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      ‘Not a Pretty Picture’: A Director’s Unflinching Response to Trauma

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      Anthology Film Archives is screening a new 4K restoration of Martha Coolidge’s 1976 docudrama about date rape.Made nearly half a century ago and long hiding in plain sight, Martha Coolidge’s “Not a Pretty Picture” is at once an autobiographical documentary, a Pirandellian psychodrama, an acting exercise, a personal exorcism and a powerful political tract.The subject is date rape, and it could not be more topical. In a rare theatrical run, a new 4K restoration of the movie opens on Friday at Anthology Film Archives.At 16 years old, in 1962, Coolidge was sexually assaulted by an older schoolmate. Her 1976 movie restages and analyzes the rape. In the film, it’s 1962 again and the actress playing Martha (Michele Manenti), innocently adventurous, takes a trip with three boys and another girl to New York City. No matter how self-possessed she believes herself to be, she winds up isolated in a loft, where she is cajoled, bullied and ultimately raped by a far more self-assured predator (Jim Carrington), who separates her from her friends.Coolidge interviews the performers onscreen as well as directing them and encouraging them to improvise. The assault is the movie’s central scene, but nearly as compelling as the long takes of Manenti wrestling with Carrington as he urges her to “just please relax …” is the sight of Coolidge watching the struggle, her hand over her mouth.The performances are multifaceted. Manenti herself was raped as a teenager and discusses this in the film. In critiquing his character, Carrington calls him “uneducated” (a polite substitute for jerk) and comes off nearly as glib, yet honest in his identification with the rapist. Anne Mundstuk, Coolidge’s boarding school roommate and confidante, is cast as her teenage self and recalls her own feelings at the time as well as her thoughts on re-enacting them.Coolidge frames “Not a Pretty Picture” with her own expressions of vulnerability. It begins with a school recital performance of the most achingly pure of folkie love-songs “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” sung by Coolidge and shown in long shot from the perspective of two smirking boys in the audience. It ends with the filmmaker acknowledging the shame she felt and the lasting damage that the rapist inflicted.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?  More

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      Joel Embiid Wants the African Diaspora to Flourish Onscreen

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      “I’ve always been passionate about storytelling,” said the N.B.A. star, whose production studio will create a documentary about Memphis Depay’s success on the Dutch soccer team.Joel Embiid knew as early as his rookie season in the National Basketball Association that he eventually wanted to enter the media industry.Seven years later, he is now at the pinnacle of the sport — the league’s reigning most valuable player, Embiid set a Philadelphia 76ers record last week by scoring 70 points in a game — and is ready to take on that new challenge.Embiid, 29, who moved from Cameroon to the United States as a teenager, has created a production studio, Miniature Géant, that he hopes will amplify the culture of his home continent. The studio intends to profile athletes and entertainment figures of African descent, with an initial goal of selling content to streaming services.“We’re dabbling in a lot of different spaces, but the common denominator is Africa and the joys and the quest of African people and the African diaspora,” said Sarah Kazadi-Ndoye, who is the studio’s lead creative executive and was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo.Miniature Géant’s first documentary will explore themes of race and identity as it follows Memphis Depay, a Dutch soccer player who was born to a white mother from the Netherlands and a Ghanaian father. The studio is also having exploratory conversations with the Cameroonian mixed martial arts fighter Francis Ngannou, a former Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight champion. In addition to coverage of athletes, the studio hopes to also explore the entertainment world.Embiid is one of several athletes to enter the world of content creation. The basketball player Giannis Antetokounmpo recently announced the start of a production company with the ESPN analyst Jay Williams. The retired National Football League quarterbacks Tom Brady and Peyton Manning created similar organizations and have released projects with ESPN and Netflix.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?  More

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      ‘The Greatest Night in Pop’ Review: They Were the World

