Documentary Films and Programs

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      The Best True Crime to Stream: ‘Dirty John,’ ‘The Puppet Master’ and More

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      Four picks across television, film and podcasting that explore a devastating, yet slippery, type of manipulation.The concept of “coercive control” entered the lexicon about a decade ago and has become an increasingly prevalent theme in the true crime genre. Pioneered by Evan Stark, a researcher and expert on domestic abuse, it refers to a pattern of abusive behavior and manipulation — including isolation, humiliation, financial abuse, stalking and gaslighting — used to dominate a partner. Men are most often, but not always, the abusers.Coercive control “is designed to subjugate and dominate, not merely to hurt,” Stark, who died in April, said in a London court in 2019 while testifying on behalf of a domestic abuse victim who’d murdered her husband. She, appealing her conviction, was subsequently released from prison.Here are four picks across television, film and podcasting that show how this form of psychological abuse, though hard to prove as a crime, ruins lives.Podcast‘Sweet Bobby’Because I’ve watched every episode of the MTV show “Catfish,” I thought that this six-chapter investigative podcast from Tortoise Media, which explores a true story in which coercive control overlaps with catfishing (tricking others, often into a romantic relationship, using fake digital profiles), was unlikely to shock me.But the saga — about Kirat Assi, a woman from London whose life was turned on its head for nearly a decade after she fell for “Bobby” via Facebook — still managed to test my tolerance for how little legal recourse the deceived parties have. The story also speaks to why the damage caused by coercive control and by the proliferation of catfishing should not be minimized.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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      ‘MoviePass, MovieCrash’ Review: When They Take Your Company Away

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      An illuminating documentary about the ill-fated (though now-revived) subscription service finds an unexpected story.As a reporter, I spent the better part of 2018 puzzling over the meteoric rise and sensational nosedive of MoviePass, the brief beautiful dream of a subscription service that’s the subject of Muta’Ali’s new documentary “MoviePass, MovieCrash.” Perhaps you remember those halcyon days. For about $10 a month, you could see any movie in any theater on any day. You received a debit card that you’d use to “purchase” the ticket, and then the company would reimburse the theater for the ticket’s full cost. It worked, for a while, and it was amazing. But it made positively zero sense.Anyone who passed third grade math can see why. If I pay $10 this month, and see only one movie, the company’s probably already in the hole. (A normal, non-matinee ticket in New York City, where there were a whole lot of MoviePass subscribers, hovered around $15.) If I see two, the hole gets deeper. Now consider the people who go to two movies a week, or four, or seven, and you start to see the problem.There was some speculation that MoviePass was working on the gym membership model — lots of people subscribe, but few people actually use it, and they balance each other out. But that also makes very little sense. People, on the whole, tend to enjoy watching movies more than they enjoy slogging away on the StairMaster.The only answer was that MoviePass was either trying to cut deals with studios and theaters, or selling and utilizing user data, or both — especially since Helios and Matheson, MoviePass’s publicly traded owner, was a data analytics firm. The answer is both, and the company’s leadership was convinced that the bigger their user base, the more likely they’d be able to monetize audiences. After all, data showed that MoviePass drastically increased people’s willingness to go to the movies, where they’d presumably spend money on concessions, too — and that might translate to eagerness from theaters to keep the service alive. The company’s chief executive, Mitchell Lowe, who was at Netflix in its early days, was certain that if they could reach five million users, they’d be operating in the black.MoviePass didn’t reach five million users, but for a while it seemed as though there would be no stopping it. Under the leadership of Lowe and Theodore Farnsworth, the chief executive of Helios and Matheson, the new subsidiary MoviePass Ventures produced the abysmal movie “Gotti” and threw a lot of very expensive parties in mid-2018. At the same time, if you were trying to actually use the service, it went from bad to worse to baffling: random blackout periods, strange requirements for purchasing tickets (like uploading photos of stubs) and near-constant changes to the terms and conditions. Eventually the Federal Trade Commission made accusations that MoviePass fraudulently deceived its customers to prevent power users from getting what they’d paid for. That era of MoviePass did not end well.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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      10 Artists on Living and Creating Through Grief

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      Sigrid Nunez, authorConor Oberst, musicianBridget Everett, performerBen Kweller, musicianJesmyn Ward, authorJustin Hardiman, photographerJulie Otsuka, authorLila Avilés, filmmakerRichard E. Grant, actorLuke Lorentzen, filmmakerWhen Jesmyn Ward was writing her 2013 book, “Men We Reaped,” she could feel the presence of her brother, who had been killed years earlier by a drunk driver. She still talks to him, as well as to her partner, who died in 2020.“This may just be wishful thinking, but talking to them and being open to feeling them answer, that enables me to live in spite of their loss,” she told me.While filming the HBO series “Somebody Somewhere,” Bridget Everett, playing a woman mourning the loss of her sister, was grieving the loss of her own. Working on the show was a way to still live with her, in a way, she said: “There’s something that’s less scary about sharing time with my sister when it’s through art or through making the show or through a song.”One of the many things you learn after losing a loved one is that there are a lot of us grieving out there. Some people are not just living with loss but also trying to create or experience something meaningful, to counter the blunt force of the ache.We talked to 10 artists across music, writing, photography, film and comedy about the ways their work, in the wake of personal loss, has deepened their understanding of what it means to grieve and to create.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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      Morgan Spurlock, Documentarian Known for ‘Super Size Me,’ Dies at 53

