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      ‘The Boy From Medellín’ Review: A Dizzying Week in J Balvin’s World

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      A documentary about the reggaeton star from Colombia is a relatively sophisticated form of celebrity publicity.The year is 2019 and protests in Colombia — the largest the country has seen in decades — have erupted against the government of President Iván Duque. The killing of 18-year-old Dilan Cruz by a police projectile makes its way into the reggaeton star J Balvin’s Instagram feed, which exacerbates his individual crisis.It seems Balvin wasn’t sleeping well. In the days leading up to a sold-out concert on Nov. 30, 2019, in his hometown, Medellín, he begins to consider his responsibilities as a public figure. Social media users criticize his political disengagement, while uprisings in the city threaten to cancel his big night.In “The Boy from Medellín” on Amazon Prime Video, the director Matthew Heineman captures a week in the life of Balvin, the Prince of Reggaeton, a charismatic performer who appears to be privately diffident.Known for his gritty documentaries about international conflicts (“Cartel Land,” “City of Ghosts”), Heineman delivers a relatively sophisticated form of celebrity publicity in this film, armed with stunning concert footage but unoriginal insights into the burdens of modern fame, like the difficulty of balancing the expectations of fans with personal desires.At the very least, attending a J Balvin show looks like it would be great fun.Heineman weaves together clips from Balvin’s youth — his scrappy origins in the local music scene — with snapshots into his chaotic present. As the concert approaches, Balvin seems to be either on the verge of a panic attack or meditating with the help of his spiritual adviser. Destigmatizing mental illness is an important cause for Balvin, for reasons made intimately apparent.Similar recent mythmaking projects like Beyoncé’s “Homecoming” and Taylor Swift’s “Miss Americana” have generated their own publicity by giving access to curated versions of the personal lives of musicians, which makes them seem real and relatable. In “The Boy from Medellín,” this curation is obvious.Before Balvin hits the stage, his manager urges him to speak out and cites the activist roots of the American rap group N.W.A. I couldn’t help but chuckle at the comparison, since the artists responsible for explicit protest anthems probably didn’t need any encouragement to express their opinions. In “getting political,” Balvin risks alienating some fans, but he stands to win some as well — the viewers of this documentary, for instance.The Boy from MedellínRated R for language. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Streaming on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      'Colette,' From the Video Game Medal of Honor, Wins an Oscar

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      “Colette,” which was featured in the virtual-reality video game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, took home the award for best documentary short.It was a night of firsts: First Korean actor to win an Oscar, oldest performer to win best actor, first woman of color to win best director.And, for the video game industry, its first Oscar recognition for best documentary short.The statuette was for “Colette,” a short film featured in the Oculus virtual-reality game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, which is also the first Oscar for Facebook. (It owns Oculus, the virtual-reality group that produced the documentary short along with EA’s Respawn Entertainment.)The 24-minute film, directed by Anthony Giacchino and produced by Alice Doyard, follows a survivor of the French Resistance, Colette Marin-Catherine, as she returns to Germany for the first time since the end of World War II to visit a concentration camp where the Nazis killed her brother, Jean-Pierre.“The real hero here is Colette herself, who has shared her story with integrity and strength,” Mike Doran, the director of production at Oculus Studios, said in a statement. “As we see in the film, resistance takes courage, but facing one’s past may take even more.”Medal of Honor, which is set during World War II and casts players as an Allied agent trying to outwit the Nazis, did not garner much acclaim as a video game. Many reviewers criticized it for its huge system requirements, which were largely the result of the inclusion of so much historical and documentary footage.But now that the film has won an Oscar — well, that might change a few minds. Or at least get it in front of the eyes of nongamers. You can watch “Colette” free online on Oculus TV or YouTube, or on the website of The Guardian, which later acquired and distributed the film.“We hope this award and the film’s reach means” that the memories of all of who resisted “are no longer lost,” Doran said. More

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      ‘Sisters With Transistors’ Review: How Women Pioneered Electronic Music

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      This far-reaching documentary from Lisa Rovner looks back at the female composers and artists who shaped modern music.This documentary from Lisa Rovner, about women and electronic music, is hardly as goofy as its title makes it sound. Many of the innovating individuals profiled here contend that women have an affinity for digital technology. And that technology had, and still has, the potential to “blow up the power structure.”Then again, discussing her theremin — an electronic instrument that creates sound via hand movements through what looks like empty space — the performer Clara Rockmore says: “You cannot play air with hammers. You have to play with butterfly wings.” By the same token, Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, 1950s and ’60s pioneers of synthesizers and tape loops who both worked for the BBC, are conventionally proper and polite as they explain their innovations in archival interviews.Narrated by the avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson in a vocal timbre that blends her performance mode with a more conversational one, this film is informative and often fascinating. It is invigorating to hear the great performer-composer Pauline Oliveros ask, “How do you eliminate the misogyny of the classical canon?” — pointing to a tape recorder as a potential tool. (Oliveros, who died in 2016, also discusses her 1970 New York Times Op-Ed titled “And Don’t Call Them ‘Lady’ Composers.”The short shrift the movie gives to Wendy Carlos is puzzling. The very brief segment allotted to her begins with a French television clip about “Switched-On Bach” and its high sales. This segues into the composer-performer Suzanne Ciani’s dismissal of Carlos’s work: “The way it impacted the public’s consciousness of what a synthesizer was, was completely retroactive.” Rovner sees no irony in then chronicling Ciani’s work in television advertising.Sisters with TransistorsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch through Metrograph’s virtual cinema. More

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      ‘Paris Calligrammes’ Review: Recalling the 1960s With Fondness and Passion