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      This documentary shows the highlights of the recording session for the charity song “We Are the World,” which assembled a who’s who of pop celebrities.In late 1984 the singer and activist Harry Belafonte was both impressed and perturbed by “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” a British charity single featuring a cast of pop stars. The proceeds from the project went to Ethiopian famine relief. Belafonte complained to the music manager Ken Kragen, “We have white folks saving Black folks and we don’t have Black folks saving Black folks.”Such was the spur for the 1985 song “We Are the World.” The creative nucleus was Black: its writers, Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson; Stevie Wonder (who didn’t get a writing credit but, as relayed in the film, was invaluable to the whole creative process); and the producer-arranger Quincy Jones. How the project turned into a one-night-only superstar fest — “If a bomb lands on this place,” a droll Paul Simon quipped while surveying the room, “John Denver’s back on top” — is chronicled in “The Greatest Night in Pop,” directed by Bao Nguyen.While the making of the song was partially detailed in its long-form video, there’s plenty of new, engaging, and sometimes eyebrow-raising anecdotal material here. Wonder’s impromptu notion of singing a phrase in Swahili (which was squelched when it was pointed out that Swahili isn’t spoken in Ethiopia) compelled the country star Waylon Jennings to walk out of the session. A nervous Cyndi Lauper was almost dissuaded from participating by her (unnamed) then-boyfriend, who thought the record would flop. And a few interviewees relay that Al Jarreau was tipsy throughout.Bob Dylan did not sit for a present-day interview, but Bruce Springsteen did. One of the handful of rock stars who’d also make an excellent rock critic, he’s a vivid docent and apologist for the song: “Steve Perry can sing! He’s got that great voice. Up in that Sam Cooke territory.” As the assembled room pays tribute to Belafonte, a salty joke improvised in song by Stevie Wonder is worth the price of a Netflix subscription.The Greatest Night in PopNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Sundance Documentaries: ‘Eternal You,’ ‘Ibelin’ and More

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      Festival documentaries ranged across the genre map, but several explored the lengths we’ll go to communicate with lost loved ones.Everyone from the academy to streaming services splits cinema into two buckets: movies (comedy, romance, horror, whatever) and documentaries, lumped into one unholy pile. Besides being obviously reductive, the division is false: Nonfiction movies can be comedies or romances or horror or any other genre, and they can create new indescribable genres, too. But American audiences still tend to be fed documentaries of only a few types: true crime stories, cult exposés, hagiographies, and educational disquisitions full of talking heads.There’s more than that to nonfiction. And though plenty of star-driven, lightweight biographies show up at Sundance — famous folk on the carpet create much-needed social-media attention — there’s a lot of other nonfiction on offer, some of which will make its way to theaters and streaming services over the next year or two. A couple of lucky films may even eventually make their way into Oscar contention.Documentaries at this year’s Sundance, which concluded Sunday, ranged across the genre map, often playfully mixing up conventions. But it was striking how often a particular thread kept popping up: the human longing to communicate with the dead, and the lengths — technological and otherwise — to which we’ll go to make it happen.That was the theme of “Love Machina” and “Eternal You,” which feel picked by the programmers to complement one another. “Love Machina” (directed by Peter Sillen) is a romance looking at the efforts of the married couple Martine and Bina Rothblatt to create a robotic replica of Bina, powered by artificial intelligence and an extensive database of her thoughts, speech and emotions, that can communicate with her descendants when she is gone. “Eternal You” (directed by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck) takes a broader, more analytical look at the burgeoning market for “afterlife technology” designed to do what the Rothblatts hope to accomplish: let people communicate with their loved ones after death using A.I. If that sounds like a “Black Mirror” episode, you’re right — and some “Eternal You” participants note the humanity-altering danger in this quest.In “Love Machina,” the robotic likeness of a woman is part of an effect to communicate with her descendants after she’s gone.Peter Sillen, via Sundance InstituteYet, as the eminent sociologist Sherry Turkle points out onscreen, what we see in these efforts is A.I. offering what religion once did: a sense of an afterlife, a quest for meaning, the feeling of connecting to transcendence. One of the festival’s best documentaries, the sociological portrait “Look Into My Eyes,” taps into this same longing from a more mystical direction. Directed by Lana Wilson, the film drops audiences into the lives of several New York City psychics. The clients are hoping to communicate with the beloved dead through a literal rather than technological medium. (One participant helps people communicate with their pets, some of whom are still living.) But the focus is on the psychics themselves, the reasons they’ve come to their work, and what they believe they’re actually doing in their sessions — and the film is marvelously nuanced and fascinating in its examination. Is this performance? Is it “real”? And if it brings peace to the living, does it matter?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?  More

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      Why the Documentary Oscar Race Is the Most Unpredictable One

