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      ‘Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy’ Review: A Brisk Look Back at a Crisis

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy’ Review: A Brisk Look Back at a CrisisVeteran documentarian Stanley Nelson crafts a somewhat cursory primer on the 1980s crack epidemic.A scene from the documentary “Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy.”Credit…NetflixJan. 12, 2021, 5:18 p.m. ETCrack: Cocaine, Corruption & ConspiracyDirected by Stanley NelsonDocumentary, Crime, History1h 29mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.As its alliterative mouthful of a title suggests, the new Netflix documentary “Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & Conspiracy” takes on a many-headed beast. Racial injustice, economic inequities, police corruption, media ethics and foreign-policy scandals are all crammed — a bit too cursorily — into Stanley Nelson’s brisk primer on the 1980s crack epidemic.[embedded content]Told in eight chapters, the film begins with some scene-setting bits of archival footage. Speeches by President Ronald Reagan and clips from the 1987 drama “Wall Street” capture the era’s free-market capitalism, while its underside is illustrated by images of impoverished inner cities and the hip-hop that emerged from there. Former dealers explain that crack, a cheaper and more potent variant of cocaine, offered destitute youth a get-rich-quick scheme. The drug suddenly became more available than ever in the United States in the ’80s, which the movie links to shady C.I.A. dealings during the Iran-contra affair.In the film’s strongest moments, former peddlers, users, journalists and scholars unravel the narratives, often propelled by the media, that led to a disproportionate targeting of people of color during the war on drugs. A dealer recalls with horror how D.E.A. agents persuaded him to lure a teenager into buying crack in front of the White House just so President George H.W. Bush could have a cautionary tale to use in a televised speech.But Nelson tries to cover too much ground too fast, leading to some tonal fuzziness: In a too-brief segment on Black women’s exploitation during the crack era, a dealer’s seemingly amused recollection of how women would trade sexual favors for a hit goes oddly uncontextualized. A narrower focus might have allowed the film to better tease out such knotty material.Crack: Cocaine, Corruption & ConspiracyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Netflix.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Michael Apted, Versatile Director Known for ‘Up’ Series, Dies at 79

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMichael Apted, Versatile Director Known for ‘Up’ Series, Dies at 79His output included “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and a James Bond film. But he was best known for his long-running documentary series about life in Britain.The director Michael Apted with, from left, Jackie Bassett, Lynn Johnson and Susan Davis, three of the subjects of his documentary “28 Up” (1984), the fourth in a series that began with “Seven Up!” in 1964 and followed the lives of a group of British people in roughly seven-year intervals. (Ms. Johnson died in 2013.)Credit…Granada TelevisionJan. 8, 2021, 7:01 p.m. ETMichael Apted, a versatile director whose films were as varied as the James Bond picture “The World Is Not Enough” and the biographical dramas “Gorillas in the Mist” and “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and who made his most lasting mark with the “Up” documentary series, which followed the lives of a group of British people in seven-year intervals for more than a half century, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 79.His agent in the United States, Roy Ashton, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Mr. Apted, who was British, was a researcher at Granada Television in England when he helped pick the 14 children, all of them 7, who became the subjects of “Seven Up!,” the initial documentary in the “Up” series, which was directed by Paul Almond and shown on British television in 1964.The film was intended as a one-off, but Mr. Apted picked up the ball seven years (more or less) later, acting as director of “7 Plus Seven,” broadcast in England in late 1970, in which he interviewed the same children, now at a more developed stage of life.Then came “21 Up” in 1977, “28 Up” in 1984 and so on, with new installments arriving every seven years, all directed by Mr. Apted. “63 Up” was released in 2019.Collectively, the films became a serial portrait of a group of ordinary people advancing through life, from childhood through adulthood, charting their different paths, changing perspectives and various fates (one participant, Lynn Johnson, died in 2013). The New York Times in 2019 called it “the most profound documentary series in the history of cinema.”The intent of the original program in 1964 was to look at different segments of Britain’s class system. Thanks to Mr. Apted’s persistence, “Up” became something more.