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      ‘Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story’ Review: A Legend and His Kryptonite

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      The original Superman actor gets a comprehensive, if narrow-mindedly celebratory, tribute in this traditional talking-heads-style doc.Biographical documentaries too often turn into hagiographies, so you could imagine how that’s even more easily the case when the subject is as beloved as Christopher Reeve. The actor, who is best known for playing Superman in the original 1978 film (and the three sequels that followed in the 1980s), gets a suitably comprehensive tribute in the HBO doc “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story.”Directed by Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, this traditional talking-heads-style documentary weaves together deep-cut archival footage from Reeve’s heyday and interviews with his three children, other relatives, and friends in the business (like Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close and Whoopi Goldberg). The filmmakers jump back and forth in time, presenting early on a 1995 accident that would forever change Reeve’s life.Reeve was thrown from a horse, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down. But the movie’s shaken-up timeline keeps the documentary from becoming a mere before-and-after story. Instead, it considers the breadth of Reeve’s career and personal life — his beginnings in the theater, his feelings about playing Superman, his efforts to break the mold, and his two most important romantic relationships — with his injury looming over his successes like Kryptonite.Reeve’s bond with his fellow actor Robin Williams also makes up one of the documentary’s meatiest threads, adding depth to the character study. In many ways, Reeve actually was a gentle all-American type, but footage of his friendship with Williams brings out his funny, artistic — and dark — side.The documentary argues that without Williams and Reeve’s wife, Dana (who deserves a film of her own), Reeve wouldn’t have pulled out from his post-accident depression.Their love and optimism were key to his rehabilitation and turn to activism. Too little is said about some disabled people’s criticisms of Reeve’s advocacy (specifically, the belief that it was overly fixated on a cure as opposed to promoting destigmatization), which would have productively complicated the portrait. But that’s no surprise considering the narrow-mindedly celebratory scope of this homage.Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve StoryRated PG-13 for language and themes. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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      The Ultimate Yacht Rock Playlist

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      Gain a deeper appreciation of music from Michael McDonald, Toto and Christopher Cross.Michael McDonald appearing on “Soul Train” in 1982.Soul Train/Getty, via Courtesy HBODear listeners,Over the weekend, I watched an entertaining new documentary — or, as it’s billed, a “dockumentary” — about the genre of music that’s retroactively come to be known as “yacht rock.”You might be familiar with the term, which encapsulates a disparate scene of mostly California-based musicians who brought jazz, soul and R&B influences to mainstream pop and soft rock in the late 1970s: Think Kenny Loggins, Toto, Christopher Cross and just about any song with backing or lead vocals by Michael McDonald. What you might not realize is that the term “yacht rock” was coined not by music critics or even the musicians themselves, but by a ragtag group of comedians who lovingly parodied some of those musicians in a beloved web series that premiered in 2005.“Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary,” currently streaming on Max, features interviews with J.D. Ryznar, a creator of the web series, as well as Loggins, Cross, McDonald and a host of the other artists who defined the genre’s sound — even if it wasn’t considered a genre at the time. “To us it was just the next logical step in making pop music,” Loggins says in the film. Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen had the documentary’s strongest rejection of the term: At the mere mention of “yacht rock,” he hangs up on the film’s director Garrett Price — though not before suggesting a course of action unprintable in this family newsletter.Regardless of what you call it, (“smooth music,” “the West Coast sound” and “progressive R&B pop” are all offered), Price’s documentary makes the case that this was indeed a unified scene, driven by overlapping influences, shared personnel and playfully competitive studio one-upsmanship. Like the web series that preceded it, the new documentary ultimately offers a deeper appreciation of this sometimes-maligned music, which is worth a considered reappraisal.Today’s playlist is one such opportunity. It features some of the aforementioned yacht rock luminaries alongside a few of the younger artists they influenced, like De La Soul, Warren G and Thundercat. Listening on a decent pair of speakers or headphones is a must; donning a captain’s hat is entirely optional.No wise man has the power,LindsayWe 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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      ‘Beatles ’64’ Review: They Wanted to Hold Their Hands