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      The German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger takes us on an unhurried journey through her past.The German artist and filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger, whose work is not nearly as well distributed in the United States as it ought to be, is not generally known for sentimentality. Her long, searching films are elaborately costumed and visionary not-quite allegories of queer radical feminism. Representative titles include “Madame X: An Absolute Ruler” (1982), “The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press” (1984) and “Joan of Arc of Mongolia” (1992). She can’t be blamed for getting at least a little wistful, though, in her new “Paris Calligrammes,” an autobiographical documentary. It’s about Paris, after all — her Paris, first experienced in the early 1960s.After the film opens with footage that Ottinger shot in the Paris of today, we’re swept back in time, aurally and visually: Notably by the singers Juliette Gréco and Jacques Dutronc, and a clip from Marcel Carné’s immortal 1945 “Les Enfants du Paradis.” But “Paris Calligrammes” consistently mixes what’s familiar to the Francophile with much that isn’t. The movie takes its title from a bookshop Ottinger frequented as a young woman. She had been enchanted by French culture growing up in occupied Germany, and sought out a connection home once she landed in the City of Lights to study. The bookstore Calligrammes, run by the German-born Fritz Picard, served German expatriates. It was a place where, Ottinger puts it, “The Dadaists encountered the Situationists.” It became a formative aesthetic home for the young artist.Ottinger’s account of a reading at the store by Walter Mehling is one of the movie’s high points. The filmmaker has what seems like a torrent of anecdotes and attendant ideas to impart, but the movie never feels rushed. She created three different narrations, those in French and English read by the actors Fanny Ardant and Jenny Agutter, and one in German, read by Ottinger herself. This U.S. release features the Agutter narration. This reading is as crucial in conveying the mood of Ottinger’s story as the film’s unhurried pace is.We see Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Signoret and Nico, but also now-obscure figures including Raymond Duncan, the dancer Isadora Duncan’s eccentric brother, who stalked the Paris streets in a toga and philosophized at the famed cafe Les Deux Magots. Ottinger’s account of the riot-provoking 1960s Paris premiere of Jean Genet’s play “The Screens” emphasizes how that production’s use of costuming and makeup influenced Ottinger’s own future film aesthetic.Ottinger also remembers alienation: Her account of a strike in May 1968 is less-than utopian. And she is pointed when recalling how when the activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit was agitating in Paris, it wasn’t just the right wing that dismissed him with the categorization “a German Jew.”When she ends the movie by putting Édith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” on the soundtrack, you may think Ottinger has finally succumbed to the sentimentality she’s kept mostly in check. But wait. Just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, “Paris Calligrammes” has a mid-credits stinger — this one about Piaf’s dedication of the song.Paris CalligrammesNot rated. In English, German and French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. Watch through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema. More

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      ‘Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame Street’ Review: Making of a Sunny Day

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      Even nostalgia-resistant viewers can learn something from this documentary version of a book on the making of the show.After more than 50 years, “Sesame Street” still has something to teach us — at least those of us plopped in front of it as preschoolers who never had a sense of how it came to be. The author Michael Davis presented that history in the 2008 book “Street Gang: The Complete History of ‘Sesame Street,’” and now the director Marilyn Agrelo (“Mad Hot Ballroom”) has made a documentary version, which takes full advantage of clips, outtakes and interviews, recent and archival.Even those resistant to easy nostalgia will find plenty to think about. As told here, the show’s strategy — using television’s methods for teaching children beer jingles to teach them the alphabet instead — could only have come together through a combination of figures: Joan Ganz Cooney (a creator of the show and the first executive director of the Children’s Television Workshop); Jim Henson, who brought Muppets and just the right amount of irreverence; and the workhorse director-writer-producer Jon Stone, whose daughters say he treated the show as his third child. The show required the input of educators and psychologists and owed some of its freedom to experiment to federal investment.The movie “Street Gang” never shakes the sense that much of this story has been told elsewhere, but it feels close to comprehensive, and the visual component — watching characters explain the death of Mr. Hooper to Big Bird, after hearing the show’s makers explain how they approached the death of the actor, Will Lee — is crucial. There are also great flubbed takes involving Muppets.Street Gang: How We Got to Sesame StreetRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘8 Billion Angels’ Review: Giving Earth Top Billing

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      This documentary about climate injustice feels defanged by its unfocused structure.“8 Billion Angels” opens with a montage of high-resolution shots of nature: frothy ocean waves, white-blue coral reefs, birds skimming a lake, a tree with a young girl perched on it. When the slow motion begins, and Jane Goodall’s voice-over starts playing over weepy strings, you might wonder if you’re watching an ad or a P.S.A.With a subject like climate change, one could argue that it’s better that the tale be told imperfectly rather than not at all. Victor Velle’s documentary is certainly noble in its attempt to drive home some of the more abstract aspects of our environmental crisis, such as the global — and unequal — effects of local actions.Divided into chapters titled “Oceans,” “Land” and “Air and Rivers,” the film connects the dots between an oyster farm in Maine, a marine research lab in Japan, farmland in the American Midwest and the polluted air and waters of New Delhi, India. Talky, meandering interviews with farmers, academics and activists are paired with images of arid lands and crowded cities.The unfocused editing somewhat defangs the film’s urgency, but it does give a sense of the scale of the issue and the corporate greed that fuels overconsumption. As Bill Stowe, the C.E.O. of Des Moines Waterworks, notes, agriculture in Iowa primarily supports industrial livestock and ethanol production. It’s not quite “feeding the world” as some might believe.So the film’s aphorism-packed coda, titled “Solutions,” comes out of left field. Experts suggest that the need of the hour is population control, which is best achieved by educating women and empowering them to plan their families. The paternalistic irony of holding the world’s resource-strapped women responsible for a systemic problem goes unaddressed.8 Billion AngelsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More