“I realized for the first time, after 20 years on the project, that I really hadn’t made a political film at all,” he wrote in 2000. “What I had seen as a significant statement about the English class system was in fact a humanistic document about the real issues of life.”Mr. Apted in Los Angeles in 2012. His “Up” series, The New York Times said in 2019, was “the most profound documentary series in the history of cinema.”Credit…Robert Yager for The New York TimesManohla Dargis, summarizing “63 Up” in The Times, wrote, “There’s great pleasure in revisiting this series, seeing who turned out just fine and sometimes better than you might have expected or hoped.”While revisiting “Up” periodically across six decades, Mr. Apted worked in television and commercial film.“Agatha” (1979), a fictional drama about the novelist Agatha Christie, starred Vanessa Redgrave in the title role. Mr. Apted had particular success in the 1980s, beginning in 1980 with “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” about the country singer Loretta Lynn, played by Sissy Spacek, who won the best-actress Oscar.Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn in Mr. Apted’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1980). She won an Oscar for her performance.Credit…Universal StudiosThe next year he directed the John Belushi-Blair Brown comedy “Continental Divide”; two years later came the crime drama “Gorky Park,” based on the Martin Cruz Smith novel, starring William Hurt. In 1988 there was “Gorillas in the Mist,” the story of the naturalist Dian Fossey; its five Oscar nominations included one for Sigourney Weaver, who played Ms. Fossey.Mr. Apted’s 1990s films included “Thunderheart” (1992), a thriller with Val Kilmer, and the drama “Nell” (1994), a vehicle for Jodie Foster. Then came his entry in the James Bond franchise — “The World Is Not Enough” (1999), with Pierce Brosnan as agent 007.In a 2010 interview with The Times, Mr. Apted reflected on his one regret about the “Up” series — that his initial choice of children was unbalanced, 10 boys but only 4 girls — and how his choices of mainstream films might have been a way to compensate for that.“The biggest social revolution in my life, growing up in England, has been the change in the role of women in society,” he said. “We didn’t have civil rights and Vietnam in England, but I think that particular social revolution is the biggest thing, and I missed it by not having enough women. And because I didn’t have enough women, I didn’t have enough choice of what options were in front of women who were building careers and having families and all this sort of stuff.”He continued: “Looking at everything from ‘Agatha’ through ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ from ‘Nell’ and “Continental Divide,’ they’re all to do with women’s role in society and what women have to do to have a role in society, or the choices women have to make to stay in society or have a voice in society, in both straightforward and eccentric ways. That’s always interested me. And that, I think, stems from the feeling that I slightly missed out.”Alex Traub contributed reporting.A complete obituary will appear shortly.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Fran Lebowitz and Martin Scorsese Seek a Missing New York in ‘Pretend It’s a City’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFran Lebowitz and Martin Scorsese Seek a Missing New York in ‘Pretend It’s a City’The Netflix series, featuring Lebowitz and directed by Scorsese, offers acerbic commentary and a sense of yearning for a pre-pandemic metropolis.Martin Scorsese and Fran Lebowitz, as seen in the new Netflix documentary series, “Pretend It’s a City,” are longtime friends. “It’s about being around Fran,” said Scorsese, who directed the series.Credit…NetflixJan. 7, 2021Updated 2:24 p.m. ETHad this past New Year’s Eve been a normal one, Fran Lebowitz and Martin Scorsese would have spent it as they usually do: with each other and a few close friends, in the screening room in Scorsese’s office, watching a classic movie like “Vertigo” or “A Matter of Life and Death.”The year they got together to see “Barry Lyndon,” they watched a rare, high-quality print made from the director Stanley Kubrick’s original camera negative.“And I said, ‘What’s a camera negative?’” Lebowitz recalled in a group video call with Scorsese on Tuesday. “And then all of the movie lunatics glared at me, like I admitted to being illiterate.”In previous years, when they were feeling especially energetic, Scorsese said with some audible melancholy, “We used to have one screening before midnight and then have another screening after.”But this time, their annual custom had to be put on hold. Instead, Lebowitz explained: “I talked to Marty on the phone. We commiserated about how horrible we felt, how awful it was not to be doing that.”Lebowitz, the author, humorist and raconteur, and Scorsese, the Academy Award-winning filmmaker, were speaking from their individual New York homes to discuss their latest collaboration, the documentary series “Pretend It’s a City.” They are longtime friends who, as they continue to wait out the coronavirus pandemic, have lately been unable to see much of each other or the city with which they are irrevocably associated.A similar, bittersweet air hangs over the seven-part series, which Netflix will release on Friday. A follow-up to Scorsese’s 2010 nonfiction film “Public Speaking,” “Pretend It’s