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      This documentary, directed by David Tedeschi, comes up with a solid compendium of the band’s arcana from their first trip to the United States, when fans went wild.Few cultural events of the 20th century have withstood as much scrutiny as the Beatles’ first trip to the United States, but the documentary “Beatles ’64,” directed by David Tedeschi, a frequent collaborator of Martin Scorsese’s, comes up with a solid compendium of Beatlemania arcana.Tedeschi (“The 50 Year Argument”) revisits the excitement surrounding the Fab Four’s arrival through the eyes of early fans. Among the more unlikely Beatles enthusiasts who appear is the filmmaker David Lynch, who attended the band’s 1964 concert at Washington Coliseum and remembers music that could inspire “tears of happiness.”The writer Jamie Bernstein recalls a childhood crush on George Harrison. Her ardor surely helped convince her father, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein, to weigh in on the merits of rock ’n’ roll: “I think this music has something terribly important to tell us adults,” he says in an archival clip. The musician Smokey Robinson describes being “elated” when the Beatles covered “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” even though, he says, he didn’t know about it until the record came out. “There are a billion songs on earth, man,” he says. “To just have somebody like the Beatles, who are great songwriters themselves — out of that billion songs, to take one of my songs and record it? I can’t beat that as a songwriter.”The present-day footage can seem self-reflexive to the point of parody: Paul McCartney gives the documentary team a tour of the Brooklyn Museum’s Paul McCartney exhibition. Ringo Starr is shown hanging out with Scorsese, a producer on this documentary and the director of a previous one on Harrison.But with respect to Harrison’s status as the quiet Beatle, the quiet star of “Beatles ’64” is superb footage by the brothers Albert and David Maysles, to whom the film is dedicated, and who trailed the Beatles during those two weeks. (They made their own 1964 documentary, “What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.,” out of the material.) Watching the band in the Plaza Hotel and fans in the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of their idols, you can’t help but get swept up in a 60-year-old fervor.Beatles ’64Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      Thanksgiving Streaming Recommendations for Every Mood

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      Whether you’re with hanging out with children or adults, want to laugh or tuck into an adventure, here are some specific selections to stream.“What do you all want to watch?”This question has torpedoed many get-togethers, leaving the poor soul wielding the remote at a Thanksgiving gathering to search and scroll through seemingly infinite streaming options until everyone is cross-eyed and over it. Let’s skip that part, shall we? Here are a handful of picks that might fit the bill for some common holiday dynamics.Family Friendly, but Not CornyAlex Honnold climbs El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. His feat was captured in the 2018 documentary “Free Solo.”Jimmy Chin/National GeographicDocumentary with the little ones: “Tiger” (Disney+)There is no shortage of stunning nature documentaries, but this 2024 Disneynature film from the director Mark Linfield (“Planet Earth”) goes beyond the usual script to tell a poignant family tale. Narrated by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and filmed over the course of 1,500 days, we follow a tigress named Ambar in the forests of India as she protects her cubs from predators and adverse weather while on a perpetual quest to feed them and herself.Documentary with the teenagers: “Free Solo” (Disney+)This 2018 film that follows Alex Honnold on his free solo ascent of El Capitan, a vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park, won the Oscar for best documentary for good reason. Not only will his feat shake your understanding of what is humanly possible, but how it was captured on film (Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin directed) is just as gripping. Watch this on the biggest television you have. It’s worth it.Feature with the little ones: “Elemental” (Disney+)If you’ve already seen “Inside Out 2,” try this 2023 Pixar comedy set in Element City, where characters are divided into four strata: water, earth, air and fire, all magnificently rendered, creating a dazzling animated experience. The plot looks thoughtfully at family ties while telling a story of cross-cultural romantic love and self-actualization.Feature with the teenagers: “Spirited Away” (Max)It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 25 years since the release of this now revered Oscar-winning fantasy anime from the celebrated Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. It re-entered the zeitgeist this year with Billie Eilish’s track “Chihiro,” named after the film’s main character, a girl who slips into another realm, where she becomes trapped. The hand-drawn animation is transporting, and the coming-of-age themes will open the door for some deeper reflection.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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      6 New Documentaries Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

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      Whether you’re a casual viewer or certified fan of the genre, our reviewers think these documentaries are worth knowing about.Critic’s pickRevisiting a life through photographs.Sheila Turner Seed in the documentary “A Photographic Memory.”Capariva Films‘A Photographic Memory’Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s mother, Sheila Turner Seed, died when she was 42 and Rachel was 18 months old. In this documentary, she seeks to connect with her mother through her photography.From our review:It’s a film that captures the unsettling sensation of reaching middle age, knowing the length of the road ahead is uncertain but certainly shorter than it’s ever been, and not being able to see past the age your parent was upon death.In theaters. Read the full review.Critic’s pickReviving the story of an apartheid photographer.A photograph by Ernest Cole, as seen in a new a documentary directed by Raoul Peck.Ernest Cole/Magnolia Pictures ‘Ernest Cole: Lost and Found’The South African apartheid photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 in Manhattan after he was exiled — this documentary, directed by Raoul Peck, reviews some of the photos featured in his 1967 photo book “House of Bondage.”From our review:Peck makes use of keen observations excerpted from Cole’s writings and moves fluidly between stills (compassionate toward their subjects, damning of the subjugators) as well as quietly captivating photos he took of street life in Harlem and rural life during a road trip to the South in the 1960s and ’70s. The result is an elegantly wrought documentary that pulls off the trick of leaving viewers sated yet also craving more.In theaters. Read the full review.Critic’s pickObserving the making of a Jewish identity.Amichai Lau-Lavie, the subject of the documentary “Sabbath Queen.”Simcha Leib Productions/Roco Films‘Sabbath Queen’Directed by Sandi DuBowski, this film follows the story of Amichai Lau-Lavie, an Israel-born gay man who was ordained as a rabbi in 2016.From our review:How he went from the Radical Faeries’ joyous, transgressive vision of queerness — which led to creating his drag alter ego, Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross — to embracing Conservative Judaism is the subject of Sandi DuBowski’s fascinating look at the act of questioning yourself and your family, your surroundings and your decisions.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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      The Complexities of Fighting for Democracy

