as if the group was eager to shed any expectations that might come with popular success. In “The Sparks Brothers,” Ron says, “we think it’s important to do something that’s polarizing.”Sometimes the results are gloriously weird (in “My Baby’s Taking Me Home,” the lyrics consist of the title phrase repeated more than 100 times), and sometimes they’re more confrontational: When a label executive suggested they make an album of music to dance to, they responded with a record titled “Music You Can Dance To” (the label dropped them), and when the idea of a project with the band Franz Ferdinand surfaced, the first song they sent to the other group was called “Collaborations Don’t Work.” (The resulting 2015 album, “FFS,” was a major critical success.)Michelle Groskopf for The New York TimesBoth Maels, though, deny that there’s anything willfully destructive in their musical choices. “Within pop music, within three-minute songs, the exciting thing is to see how you can reshape the formula and still come up with something provocative that hasn’t been done,” Russell said. “You’re always searching for that new thing you can impose on the givens of pop music — that’s when the change becomes something exciting, and not just because we want to say we’re chameleons all the time.”The portrait that emerges in “The Sparks Brothers” is of musicians fully dedicated to their work — even in the years when Sparks didn’t have a record deal, the Maels continued to write and record with almost monastic discipline. “I don’t think it’s especially praiseworthy that even in those periods when things around us were kind of dire, we were working on the music,” Ron said. “There isn’t an alternative; that kind of work ethic is all that there is. At this point, we have an excuse and we could say we’re too old, but that’s a part of our DNA.”Wright said this example of artistic commitment beyond the pursuit of commercial success is the true intention of the film. “I hope that for people with creative ambitions, the lesson that comes out is to stay true to your beliefs, because really it’s about the persistence of vision,” he said. “Especially in this climate when musicians are having the hardest time they’ve ever had, I hope the documentary shows a way to do it.”Meanwhile, the Mael brothers have not slowed down. Last year, their album “A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip” became their fourth British Top 10 entry, and they plan to tour the United States, Europe and Japan in early 2022, alongside the release of a new album. They have a “very brash” sequel to “Annette” they will be pitching during the Cannes festival, and still hope to make an animated film of their 2010 radio musical, “The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman.”The experience of “The Sparks Brothers” has given the perpetually evolving Sparks a different attitude about revisiting their life’s work.“We’ve always said that we dispose of everything immediately after the moment,” Ron said. “But with this specific representation, we have to admit that perhaps some of those judgments were wrong. This way of presenting our legacy is the one way we want to be remembered.” More

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      ‘Rita Moreno’ Documentary Review: An Icon’s Growing Pains

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      This paean to the trailblazing Puerto Rican actress is also a case study in the highs and lows of showbiz for a woman of color.Most documentaries about famous people tend to be exercises in celebrity worship, and “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It” is no exception. Directed by Mariem Pérez Riera, the film is a portrait filled with dazzling archival footage and shorn of ambiguities and unflattering viewpoints. Yet it is not your average paean because Moreno, a trailblazing Puerto Rican actress whose career spans more than seven decades, is not your average star.The film’s primary talking head among a parade of former collaborators and Latino luminaries — including Lin-Manuel Miranda (co-executive producer), Gloria Estefan and Eva Longoria — Moreno is given full rein of her story, which doubles as a case study in the highs and lows of showbiz for a woman of color.Under studio contract in the 1950s and ’60s, Moreno recounts the painful times she spent playing “illiterate, immoral island girls” and fending off Hollywood executives who demanded sexual favors. In one, likely staged, scene in the documentary, we see Moreno watching the 2018 Christine Blasey Ford testimony in her dressing room on the set of the Netflix series “One Day at a Time.” It’s a clunky way of transitioning to her own experiences with abuse, but nevertheless situates Moreno and her lifelong commitment to social activism along a feminist historical trajectory.After winning a best supporting actress Oscar for “West Side Story” in 1962 (she is one of only two Latina recipients of an acting Academy Award; Lupita Nyong’o, who was born in Mexico, became the second in 2014), Moreno’s career did not skyrocket in the way one might expect. Instead, it expanded across mediums and genres.This documentary credits her turn to comedy, television and stage acting for liberating her from her exotic sexpot persona. It’s almost hard to believe that the radiant Moreno we see in the film — who at 89 continues to epitomize that ineffable and rare quality we call star power — was ever restrained. Though this contrast is precisely what makes her story so enthralling and vital.Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for ItRated PG-13 for mature thematic content, suggestive material and some strong language including a sexual reference. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation’ Review: Friendship in Focus

