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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

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      ‘Museum Town’ Review: A Love Letter to Mass MoCA

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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‘Museum Town’ Review: A Love Letter to Mass MoCAThis documentary looks at how a contemporary art museum in Western Massachusetts transformed a struggling small town.A scene from the documentary “Museum Town,” about Mass MoCA.Credit…Kino LorberDec. 17, 2020, 10:49 a.m. ETMuseum TownDirected by Jennifer TrainerDocumentary1h 16mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.At its heart, the documentary “Museum Town,” is a love letter — to the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, to artistic experimentation and to North Adams, the struggling factory town where the institution is situated.The film’s main thread follows the staff of Mass MoCA as they prepare for “Until,” a colossal exhibition by the Black sculptor Nick Cave that includes an eclectic mix of found materials like ceramic birds and 10 miles of crystals. The project, which was on display from October 2016 to September 2017, perfectly encapsulates Mass MoCA’s mission: to help contemporary artists realize their wildest dreams and to curate in ways not dictated by the art market. Between scenes of Cave approving different ceramic trinkets and the staff maneuvering the moving pieces of the exhibition are two other stories, narrated by Meryl Streep: The history of Mass MoCA’s uneven development and the story of how North Adams went from a bustling working-class factory town to a divested one.[embedded content]The film was directed by Jennifer Trainer, who was also the first director of development at the museum, and her adoration for Mass MoCA is obvious at every turn. This isn’t always bad, but at times, one wishes the documentary had more distance from its subject. Interesting conversations about gentrification as a means to revitalization and who a museum serves (the public, the artist, both?) are quickly papered over, and the focus on local residents’ indifference toward contemporary art begins to feel gimmicky. But for those even mildly curious about the story of one of the country’s largest visual and performing arts spaces, “Museum Town” is worth watching.Museum TownNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Belovs’ Review: Another View of Farm Life

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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 Belovs’ Review: Another View of Farm LifeThe director of “Gunda” filmed two Russian siblings in the early 1990s.A scene from the documentary “The Belovs.”Credit…Film ForumDec. 17, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ETFor viewers charmed by the Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky’s “Gunda,” an immersion in the sights and sounds of farm life from something close to a pig’s-eye point of view, Film Forum is streaming an intriguing portrait of agrarian living that the director filmed in 1992.Likewise shot in black and white and just as hermetic in its purview, “The Belovs” retrospectively plays like a human-centered companion piece. It focuses on a sister and a brother — Anna, a double widow; Mikhail, left by his wife presumably long ago — who live together on a farm in western Russia. But it’s also a different kind of documentary. In “Gunda” and the preceding “Aquarela,” Kossakovsky turned his gaze on nature’s wonders. “The Belovs” finds him working closer to the direct-cinema tradition of the Maysles brothers (“Grey Gardens”), giving eccentric personalities the space to reveal themselves.“Why bother to film us?” Anna asks in “The Belovs.” “We are just ordinary people.” Initially, it’s tempting to agree. Kossakovsky shows Anna talking to her cows and even the wood she’s chopping. The film, periodically scored with eclectic, global song selections, delights in observing a dog run ahead of a tractor or torment a hedgehog.The human angle comes to the foreground when the siblings receive a visit from Vasily and Sergey, their brothers, and Mikhail’s ramblings about the Soviet system (which had just ended) threaten to derail a pleasant tea. Kossakovsky stations his camera in a corner, in a voyeur’s position. Later in the film, he cuts the sound during a nasty argument. As in “Gunda,” this is behavior to watch, not explain.The BelovsNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour. Watch through Film Forum’s Virtual Cinema.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Nasrin’ Review: Righting Wrongs in Iran

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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‘Nasrin’ Review: Righting Wrongs in IranFilmed in secret, Jeff Kaufman’s portrait of the Iranian lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh captures her ongoing battles for the rights of women, children and minorities.The Iranian lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh is the subject of “Nasrin.”Credit…Floating World Pictures/Virgil FilmsDec. 17, 2020, 7:00 a.m. ETNasrinDirected by Jeff KaufmanDocumentary1h 32mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“Nasrin,” a surreptitiously filmed documentary about the imprisoned Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, offers a strangely cheerful portrait of extreme sacrifice and ongoing suffering.The uplift is a little unnerving, the bright positivity of Sotoudeh echoed among her supporters (including the dissident filmmaker Jafar Panahi) and clients. One young woman, Narges Hosseini, arrested for protesting Iran’s mandatory head-covering law, smiles calmly as she accepts the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence. Her courage, like that of so many in this film, is breathtaking.[embedded content]Defending women like Hosseini led, in part, to Sotoudeh’s 2018 arrest and a sentence of 38 years and 148 lashes, according her husband, Reza Khandan. A pocket history of Iran’s volatile record on human rights, along with examples of Sotoudeh’s political work on behalf of women, children and minorities, provide context for her various incarcerations as the director, Jeff Kaufman, compiles secretly captured footage from multiple sources. Interviews with Iranian exiles and other activists enrich his portrait, as do warm moments with Sotoudeh, Khandan and their two children.Yet this extraordinary woman, seemingly incapable of despair through roughly two decades of struggle, remains elusive. There’s something daunting about this degree of implacable selflessness, and it has a curiously flattening effect on a movie that feels less emotionally complex — less enraged — than it ought to.By the end, I worried mainly about Sotoudeh’s children, enduring yearslong separations from one or both parents. And when a prison visit showed her son laughing delightedly at his mother through a glass partition while her daughter wept quietly nearby, it felt like the most painfully human moment onscreen.NasrinNot rated. In English and Farsi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More