a City” (which Scorsese also directed) chronicles the acerbic Lebowitz in interviews, live appearances and strolls through New York as she shares stories about her life and insights about the city’s constant evolution in recent decades.Of course, the Netflix series was initiated before the pandemic, and Lebowitz and Scorsese are supremely aware that it depicts a bustling, energized New York that now feels just out of reach — and which they both hope will return soon.In the meantime, “Pretend It’s a City” offers a tantalizing snapshot of New York in full bloom, along with Lebowitz’s lively and unapologetic commentary on what it means to live there.As she explained: “I don’t care whether people agree with me or not. My feeling if someone doesn’t agree with me is, OK, you’re wrong. That is one thing that I’ve never worried about.”Scorsese gently replied, “I had that impression.”Lebowitz and Scorsese spoke further about the making of “Pretend It’s a City” and the impact that the pandemic has had on them. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.”I have lived in New York long enough to know that it will not stay the way it is now,” said Lebowitz, who moved to the city in 1970.Credit…NetflixI was surprised to learn from “Pretend It’s a City” that neither of you recall when you first met.FRAN LEBOWITZ That’s because we’re old and we have many friendships. I don’t mean old in the sense that we don’t remember things, because I believe we both have perfect memories. But because there’s so many years and so many people. I guess we met at a party, because where else would I have met him? Obviously, I go to a lot more parties than Marty. That’s why Marty made so many movies and Fran wrote so few books.MARTIN SCORSESE I really recall us talking the most at John Waters’s 50th birthday party. It was after “Casino” came out.LEBOWITZ Of course, you were not averse to hearing how much I loved it.SCORSESE No, I was not at all.LEBOWITZ Even though I’m not as Italian as you might imagine [laughs], Marty’s parents and a lot of my father’s relatives — all of whom were working-class Jews — have a lot of parallels that are very well-known. The big difference is, the food is better in Italians’ houses.SCORSESE We liked the Jewish food better.LEBOWITZ No, no, no, there’s no comparison.After working together on “Public Speaking,” what made you want to collaborate on another documentary project?SCORSESE I enjoyed making “Public Speaking.” I found it freeing, in terms of narrative. But primarily, it’s about being around Fran. I really would like to know what she thinks, pretty much every day, as it’s happening. I’d like a running commentary — not all the time, but one that I can dip in and out of during the day.Do either of you worry that Fran is a finite resource and you will eventually exhaust her supply of wit?LEBOWITZ You mean, am I worried about running out of things to say? No. I am worried about running out of money. But it never even occurred to me that I would not have something to say. It’s just there. It’s like having a trick thumb.The series is divided into fanciful chapters like “Cultural Affairs” and “Department of Sports & Health.” How did you settle on these subjects?SCORSESE We always felt we should have topics. She’ll start on a topic, and then it’ll go off like a jazz riff into a thousand other places. Eventually, we might be able to pull it back. In a lot of the films I make, the types of actors I work with, the dialogue is like music — it’s the timing and the emphasis. She has that.LEBOWITZ Of course I am the world’s most digressive speaker, but what you’re really seeing at work is editing. I don’t remember how many days we shot this but I’m confident that it was an infinitesimal amount compared to how much time it took him to edit.SCORSESE I try to get that kind of freedom in my narrative films, but I very often am stuck to a plot.LEBOWITZ I am plot-free, so no problem. [Laughter.]Among the locations where you filmed Fran is at the Queens Museum, where we see her standing amid the Panorama of the City of New York, a highly detailed scale model that Robert Moses had built for the 1964 World’s Fair. What was it like to shoot there?LEBOWITZ I did knock over the Queensboro Bridge. The guy who’s in charge of that, the day we shot there, was in a panic the entire time. And I proved him right.SCORSESE That was the only time that I ever yelled “Action!” I don’t know what possessed me. It must have thrown you off or something.LEBOWITZ I did not destroy it, I just knocked it over.SCORSESE By the way, it is magnificent, that model.LEBOWITZ I’m not sure it makes up for Robert Moses. [Laughter.] It made you realize that if only Robert Moses had done everything in miniature, we wouldn’t hate Robert Moses.How did the pandemic affect the making of this series?LEBOWITZ We shot it way before there was a virus. When the virus happened, Marty said, “What should we do? What can we do?” At the height of the shutdown, I went out walking around the city, and Marty sent Ellen Kuras [the director of photography on “Pretend It’s a City”], and what she filmed was incredibly beautiful. But I said to Marty, “I think we should ignore it.”SCORSESE We tried it. We edited sequences. It was OK, and then a week later, the city changed