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      Tribeca Festival’s 2024 Lineup Features Films With the Brat Pack, Lily Gladstone

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      Organizers released the event lineup for the annual New York event, set for June. It includes films that trace the lives of Linda Perry and Avicii.The 2024 Tribeca Festival will offer the world premieres of a Brat Pack documentary, a movie starring Lily Gladstone and films that trace the lives of the music world figures Linda Perry and Avicii, organizers said Wednesday as they announced the event lineup.Also on the schedule will be a feature starring Jenna Ortega, a buddy comedy with Michael Cera, Maya Erskine and Kristen Stewart and a documentary that looks at the world of queer stand-up comedy.This year’s festival, which will run in Lower Manhattan from June 5-16, will open with the documentary “Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge” and will include 103 features from 114 filmmakers in 48 countries. The festival will offer 86 world premieres and 30 movies directed by first-time filmmakers.Officials said their final selections were chosen from more than 13,000 submissions — a record high.“We feel really lucky that there was such enthusiasm, particularly with all of the challenges that the industry had this year,” Cara Cusumano, the Tribeca Festival’s director, said in a phone interview. “It made me feel really optimistic about the future of independent film and about the resiliency of the creative community.”The documentary “Brats” will follow Andrew McCarthy as he crisscrosses the country reconnecting with fellow actors Rob Lowe, Demi Moore, Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez and others who in the 1980s and ’90s became collectively known as the Brat Pack. A panel featuring McCarthy, who directed the documentary, and other members of the cast will follow the premiere.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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      Participant, Maker of Films With Social Conscience, Calls It Quits

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      The company had critical and commercial hits over two decades but never made money consistently and faced a challenging entertainment landscape.For 20 years, Participant Media has been Hollywood’s pre-eminent maker of activist entertainment, backing socially conscious films like “An Inconvenient Truth,” a climate change cri de coeur, and “Wonder,” about a boy with birth defects. Its movies have won 21 Academy Awards.But the company never quite managed to do good while also making money, at least not consistently. Matt Damon in a fracking drama (“Promised Land,” a 2012 Participant effort) has a hard time competing with “Avengers: Infinity War” in 3-D.On Tuesday, the company’s founder and financial lifeline, the eBay billionaire Jeff Skoll, pulled the plug — a decision based, at least in part, on the atrophying entertainment business. Participant relies on studios and streaming services to distribute its content, and those partners are cutting back — especially on the “niche” films and shows in which Participant specializes — as they contend with continuing weakness at the box office, higher labor costs and increased profit pressure from Wall Street.Streaming services like Disney+ and Netflix have started to sell ads, and advertisers prefer all-audience, apolitical content. Eat-your-broccoli documentaries and dramas that explore underrepresented communities (both Participant sweet spots) are harder to sell than ever.“The entertainment industry has seen revolutionary changes in how content is created, distributed and consumed,” Mr. Skoll said in an email to Participant employees that was viewed by The New York Times. A spokesman said Mr. Skoll was unavailable for an interview.Participant will immediately lay off most of its 100 employees. A skeleton staff will remain for a time to work on coming films like “Out of My Mind,” about a nonverbal sixth grader with cerebral palsy, and “BLKNWS,” about what the media leave out, or misrepresent, in reporting on Black culture.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 Beatles’ ‘Let It Be’ Film Will Stream After 54 Years on Disney+