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      His 2004 film followed Mr. Spurlock as he ate nothing but McDonald’s for a month. It was nominated for an Oscar, but it later came in for criticism.Morgan Spurlock, a documentary filmmaker who gained fame with his Oscar-nominated 2004 film “Super Size Me,” which followed him as he ate nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days — but later stepped back from the public eye after admitting to sexual misconduct — died on Thursday in New York City. He was 53.His brother Craig Spurlock said the cause was complications of cancer.A self-described attention hound with a keen eye for the absurd, Mr. Spurlock was a playwright and television producer when he rocketed to global attention with “Super Size Me,” an early entry into the genre of gonzo participatory filmmaking that borrowed heavily from the confrontational style of Michael Moore and the up-close-and-personal influences of reality TV, which was then just emerging as a genre.The film’s approach was straightforward: Mr. Spurlock would eat nothing but McDonald’s food for a month, and if a server at the restaurant offered to “supersize” the meal — that is, to give him the largest portion available for each item — he would accept.The movie then follows Mr. Spurlock and his ever-patient girlfriend through his 30-day odyssey, splicing in interviews with health experts and visits to his increasingly disturbed physician. At the end of the month, he was 25 pounds heavier, depressed, puffy-faced and experiencing liver dysfunction.The film, which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, grossed over $22 million, made Mr. Spurlock a household name, earned him an Academy Award nomination for best documentary and helped spur a sweeping backlash against the fast-food industry — though only temporarily; today, McDonald’s has 42,000 locations worldwide, its stock is near an all-time high, and 36 percent of Americans eat fast food on any given day.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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      An Extraordinary Documentary About the Most Precious of Lives

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      Margreth Olin’s “Songs of Earth” works almost like a poem as she records her parents and the Norwegian landscape.It’s rare to see a film that feels not just poetic in nature, but like actual poetry. The rhythm and cadence, the imagery and metaphor, even the sense of movement and time that often accompany a great poem don’t translate easily to the screen. Filmmakers need a light touch and trust in the viewer to lean in and let their work wash over them, rather than trying to decode everything.Margreth Olin somehow pulled it off — and in a documentary, no less. Her “Songs of Earth” (in theaters) is tough to categorize as anything other than poetry, though there are elements of nature photography and personal narrative woven throughout.At the center of “Songs of Earth” are the relationship between Olin’s parents, Jorgen and Magnhild Mykloen, as they age, and the spectacular landscapes of her native Norway. The film moves through a cycle of seasons, during which the terrain changes from green to brown to white and back again. At the center of that terrain is Olin’s 84-year-old father, who returns repeatedly to the Oldedalen valley, in the western part of the country.Olin’s father tells her stories of his life and their ancestors. She learns about tragedies, about surgery he underwent when he was young, about the way the world has shaped him and his life. Both of her parents — who have been married for 55 years — talk about their relationship and what the future may hold for them, with grief inevitably on the horizon.The gentle stories are marked by periods of silence that are never silent: The earth produces its own noises of ripples and blusters and crackling, melting ice, sometimes harmonizing with a gorgeous score by Rebekka Karijord. It’s really quite an experience to watch, and what might tie it all together is Olin’s decision to film her father’s skin at very close range. There’s a point being made there: His wrinkles and crevasses echo the landscape, which has also been shaped by time and forces of nature. In the span of the earth’s life, an individual human’s time is minuscule, yet precious — we are the planet in microcosm.It’s an altogether extraordinary film, one I’ve thought about often since I first saw it, and I’m delighted that it’s playing in theaters — the immersive nature of the sounds, music and landscapes are worth experiencing with the full concentration a cinema affords. But even if you can’t see it that way, it’s worth watching whenever it’s available digitally. Just make sure you close the door, dim the lights and give yourself the gift of being immersed in it fully.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 Beach Boys’ Review: How to Make Good Vibrations