again. All these stores were closed and they had boards up. A week later, something else changed. So I said, “Let’s just stop it.”LEBOWITZ We’re not journalists. We don’t have to be on top of the news.The series was filmed before the pandemic shut down much of New York. Looking back, what Lebowitz and Scorsese seem to miss most, aside from maybe hanging in person, is dining out. Credit…NetflixDoes the series feel different to you because of the pandemic?LEBOWITZ There’s a difference for sure. I thought of the title, “Pretend It’s a City,” when New York was packed with morons who would stand in the middle of the sidewalk. And I would yell at them: “Move! Pretend it’s a city!” The people who have seen it since then — an agent of mine said, “Oh, it’s a love letter to New York.” Before the virus, it was me complaining about New York. Now people think it has some more lyrical, metaphorical meaning.Do you worry that New York won’t fully return to what it was before the pandemic?LEBOWITZ I have lived in New York long enough to know that it will not stay the way it is now. There is not a square foot of New York City, a square foot, that’s the same as it was when I came here in 1970. That’s what a city is, even without a plague. But I’d like to point out, there were many things wrong with it before. After the big protests in SoHo, I saw a reporter interviewing a woman who was a manager of one of the fancy stores there. The reporter said to her, “What are you going to do?” And she said, “There’s nothing we can do until the tourists come back.” I yelled at the TV and I said, “Really? You can’t think what to do with SoHo without tourists? I can! Let me give you some ideas.” Because I remember it without tourists. How about, artists could live there? How about, let’s not have rent that’s $190,000 a month? How about that? Let’s try that.Has the pandemic ever made you feel more vulnerable or aware of your own fragility?LEBOWITZ It makes me feel angrier. Luckily, I have managed to distill all human emotion into anger. It doesn’t matter what the initial emotion is: It could be despair, sadness, fear — basically I experience it as anger. It makes me feel angry because this didn’t have to happen at all.SCORSESE I actually don’t know where I belong on the island. I grew up downtown when it was pretty tough in that area. Now it’s very chic. It’s no longer home for me, certainly. I’ve grown old, and out, in a way. I have been locked in and working on FaceTime. I have been trying to make this movie [“Killers of the Flower Moon”] since March. Every two days, they say we’re going. And then they say, no we’re not. It’s a state of anxiety and tension. But in any event, I really haven’t gone out that much. I can’t take a chance, either.The day the pandemic is over — there’s no longer any risk of the coronavirus and we can all return to our usual lives — what’s the first thing you do?SCORSESE First thing I would say is, please, to go to a restaurant. There’s a few that I’m missing a great deal. I’ll never eat outside. I don’t understand how you can sit there and the fumes from the buses come in. I don’t get it. It’s not Paris.LEBOWITZ I’ve been eating outside. There is no greater testament to how much I hate to cook than the fact I will sit outside in 28-degree weather, trying to eat with gloves on. I would like to eat at a restaurant. Also, I would like to crawl around underneath the tables in the rare book room at the Strand and when I bring the things to the register and the guy goes, “Where did you find this?” It was under the table. “We haven’t priced it yet! You’re not supposed to take it out from under there.” Well, I did, so how much is it?AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Beautiful Something Left Behind’ Review: Young Children and the Trauma of Lost Parents

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Beautiful Something Left Behind’ Review: Young Children and the Trauma of Lost ParentsIn her new documentary, Katrine Philp takes us into Good Grief, a facility that helps the very young deal with unspeakable loss.A scene from Katrine Philp’s documentary “Beautiful Something Left Behind.”Credit…MTV Documentary FilmsJan. 7, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThe death of a parent, at almost any age, leaves a mark, but the effect it has on very young children is especially confounding. “Beautiful Something Left Behind” is a simple, elegant documentary about children coping with such heartbreaking loss, at a facility designed especially for them.It’s a place called Good Grief, a large clapboard house in New Jersey (the film focuses on its Morristown location, one of two in the state). In a one-on-one session with an adult staff member, a child tries to give colors to his feelings. Blue and red, he says, are how he feels when he’s “sad and really mad.” The movie then shows a group-therapy session, with children from six to about 10 years old doing recovery-room-style sharing.[embedded content]We like to think of children as being more emotionally candid and expressive than adults. Among the moments this picture, directed by Katrine Philp, shows us is how kids put on brave faces and try to deflect what they’re actually feeling. This is even more painful to witness than a child’s overt sadness. Also striking is how the children are made to understand the way some parents met their ends. You may shudder when one uses “bad medicine” to describe the cause of his father’s death.Philp does not have any talking-head interviews with the staff of Good Grief; only the children address the camera directly. She structures the movie in a loose, satisfying seasons-of-the-year narrative.It could be argued that the film needed a little more documentary-style explanation about how the facility works — how long children stay, the goals of the treatment, and so on. But ultimately, Philp can’t be blamed for stressing emotional engagement over exposition.Beautiful Something Left BehindNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Reason I Jump’ Review: Portraits of Autism