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      All five nominees are international features focused on geopolitical events, and three are directed by women.Most post-nomination Oscar chatter focuses on surprises and snubs connected to the fiction nominees. But I’m a nonfiction nerd, so for me the documentaries are where it’s at, and in recent years, the picks have grown delightfully unpredictable. This year, two seeming slam dunks were left off the list: “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” and “American Symphony,” about the musician Jon Batiste. Both are artful, and their nominations had seemed assured because, at least in the past, well-made portraits tended to get eyeballs and thus votes.But here we are, in a strange new world. Biographical documentaries are still hugely popular; next to true crime, they’re what’s hot in nonfiction right now, as our recently reviewed releases “June” and “Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero” indicate. This time around, though, the voters cast their net more widely.Much more widely, in fact. Don’t look now, but this may be the most groundbreaking category at the awards. All five are international films, centering mostly on geopolitical situations. Three are directed by women. And all five are also, as it happens, very good.“The Eternal Memory,” a second nomination for the Chilean director Maite Alberdi (her first was “The Mole Agent”), landed on my Top 10 list last year. (Stream it on Paramount+.) It deals with the erasure of public memory in Chile, refracted through the relationship of one couple: the prominent cultural journalist Augusto Gongora and his wife, Paulina Urrutia, as she cares for him after an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. (Gongora died last May.)The nomination of “Four Daughters” made its Tunisian director, Kaouther Ben Hania, the first Arab woman to be nominated twice at the Oscars. (Her first, “The Man Who Sold His Skin,” was nominated for best international feature.) “Four Daughters” (for rent on most major platforms and streaming here) explores radicalization in a single Tunisian family and uses unexpected techniques, like having actors play out scenes in the family’s life.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?  More

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      ‘In the Summers’ and ’Didi’ Among 2024 Sundance Film Festival Winners

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      The jury focused largely on under-the-radar titles, though a Jesse Eisenberg-Kieran Culkin collaboration also was recognized.“In the Summers,” an independent film about two sisters navigating fraught summer visits with their father, won the top prize in the Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. dramatic competition on Friday. The movie also won the competition’s directing award for its first-time filmmaker, Alessandra Lacorazza.“This film snuck up on us,” read a citation delivered by the jury, which was made up of the director Debra Granik, the cartoonist Adrian Tomine and the producer Lena Waithe. “A film like this can easily slip through the cracks, and for that reason we have chosen to shed light on this beautiful piece of cinema and we hope it finds the audience it so well deserves.”That appeared to be the animating ethos for many of the jury’s picks, which went to worthy but lower-profile entries in competition, though the screenwriting award was given to Jesse Eisenberg for his buzzy comedy, “A Real Pain,” a road-trip movie he directed and starred in alongside Kieran Culkin. The film sold to Searchlight for $10 million in one of the festival’s biggest deals.Audience awards voted on by festival attendees went to the likes of “Didi,” a teen coming-of-age movie from Sean Wang, the documentary “Daughters,” about four girls attending a daddy-daughter dance with their imprisoned fathers, and the Irish rap movie “Kneecap.”Here are the rest of the top awards. For a complete list of winners, including short films and special jury prizes, go to sundance.org.Grand Jury PrizesU.S. Dramatic Competition: “In the Summers”U.S. Documentary Competition: “Porcelain War”World Cinema Dramatic Competition: “Sujo”World Cinema Documentary Competition: “A New Kind of Wilderness”Next Innovator Award: “Little Death”Directing, U.S. Dramatic: Alessandra Lacorazza, “In The Summers”Directing, U.S. Documentary: Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, “Sugarcane”Directing, World Cinema Dramatic: Raha Amirfazli and Alireza Ghasemi, “In the Land Of Brothers”Directing, World Cinema Documentary: Benjamin Ree, “Ibelin”Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award: U.S. Dramatic: Jesse Eisenberg, “A Real Pain”Jonathan Oppenheim Editing Award, U.S. Documentary: Carla Gutiérrez, “Frida”Audience AwardsFestival Favorite Award: “Daughters”U.S. Dramatic Competition: “Didi”U.S. Documentary Competition: “Daughters”World Cinema Dramatic Competition: “Girls Will Be Girls”World Cinema Documentary Competition: “Ibelin”Next: “Kneecap” More