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      The director deftly constructs a dialogue between Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.Merging two biographies is a solid way to enliven the often-tedious genre of the literary documentary. But the connections drawn in “Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation” are sufficiently instructive that watching and listening to these writers is also, in a way, like hearing one author in stereo.The director Lisa Immordino Vreeland uses the friendship between Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams to construct a dialogue between them, using the writing and appearances they left behind. Jim Parsons reads Capote’s words in voice-over and Zachary Quinto reads Williams’s. (There is a lengthy list of sources at the end; all credit to a documentary that shows its work.) For the visuals, Vreeland relies principally on archival material. Her most striking conceit is to show the writers in separate but parallel interviews with David Frost.We hear the Southern-born authors on their writing habits, on how autobiography inflects their narratives, on their homosexuality and on substance abuse. They express disappointment with films adapted from their work: Williams felt the censorship was so heavy you often needed to see the stage version for comprehension. Capote says Paramount “double-crossed” him by casting Audrey Hepburn (whom he nevertheless praises) instead of Marilyn Monroe in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”There is some bite in stories of their rivalry. (Capote apparently stung Williams with his description of a Williams-like character in his unfinished novel “Answered Prayers.”) “An Intimate Conversation” never quite digs beyond the cultivated personas of either author — a drawback of the archival format. But for anyone invested in the writers, it offers a vivid sketch.Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate ConversationNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters and in virtual cinemas through Kino Marquee. More

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      ‘The French’ Review: A Candid Look at the French Open

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      This documentary by William Klein relies on the unspoken or spontaneous moments to tell the tale of the 1981 Open, off court and on.Bjorn Borg won the French Open in 1981. It was his 11th, and final, victory in a Grand Slam tournament — and the sixth time he won this particular event. An ordinary filmmaker constructing a documentary on the Open that year would likely structure its narrative around the implacable, cool Swedish player’s road to glory there.But the American-born photographer and filmmaker William Klein, who spent most of his career working in or from France, is no ordinary filmmaker or photographer. And he was the first director invited by the event to capture the French Open for a feature film. He and his crew took a fly-on-the-wall approach that captures, among other things, what professional tennis looked like before corporatization fully warped it into the glossy commodity it is today. This exceptional 1982 film is getting its U.S. debut this week.In the backstage areas of Roland Garros in Paris, tennis hardly seems a glamorous profession. There’s a lot of waiting around, one-on-one physical therapy, obligatory meet-and-greets, and more. On-court rivals Chris Evert and Virginia Ruzici unite in amusement over Ilie Nastase’s clowning. The future French champion Yannick Noah contends with a sprained ankle. There’s not narration and not much in the way of formal interviews. One of the most trenchant scenes focuses on Paul Cohen, coach of the player Harold Solomon, as he analyzes his charge’s loss in real time. Arthur Ashe and Patrice Hagelauer are seen and overheard watching Noah play Guillermo Vilas.The tedium of various rainouts is chronicled faithfully. Klein and company also catch John McEnroe complaining of having to play in wet weather and sniping at an umpire for good measure. Hana Mandilkova’s near-bemusement at winning the women’s singles is also memorable. Klein weaves all these moments into a story one could call spectacularly earthbound.The FrenchNot rated. In English and French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More