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Reason I Jump’ Review: Portraits of AutismAdapted from Naoki Higashida’s book of the same title, this documentary, from Jerry Rothwell, shares portraits of five nonspeaking autistic people on four continents.A scene from Jerry Rothwell’s documentary “The Reason I Jump.”Credit…Kino LorberJan. 7, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThe Reason I JumpDirected by Jerry RothwellDocumentary1h 22mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.In the book “The Reason I Jump,” published in 2007, the author Naoki Higashida, who wrote it when he was 13, says he hopes to explain “what’s going on in the minds of people with autism.” Higashida, a nonspeaking autistic person, structures the book as a Q. and A., answering questions like, “How are you writing these sentences?” and “What are your thoughts on autism itself?”The film adaptation, directed by Jerry Rothwell (the documentary about Greenpeace “How to Change the World”), is at once a supplement and an effort to find a cinematic analogue. Employing excerpts from Higashida’s writing as narration, it shares the stories of five nonspeaking autistic people on four continents, while intermittently using the tools of moviemaking to approximate sensory experiences similar to those discussed. The soundtrack emphasizes the creak of trampoline springs and the creeping footsteps of caterpillars.[embedded content]The portraits are moving and informative. In India, Amrit’s astonishing drawings culminate in a gallery show. In Sierra Leone, Jestina faces a stigma against children unable to care for their aging parents. Ben and Emma, from Arlington, Va., forged a decades-spanning friendship that began in preschool, before either started communicating through a letter board.As an aesthetic endeavor, though, “The Reason I Jump” is questionable, regardless of how much sensitivity the filmmakers took in their approach. It is presumptuous to assume a mere movie could simulate, even for an instant, the inner world of an autistic person. And at times — as when mystical choral music plays while Amrit draws — the filmmakers’ removed perspective is all too clear.The Reason I JumpNot rated. In English and Krio, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      An Oscar Winner Made a Khashoggi Documentary. Streaming Services Didn’t Want It.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesBryan Fogel is known for his Academy Award-winning documentary film, “Icarus.”Credit…Coley Brown for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexAn Oscar Winner Made a Khashoggi Documentary. Streaming Services Didn’t Want It.Bryan Fogel’s examination of the killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi had trouble finding a home among the companies that can be premier platforms for documentary films.Bryan Fogel is known for his Academy Award-winning documentary film, “Icarus.”Credit…Coley Brown for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyDec. 24, 2020Updated 5:58 p.m. ETBryan Fogel’s first documentary, “Icarus,” helped uncover the Russian doping scandal that led to the country’s expulsion from the 2018 Winter Olympics. It also won an Oscar for him and for Netflix, which released the film.For his second project, he chose another subject with global interest: the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian dissident and Washington Post columnist, and the role that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, played in it.A film by an Oscar-winning filmmaker would normally garner plenty of attention from streaming services, which have used documentaries and niche movies to attract subscribers and earn awards. Instead, when Mr. Fogel’s film, “The Dissident,” was finally able to find a distributor after eight months, it was with an independent company that had no streaming platform and a much narrower reach.“These global media companies are no longer just thinking, ‘How is this going to play for U.S. audiences?’” Mr. Fogel said. “They are asking: ‘What if I put this film out in Egypt? What happens if I release it in China, Russia, Pakistan, India?’ All these factors are coming into play, and it’s getting in the way of stories like this.”