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      This Disney documentary looks at the family ties and sweet harmonies that turned a California band into a popular treasure.The wholesome ocean-breeze look of the Beach Boys could make the group a punchline if it weren’t for their sweet sunshine sound. The origins of their intricate harmonies undergird “The Beach Boys,” a Disney documentary directed by Frank Marshall and Thom Zimny that notes obstacles in the band’s career but mostly tries to keep the good vibrations going.Brian, Dennis and Carl Wilson grew up in a musical household in Hawthorne, Calif., and eventually pooled their ample talents with a cousin, Mike Love, and a friend, Al Jardine. As told through a patchwork of polite interviews and mostly mundane clips from performances, the rise of their music was fueled by four-part harmonies, surf culture and entrancing orchestration not unlike Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound.Brian, who hated touring, was the band’s homebody musical mastermind, and he could imbue their pop with an outsider’s moods, while the Wilsons’ father, Murry, put on the pressure as their manager. Snippets from “Pet Sounds,” their landmark 1966 album, never fail to rejuvenate the movie. But after a while, you get the sense of a band that stopped growing, though the movie traces a fruitful competitive streak with the Beatles.Any deviations from the film’s obligatory timeline tour are very welcome, like a mortifying studio recording of Murry holding forth, and it’s a treat to hear the esteem for Brian among the Wrecking Crew, the storied group of session musicians. And for the pop romantics among us, the Beach Boys can still cast a spell with those four little words: Wouldn’t it be nice?The Beach BoysRated PG-13 for drug material and brief lapses into unsunny language. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘Queen of the Deuce’ Review: A Mother of Invention

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      This warm remembrance of a Times Square legend is too careful with its iconoclastic heroine.“Queen of the Deuce,” a curiously flat recounting of the life and titillating times of the adult-theater entrepreneur Chelly Wilson, offers a sadly conventional profile of one of the most vividly eccentric characters in the history of New York City.A Greek Jew who snagged one of the last boats to New York in 1939, a whisker ahead of the Nazi occupation, Wilson wasted no time transforming her hot-dog stand into a thriving pornography empire. From the late 1960s to the ‘80s, she played a pivotal role as the owner of multiple theaters, an importer of pornographic films and, eventually, a founder of her own production company.Ensconced in her apartment above the all-male Adonis Theater, Wilson, who died in 1994, held court among entertainers, Mafia dons, a roster of possible female lovers and shopping bags stuffed with cash. (Her Mob connections are as politely glossed over as her intriguing private life.) Cozy interviews with her children and grandchildren reveal a woman who rarely spoke of her past, including an arranged marriage to a man who repulsed her. Home movies, photographs and a smattering of surviving friends project a severe yet gregarious woman who rarely smiled and who loved to gamble. Her Friday poker nights were the hottest ticket in town.Tastefully directed by Valerie Kontakos, “Queen of the Deuce” is the story of a shape-shifter: a twice-married gay woman, a Sephardic Jew who celebrated Christmas (albeit with surveillance monitors parked behind the tree). The style is stilted, the look rudimentary, with Abhilasha Dewan’s cheeky animation supplying an occasional visual lift. Yet as Wilson’s former errand boy guides us around her onetime fiefdom — conjuring an area fizzing with smut until doused by Giuliani — we may sense the milieu, but its matriarch remains stubbornly indistinct.Queen of the DeuceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Taking Venice’ Offers a Glimpse at Conspiracy Theories Around the 1964 Biennale

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      The documentary offers a glimpse of how the arts were treated very differently in midcentury America.Something about “Taking Venice,” Amei Wallach’s new documentary about the 1964 Venice Biennale (in theaters), feels almost like science fiction, or maybe fantasy. Imagine the U.S. government taking such a keen interest in the fine arts that there may or may not have been an attempt to rig a major international prize for an American artist. A painter, no less!History buffs already know that during the Cold War, American intelligence agencies were heavily involved in literature, music and the fine arts, seeing them as a way to export soft power around the world and prove U.S. dominance over the Soviet Union. “Taking Venice” tells one slice of that story: a long-rumored conspiracy between the State Department and art dealers to ensure that the young painter Robert Rauschenberg would win the grand prize at the event sometimes called the “Olympics of art” — and a “fiesta of nationalism.”So … did they conspire? “Taking Venice” does not exactly answer that question, though various people who were involved give their versions of the story. But that question is far from what makes the documentary so interesting. Instead, it’s a tale of Americans crashing what had been a European party in a moment when American optimism was at its height. Artists like Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, Frank Stella, John Chamberlain and Jasper Johns were making work that exploded ideas about what a painting should be and do. As one expert notes, they dared to make art that suggested the present was important, not just the past.And they had support from their government in ways that were weird and complicated. In a 1963 speech a month before his assassination, President John F. Kennedy declared, “I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.” Then again, as several people note, the freedom of expression that American art was supposed to illustrate on the world stage — often without the artists’ full realization of the government’s involvement — was subject to its own kind of censorship. Government entities like the House Un-American Activities Committee and intelligence agencies decided who was allowed to represent the country and whose voices were unwelcome.Yet it’s still fascinating to imagine a time, not all that long ago, in which painting, sculpture, jazz, literature and more were considered keys to the exporting of American influence around the world. It’s a cultural attitude that’s shifted tremendously in the years since, at least on the broader scale, away from seeing art as embodying a culture’s hopes and dreams and toward something more crass.But with this year’s edition of the Biennale underway, the question of what it means to be an American artist (or an artist from any country) is still one worth wrestling with, and something “Taking Venice” explores, too. “Art is not only about art,” Christine Macel, the curator of the 2017 Biennale, says at the start of the film. “It’s about power and politics. When you have the power, you show it through art.”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