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      Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s unloved — or misinterpreted? — 1970 documentary, the source for Peter Jackson’s “Get Back,” will stream on Disney+.In 2021, the director Peter Jackson’s sprawling and vibrant Beatles docuseries, “The Beatles: Get Back,” streamed on Disney+ to nearly universal acclaim. The three-part epic, which ran nearly eight hours, captured the drama and frenzy as John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr recorded, over the pressure-filled month of January 1969, what would become the last album that the Beatles released, “Let It Be.”As fans were well aware, Jackson’s series was culled from nearly 60 hours of behind-the-scenes footage originally shot by the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg for “Let It Be,” his little-seen, though often dismissed, 1970 documentary about those recording sessions.After its initial theatrical run, Lindsay-Hogg’s film largely disappeared for more than a half-century with the exception of low-quality VHS versions and bootlegs. Fans tend to remember it as an intriguing historical document capturing the late-stage creative flights of a seismic musical force, but also as a divorce proceeding of sorts, with stark moments of internal discord as the band hurtled toward a nasty split.By that view, “Get Back,” with its abundant moments of jokey banter and on-set clowning, was seen by some as an overdue corrective to “Let It Be.”Little surprise but Lindsay-Hogg, 83, has a very different view. The acclaimed director had a hand in inventing the music video, with his promotional films for the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s, and went on to win plaudits for the 1980s British mini-series “Brideshead Revisited.” He has fought for a half-century for “Let It Be” to get a second look and, in his mind, a fair shake.On May 8, he will get his wish, when “Let It Be,” meticulously restored by Jackson’s production team, begins streaming on Disney+ in collaboration with Apple Corps, the company that oversees the Beatles creative and business interests. Lindsay-Hogg spoke to The New York Times about the culmination of a long crusade. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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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      Eleanor Coppola, Who Chronicled Her Family’s Filmmaking, Dies at 87

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      She made documentaries of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” and her daughter Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides” and recalled their lives in books.Eleanor Coppola, a documentary filmmaker and artist who called herself “an observer at heart,” a description borne out through works chronicling the cinematic triumphs and ordeals of her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, and their daughter, Sofia Coppola, died on Friday at her home in Rutherford, Calif. She was 87.Her family announced her death in a statement, which did not state a cause.Ms. Coppola’s career as a documentarian began when her husband asked her to record the production of “Apocalypse Now,” his 1979 exegesis of the Vietnam War that took so long to make, some began calling it “Apocalypse Never.” By then Mr. Coppola was Hollywood royalty on the strength of his first two “Godfather” movies. But with “Apocalypse Now,” he stumbled.He came close to going broke as the movie, its roots in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” ran way over budget and over schedule. Filming was slowed by steady rains on location in the Philippines, which served as a stand-in for Vietnam. A typhoon destroyed movie sets. Major parts of the script were written on the fly. Marlon Brando was overweight and underprepared for his role as a deranged Green Berets colonel. To top it all off, the film’s principal actor, Martin Sheen, had a heart attack during the shooting.As for the Coppolas, they careened toward divorce, a marital collapse set in motion largely by his sexual infidelities and frequent tantrums on and off the movie set. “My greatest fear,” his wife captured him on tape as saying, “is to make a really pompous film on an important subject, and I am making it.”Ms. Coppola had her own lapses. “If I tell the truth, we both strayed from our marriage, probably equally, each in our way,” she wrote in “Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now,” a 1979 account of that period. “Francis has gone to the extremes in the physical world, women, food, possessions, in an effort to feel complete. I have looked for that feeling of completeness in the non‐physical world. Zen, est, Esalen, meditation.”Ms. Coppola with her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, in 2022. They had a trying marriage but remained together. Hunter Abrams for The New York TimesWe 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 Ultimate Judee Sill Primer