“The Dissident” will now open in 150 to 200 theaters across the country on Christmas Day and then become available for purchase on premium video-on-demand channels on Jan. 8. (Original plans called for an 800-theater release in October, but those were scaled back because of the pandemic.) Internationally, the film will be released in Britain, Australia, Italy, Turkey and other European nations through a network of distributors.It is a far cry from the potential audience it would have been able to reach through a service like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, and Mr. Fogel said he believed it was also a sign of how these platforms — increasingly powerful in the world of documentary film — were in the business of expanding their subscriber bases, not necessarily turning a spotlight on the excesses of the powerful.For his film, Mr. Fogel interviewed Mr. Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who waited outside the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul in 2018 while the murder took place; The Washington Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan; and multiple members of the Turkish police force. He secured a 37-page transcript made from a recording of what happened in the room where Mr. Khashoggi was suffocated and dismembered. He also spent a significant amount of time with Omar Abdulaziz, a young dissident in exile in Montreal who had worked with Mr. Khashoggi to combat the way the Saudi Arabian government used Twitter to try to discredit opposing voices and criticism of the kingdom.“The Dissident” landed a coveted spot at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The Hollywood Reporter called it “vigorous, deep and comprehensive,” while Variety said it was “a documentary thriller of staggering relevance.” Hillary Clinton, who was at Sundance for a documentary about her, urged people to see the film, saying in an onstage interview that it does “a chillingly effective job of demonstrating the swarm that social media can be.”Jamal Khashoggi, with glasses, was killed after entering the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.Credit…Briarcliff EntertainmentThe only thing left was for Mr. Fogel to secure a sale to a prominent streaming platform, one that could amplify the film’s findings, as Netflix did with “Icarus.” When “Dissident” finally found a distributor in September, it was the independent company Briarcliff Entertainment.Mr. Fogel said he had made Netflix aware of his film while it was in production and again months later when it was accepted into Sundance. “I expressed to them how excited I was for them to see it,” he said. “I heard nothing back.”“The Dissident” features interviews with Mr. Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz.Credit…Briarcliff EntertainmentReed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, was at the film’s Sundance premiere, but the company did not bid on the film. “While disappointed, I wasn’t shocked,” Mr. Fogel said.Netflix declined to comment, though a spokeswoman, Emily Feingold, pointed to a handful of political documentaries the service recently produced, including 2019’s “Edge of Democracy,” about the rise of the authoritarian leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.Amazon Studios also declined to bid. Footage of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, who privately owns The Washington Post, is shown in the film. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.Fox Searchlight, now owned by Disney, didn’t bid. Neither did the independent distributor Neon, which was behind last year’s Oscar-winning best picture, “Parasite,” and often acquires challenging content.“What I observed was that the desire for corporate profits have left the integrity of America’s film culture weakened,” said Thor Halvorssen, the founder and chief executive of the nonprofit Human Rights Foundation, who financed the film and served as a producer.Documentaries are not normally big box-office draws, so they have traditionally found their audiences in other places. PBS has long been a platform for prominent documentaries, but the rise of streaming has made companies like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu very important to the genre. As those companies have grown, their business needs have changed.Mr. Fogel said Netflix had changed since it distributed “Icarus” in 2017.Credit…Coley Brown for The New York Times“This is unquestionably political,” said Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s film school. “It’s disappointing, but these are gigantic companies in a death race for survival.”He added: “You think Disney would do anything different with Disney+? Would Apple or any of the megacorporations? They have economic imperatives that are hard to ignore, and they have to balance them with issues of free speech.”