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      in Television

      What to Watch This Weekend: Something Hot

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      Our TV critic recommends a wild and wide-ranging documentary series about the world of hot pepper enthusiasts.Johnny Scoville, a YouTube star and central figure in the documentary series “Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People.”HuluDocumentaries about niche subcultures abound: dog dancing, science fairs, yo-yos. Few if any include as much on-screen vomiting as the Hulu series “Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People,” but then, few cover quite as much ground.“Pepper” follows the overlapping pursuits of a handful of pepper enthusiasts, whose interests lie in the hottest of the hots, peppers that induce sweating, crying and retching within minutes. Some of the featured subjects are more into the horticultural side, while others are more into online public masochism. Many acknowledge the overlap between drug use and pepper-eating, that the thrill of spiciness has replaced more dangerous and illicit substances in their lives, that once they found peppers, capsaicin became their drug of choice.The try-hard glibness of a lot of the narration (voiced by Ben Schwartz) undercuts the show’s more intriguing ideas, as if “Pepper” didn’t always know what it has. This is, deeply, a show about social media, about being famous to 15 people, about the rush and reality of online connections. It is also about the ways in which consuming too much internet narrows your vision and imagination, until you forget that posting is not the same thing as existing. It’s a big world out there, filled almost entirely with people who have never heard of any of your heroes and never will.Much like the featured growers who combine strains to cultivate extreme heat, “Pepper” combines documentary and reality formats to keep its 10 episodes moving. Early on, the show’s most endearing heroine, a Chicago nurse, “comes out” to her co-worker pals about her pepper and hot sauce hobby. It’s a scene straight out of “Queer Eye” or any number of real estate shows, an awkward party where a teary sweetheart receives support. Another episode is knockoff “Top Chef,” with people vying for a chance to develop a hot sauce for a food chain. (I’m genuinely surprised this was not developed as its own stand-alone show.)The segments about competitive pepper-eating mirror every sport documentary, with sage champions eventually compensating for their relentlessness by turning to Buddhist philosophy to help with “managing desire.” When some growers become extra suspicious about thievery and back-stabbing, “Pepper” apes Netflix’s true crime aesthetics.“Pepper” opts for breadth instead of depth, and what it lacks in insight it makes up for in volume of people calling each other “brother.” This is a series with experts who joke about putting toilet paper in the freezer, so maybe it isn’t reasonable to expect some mention that humans have been fascinated by altered states and ritualized body mortification throughout history. Fair enough. There’s still more than enough heat here for a fun, edifying ride. (Again, though: lots and lots of throwing up.) More

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      ‘Pictures of Ghosts’ Review: Layers of Love and Memory

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      The Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho draws on fact and fiction in this image-rich documentary that moves fast and far, but always returns home.Early in “Pictures of Ghosts,” an exhilarating documentary about specters onscreen and off, the Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho, pulls out a VHS tape. It’s of a 1981 TV interview with his mother, Joselice, a historian who died at age 54. In close-up, she discusses gathering information left out of history, an approach that her son has embraced here. After the tape abruptly cuts off, he says in voice-over, “it may seem like I’m discussing methodology” — as if speaking now both for his mother and for himself — “but I’m talking about love.”Love suffuses “Pictures of Ghosts,” a cleareyed, deeply personal and formally inspired rumination on life, death, family, movies and those complicated, invariably haunted places we call home. Divided into three fluidly edited sections that build into a cohesive whole, the movie draws from both original and archival material, including photographs, newsreels, home movies, amateur films and images sampled from Mendonça Filho’s features. The results unfold at the crossroads of fiction and documentary, a space that Mendonça Filho knows well. “Fiction films are the best documentaries,” as a character in a movie says here.A film critic turned filmmaker, Mendonça Filho is best known for his own fictional movies, most notably “Aquarius” (2016). A nuanced, idiosyncratic drama set in his hometown, Recife, a northeastern port city on the Atlantic coast, it centers on a music critic (Sônia Braga), her circle of intimates, the enviably ocean-facing apartment in which she lives and the gentrification that she resists. It’s about stasis and change, memory and loss, art and commerce as well as a struggle for sovereignty. The building’s owners are trying to force her out, which means that it’s also about money and power — all themes that haunt “Pictures of Ghosts.”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?  More