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      A new documentary puts a spotlight on the ’70s musician. Listen to 10 of her essential songs.Greenwich EntertainmentDear listeners,I first encountered the music of Judee Sill a little over a decade ago, when, on a whim at a record store, I blind-bought a reissue of her 1973 album, “Heart Food.” It’s since become a favorite of mine — an LP that somehow marries the searching spirit of Laurel Canyon folk with the technical grandeur of Bach. Finding it impossible to settle on a single descriptor of her music, Sill once called it “occult holy Western baroque gospel.” In an interview featured in the new documentary “Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill” (which is now playing in New York and available to rent on various streaming platforms), she says that what she aims to capture in her songs is “that moment of redemption, where the lowest thing and the highest thing meet.”Her life was full of those moments. By her early 20s, Sill had endured an abusive childhood and was struggling with a $150-a-day heroin addiction; one of the most succinctly characteristic facts of her youth was that she learned how to play gospel music when she was the church organist at her reform school. Following a stint in prison and the unexpected death of her only brother, she devoted herself with an almost religious fervor to becoming a great singer-songwriter.Sill is one of those artists who should have been more commercially successful than she was, and “Lost Angel” is filled with her marquee peers — Graham Nash, Linda Ronstadt, David Crosby — praising her talents and speculating why it didn’t happen for her. Maybe she was too obstinate or self-destructive; maybe her vision was a tad too strange for middle-of-the-road record-buyers in the early ’70s. Or maybe her record company was too focused on promoting other musicians. Sill was the first new artist signed to David Geffen’s nascent Asylum Records, and when the two brilliant albums she made for the label failed to find a large audience, Geffen transformed, in her mind, from a savior to a scapegoat. It was probably some combination of all of these factors that kept her music in relative obscurity, and after a series of unfortunate accidents that once again triggered her drug habit, Sill succumbed to her addiction in 1979 and died at 35.The two dazzling studio albums she completed during her lifetime, her 1971 self-titled debut and the even more compositionally ambitious “Heart Food,” were out of print when she died but reissued by Rhino Records in 2003. (Jim O’Rourke also mixed some of the unfinished material that Sill intended for her third album on a collection released in 2005.) The documentary features impassioned interviews with younger artists — Weyes Blood; Adrianne Lenker and Buck Meek of Big Thief — who have since discovered Sill’s music, making the case that she’s more popular and influential now than she’s ever been.Even so, Sill is hardly a household name, so I wanted to make today’s playlist an introduction to her bewitchingly beautiful music. You’ll hear highlights from both of her albums along with a transfixing demo and recordings of two other artists, the Turtles and Nash’s first band the Hollies, interpreting her songs.Sill believed deeply in music’s ability to comfort, transport and heal. So leave behind what ails you and, to paraphrase one of my favorite songs of hers, prepare to soar through mercury ripples of sky.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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      ‘Brandy Hellville’ Documentary Is a New Twist on Exposés About Cults

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      The film examines the retailer’s tactics and is surprisingly similar to exposés about cults.What’s most provocative about “Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion” (streaming on Max), and about the horror show it contends is behind the immensely popular cheap-clothing retailer Brandy Melville, isn’t necessarily its content. Other documentaries have tread similar ground with similar methods — the Netflix documentary “White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch,” for instance — which is to say that everything in “Brandy Hellville” has been reported before.Documentary participants allege that the company and its leaders, especially co-founder and owner Stephan Marsan, engaged in a host of terrible behaviors ranging from fat-shaming and exploitative practices to really awful racism and sexism. Aimed at teen girls, the company’s marketing and messaging is to Gen Z what Abercrombie was to my generation: an aspirational brand designed to make you feel terrible about yourself, even if you were the skinny white girl in the pictures or working in the store. You can read about it all, of course; what the documentary provides is a host of eyewitnesses, including girls who worked in the store as teenagers and men who worked closely with the company to open new stores. Experts and activists also attest to the threat that fast fashion (that is, inexpensive, essentially disposable clothing sold at retailers like Zara, H&M, Shein and Forever 21) poses to global economies and the environment.The documentary also looks at the economic and environmental fallout from fast fashion.HBOBut the subtitle of “Brandy Hellville,” directed by Eva Orner, points to an interesting idea, even if it’s underdeveloped in the movie. Brands like Brandy Melville and their ilk resemble a cult, and even harness some techniques employed by cults to keep their “members” (in this case, high school girls, whether as customers or as workers) in line. The documentary shows how employees were flattered, and then shamed by the leadership so that each would want to be more of a “Brandy girl” (which, the film hints at, usually required disordered eating). There was a strict image projected for “Brandy girls,” which many of the former employees in the film detail at length. Being part of the group requires constantly giving your money and time (which is to say, buying marked-up, poorly made clothing, according to the documentary, and then posting pictures on social media) to stay in the group. At times, girls were isolated from family and friends. And as in a cult, there’s a small, secretive inner circle (in this case, Marsan and some cronies) that makes all the decisions. There’s also a whole weird thing related to Marsan’s obsession with Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” but I’ll let you find that out for yourself.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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      ‘Food, Inc. 2’ Review: Pollan and Schlosser Return