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      “Night Is Not Eternal,” which follows the Cuban activist Rosa María Payá, is the rare nuanced political documentary that is likely to challenge every viewer’s perspective.If you’ve watched a lot of political documentaries, especially those that deal with American politics, I think you’ll agree with me on this: Many, if not most, are overly simplistic. It’s just hard to explain the current social and cultural moment, or adequately chronicle the rise of a controversial figure, in a couple of hours. Most often I find they fall along ideological lines with easy answers, rarely challenging partisan orthodoxies or prodding the viewer into new mental territory.“Night Is Not Eternal” (streaming on Max) is not one of those films. The movie’s director, Nanfu Wang, has spent her career making truly provocative documentaries, often about her homeland of China. Her first feature, “Hooligan Sparrow,” about Chinese human rights activists, resulted in Wang herself being surveilled by the government. In “One Child Nation,” she explored the ramifications of China’s one-child policy. “In the Same Breath,” about governmental response to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic both in Wuhan and in the United States, finds uncomfortable similarities between the two.Wang’s films often blend personal experience with broader political and social critique, and her newest does the same. Wang emigrated to the United States in 2011, and her political perspective is informed by firsthand experience of both Chinese and American public rhetoric. That lends an outside-the-box point of view to “Night Is Not Eternal,” which on its face is a film about the Cuban activist Rosa María Payá, whom Wang met at a film festival years ago. Payá’s father, the anti-authoritarian activist Oswaldo Payá, died in 2012 in a suspicious car crash, declared by official Cuban state TV to be an accident (an account later refuted by a report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights). His daughter took up his fight as her own.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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      ‘Witches’ Review: Redeeming the Wicked Witch

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      The director Elizabeth Sankey’s experience with postpartum depression anchors this documentary about the pop-cultural representation of witches.The arrival of “Witches,” a documentary streaming on Mubi, seems strategically timed. The director Elizabeth Sankey’s contribution is part essay film, part personal testimony, though like Jon M. Chu’s musical blockbuster “Wicked” she, too, starts in the land of Oz.As a child, Sankey explains in a voice-over, she wanted to be Glinda the good witch. But her experiences dealing with mental illness made her see an unsettling correlation between the wicked witches of the world and the women who, like her, have had trouble performing traditional domestic roles.The first part of Sankey’s documentary plays like a cultural history of the witch onscreen, weaving together clips from TV shows and movies across the decades to illustrate a somewhat stale point: that stigmas around women’s health have informed the characterization of witches. When Sankey shares her personal story — weaving in interviews with other women and experts who also have firsthand experience of postpartum psychosis — the details of her illness take on an eerie new light next to pop-cultural images of madwomen, like Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby” and Isabelle Adjani in “Possession.” Based on the real women’s accounts, the fictional renderings don’t seem outlandish — the satanic underpinnings of witchcraft, clearly a superstitious, and deeply misogynistic, justification.“Witches” eventually explores other parallels — for instance, the demonization of midwives and natural healers with the advent of modern medicine — but the maternal madness framework dominates the bulk of the run time to diminishing effect. The clips also veer from the occult and take on a more generalized creepiness that feels bleary and arbitrary. If all women behaving badly can be summed up as witchy, then Sankey’s documentary too often works like a game of associations.WitchesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Sabbath Queen’ Review: Capturing the Act of Questioning

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      Sandi DuBowski’s documentary about Rabbi Amichai Lau-Levie observes the making of a Jewish identity.When Amichai Lau-Lavie was ordained a rabbi, in 2016, he joined a family tradition that had been going on uninterrupted since the 11th century. And yet this had been a fraught process for Lau-Lavie, an Israel-born gay man who just a few years before entering New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary had been a pillar of a “God-optional” community. How he went from the Radical Faeries’ joyous, transgressive vision of queerness — which led to creating his drag alter ego, Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross — to embracing Conservative Judaism is the subject of Sandi DuBowski’s fascinating look at the act of questioning yourself and your family, your surroundings and your decisions.Shortly after completing his acclaimed documentary “Trembling Before G-d” (2001), about gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews, DuBowski started filming Lau-Lavie. He kept at it for the next 21 years, which gives “Sabbath Queen” the rare opportunity to capture its subject in flight, so to speak.Yes, Lau-Lavie reflects on his family’s history during World War II, as well as key points from his own past, like being outed in his 20s. But we also watch him talk about many events, like becoming a father or cofounding the aforementioned experimental Lab/Shul initiative, while he is still in the middle of experiencing them, rather than speaking with the benefit of hindsight.After Lau-Lavie makes a big decision that goes against his recent commitment to the Conservative movement, it becomes obvious that his restlessness has not abated, and his questing days may never be over. He understands all too well that life is just not that neat.Sabbath QueenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More