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      Sparks, a Musical Curiosity With a Big Following for Half a Century

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      Edward Wright knows Sparks and you will too, once you see his documentary about this singular cultural phenomenon.Sparks, the musical entity invented and fronted by Ron and Russell Mael, is sometimes rock, sometimes pop, sometimes art song, always idiosyncratic. They’re a cult band with an ever-renewing cult and a career that spans 50 years. “The Sparks Brothers,” an energetic documentary directed by Edgar Wright, explains their appeal in part by emphasizing how it cannot be explained.Sparks’s image is one of contrasts. In the 1970s, the lead singer Russell’s slim physique, bouncy hair and matinee-idol face made him prime rock star “snack” material. Hunched over a keyboard was Ron, the songwriting brother, spindly and pale, whose mustache has been described as uncomfortably poised between Charlie Chaplin’s and Hitler’s. Then there’s what came out of Russell’s mouth — an arch falsetto that might cause a dog to wince, singing ditties about Albert Einstein and breast milk (not in the same song), over precision-tooled guitar riffs and baroque song structures that evoked both Bach and a calliope.“I thought they didn’t really exist,” the musician Nick Heyward says, recounting his surprise when he saw them on the street. “The Sparks Brothers” humanizes the two, who, despite their Euro-vibe were raised in California. Russell was a high-school quarterback, even. Their adored father, an artist, instilled a love of both film and music in the boys. He died when Ron was 11 and Russell 8.Wright, the virtuoso director of “Shaun of the Dead” and “Baby Driver,” among others, and an ace soundtrack assembler, is uniquely suited to make this tribute. Both director and band revel in formal play. Their eccentricity doesn’t entirely shut out earnestness.About sex, the brothers keep relatively mum, although when the subject of Russell’s short-lived romance with his musical collaborator Jane Wiedlin of the Go-Go’s comes up, there’s a bit of mutual humble-bragging by the still-friendly exes. As for drugs, they kept away. Rock ’n’ roll motivated them initially, but it’s something they now have an arm’s-length relationship with, in part because in its purest form it is not entirely hospitable to Sparks’s particular brand of irony.Does the movie slather on the contemporary celebrity love a little too thickly? Maybe. But even the contributions from arguable wild cards — Jason Schwartzman, Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino, Neil Gaiman — are pertinent.The Sparks BrothersRated R, inexplicably. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Crime on the Bayou’ Review: Race on Trial

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      Nancy Buirski’s documentary deals with a civil rights case in 1960s Louisiana that wound up before the Supreme Court.As a documentary, “A Crime on the Bayou,” directed by Nancy Buirski, is dryly told, but it has a potent idea, which is to show how even bureaucratic aspects of the legal system in the Deep South in the 1960s could be weaponized against Black Americans. To paraphrase Lolis Eric Elie, a son of a lawyer involved in the events in the film, part of what made Jim Crow totalitarian was its arbitrariness: A Black man never knew when he might suddenly be accused of a crime.The supposed crime here occurred in 1966, when Gary Duncan, a 19-year-old fisherman in Plaquemines Parish, La., intervened in a potential skirmish between two of his young relatives, who were students at a newly integrated school, and a group of white boys whom the relatives thought were trying to start a fight. Duncan says he touched a white boy’s arm. For that, he was charged with simple battery. The case wound its way to the United States Supreme Court, where Duncan won a right to a jury trial not previously guaranteed in Louisiana’s state courts.These events are recounted principally by Duncan himself and his lawyer, Richard Sobol, who died last year. Other major voices in the film are Elie and the civil rights lawyer Armand Derfner. Sobol, who was Jewish, recalls being targeted by Leander Perez, the parish’s racist and anti-Semitic political boss. And in covering the repercussions of the branching cases, “A Crime on the Bayou” shows how superficially straightforward, courageous acts — like refusing to plead guilty unjustly or defending the unjustly accused — are hard.A Crime on the BayouNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More