“The Dissident” is not the only political documentary that has failed to secure a home on a streaming service. This year, Magnolia Pictures, which has a streaming deal with Disney-owned Hulu, backed out of a deal with the makers of the documentary “The Assassins,” which tells the story of the poisoning of Kim Jong-nam, the half brother of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.The film’s director, Ryan White, referred to the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures in an interview with Variety, and chalked up the “bumpy road” of U.S. distribution to corporations feeling they “could be hacked in a way that could be devastating to them or their bottom line.”Netflix was eager to have “Icarus” several years ago, buying the film for $5 million after it debuted at Sundance in 2017. “Fogel’s incredible risk-taking has delivered an absorbing real-life thriller that continues to have global reverberations,” Lisa Nishimura, who was Netflix’s vice president of original documentaries, said in a statement at the time.Mr. Fogel wonders if the company would be as excited about that film now.In the film, Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident, details how he says the kingdom uses social media to silence critics.Credit…Briarcliff Entertainment“When ‘Icarus’ came out, they had 100 million subscribers,” he said. (Netflix currently has 195 million subscribers worldwide.) “And they were in the hunt to get David Fincher to do movies with them, to get Martin Scorsese to do movies with them, to get Alfonso Cuarón to do movies with them. That’s why it was so important that they had a film they could win an award with.”In January 2019, Netflix pulled an episode of the comedian Hasan Minhaj’s series, “Patriot Act,” when he criticized Prince Mohammed after Mr. Khashoggi’s death. Mr. Hastings later defended the move, saying: “We’re not trying to do ‘truth to power.’ We’re trying to entertain.”In November, Netflix signed an eight-picture film deal with the Saudi Arabian studio Telfaz11 to produce movies that it said “will aim for broad appeal across both Arab and global audiences.”The outcome for “The Dissident” has not been ideal, but Mr. Fogel is still hoping that people will see the film.“I love Netflix and considered myself part of the Netflix family after our wonderful experience with ‘Icarus,’” he said. “Sadly, they are not the same company as a few years ago when they passionately stood up to Russia and Putin.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Dissident’ Review: A Murder for Power

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘The Dissident’ Review: A Murder for PowerBryan Fogel’s new documentary about the killing of Jamal Khashoggi underlines the disregard for human rights when money and geopolitics are at play.Jamal Khashoggi, right, as seen in the Bryan Fogel documentary “The Dissident.”Credit…Briarcliff EntertainmentDec. 24, 2020, 1:01 p.m. ETThe DissidentDirected by Bryan FogelDocumentary, Crime, ThrillerPG-131h 59mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.A cinematic retelling of the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi requires no embellishments. The raw facts are sinister and dramatic in themselves, involving a gruesome killing inside a consulate in a foreign country, an ambitious prince intolerant of dissenters and a kingdom with far-reaching financial clout. Yet Bryan Fogel’s new documentary, “The Dissident,” goes the extra mile, deploying an aggressive score, frenzied editing and C.G.I. elements to drive home the pathos of Khashoggi’s story and what it reveals about Saudi Arabia’s insidious machinery of surveillance and repression.The film begins in the present day with spy thriller-like intrigue. In a hotel in Montreal, a young man speaks ominously into his phone, saying things like “it’s all about revenge” and “if it doesn’t work the clean way, I’ll use the dirty ways.” This is Omar Abdulaziz, a 27-year-old Saudi vlogger living in exile in Canada, and he’s talking, we soon learn, about Twitter warfare.As outspoken critics of the Saudi regime, Abdulaziz and Khashoggi had become online friends in 2017, after Khashoggi fled to the United States amid a crackdown on journalists and activists. Days before Khashoggi’s murder, the two of them had started secretly collaborating on a social media campaign to fight Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s army of propaganda-spewing Twitter trolls. Khashoggi had been a royal insider for many years before turning critical of his country’s increasingly undemocratic ways; with their plan, Abdulaziz says, Khashoggi had finally become a dissident.Their collaboration — and its possible role in making Khashoggi a target — is one of the few revelations in “The Dissident,” whose array of talking heads and illustrative footage mostly adds context to previously reported facts. Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, shares the pair’s correspondences, which paint a touching portrait of Khashoggi as a man who had cherished finding companionship after a difficult separation from his family. In the most disturbing parts of the film, Turkish police and United Nations officials recount their investigations of the murder as the screen zooms into transcripts of conversations between the men who dismembered Khashoggi inside a Saudi consulate. “Will the body and the hips fit into a bag this way?” reads a highlighted line.All of this material is so chilling and effective on its own that the movie’s emphatic music and computer-generated graphics — which include a Twitter battle pictured as a showdown between 3-D flies and bees — can feel like overkill. But these flourishes serve the film’s ultimate objective: to impress acutely upon us the injustice of a world where money and geopolitics supersede human rights.The DissidentRated PG-13 for graphic descriptions of real-life violence. In Arabic, Turkish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More