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      Directed by Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo, the sequel about food production in the U.S. is, in some ways, a more hopeful film.How many gory details about groceries can any moviegoer digest? The 2009 documentary “Food, Inc.” drew on the muckraking of Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) and Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”) to reveal major problems with industrialized food production. The system, it argued, may keep supermarkets well-stocked, but most people have scant insight into how that food is made — and what it does to our health.“Food, Inc. 2,” directed by Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo, doesn’t merely regurgitate those ideas, although it begins by describing how the last few years have shown the risks of letting a small number of mega-suppliers dominate the market. The baby formula shortage? Cramped meatpacking plants that became Covid-19 hot spots? An industry less prone to gigantism might have avoided those horrors.In some ways, the sequel is a more hopeful film. Pollan, who, along with Schlosser, is among the producers, notes the proliferation of farmers’ markets and grass-fed beef since the last movie’s release. (The credits list separate articles that the authors wrote in 2020 as inspiration.) “Food, Inc. 2” is also wonkier than the original: Its proposed solutions don’t simply boil down to finding better sources, but also enforcing antitrust policy, supporting fair-labor practices and finding new ways to return to time-tested farming methods.Pollan visits sites where meat alternatives are manufactured and explains how those products present their own trade-offs. Elsewhere, experts testify to how foods can confuse our brains’ reward systems and how U.S. companies, faced with a food supply that provides more calories than anyone needs, have an incentive to make consumers eat more. You might devour less after watching “Food, Inc. 2,” and what you eat will probably be healthier.Food, Inc. 2Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘It’s Only Life After All’ Review: Indigo Girls Documentary

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      The director Alexandria Bombach benefited from the musician Amy Ray’s archivist instincts in this warm, compelling new documentary.Indigo Girls have been going strong for over 40 years now, and maybe the key to their resilience is that they never were cool. Often, they got it worse: Even at their commercial peak in the 1980s and ’90s, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers were routinely mocked for being too earnest, too poetic, too folky, too lesbian. Back then, being labeled a female, gay singer-songwriter was an artistic and commercial curse, as Ray recalls in “It’s Only Life After All,” a smart, compelling new documentary.The director, Alexandria Bombach, greatly benefited from Ray’s archivist instincts: The musician has held on to decades’ worth of artifacts and opened up her vault — 1981 rehearsals, recorded on cassette when Ray and Saliers were in their teens, are startlingly crisp documents of a budding chemistry, for example.From this clay Bombach has sculpted an affecting portrait of two women who have stuck to their beliefs and, just as important, their loyalty to each other. Existing fans will be mesmerized, but non-fans like me should also get a kick out of “It’s Only Life After All.” The film is especially good about contextualizing the band’s emergence in the midst of condescension (at best) from the mainstream media — their dramatic, and very funny, reading of a withering 1989 review in The New York Times is a highlight — along with their personal struggles and steadfast political engagement for causes, including the Indigenous-led organization Honor the Earth.Now that the band is experiencing a cultural moment — its hit “Closer to Fine” was prominently featured in “Barbie,” and an indie jukebox musical movie set to their songs, “Glitter & Doom,” came out last month — it is delightful to see them have the last laugh.It’s Only Life After AllNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More