Documentary Films and Programs

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      At New Directors/New Films, the Faces Tell the Story

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      They’re the great cinematic landscape in stories as diverse as “Familiar Touch,” about dementia, and “Timestamp,” about Ukrainian schoolchildren.In “Familiar Touch,” Kathleen Chalfant plays a woman whose inner life alternately burns bright and suddenly dims. Her character, Ruth, has an inviting smile and natural physical grace, though at times she falters midstep. A former cook and a cookbook author now in her 80s, she lives alone in a pleasant modern home cluttered with shelves of books and just-so personal touches that convey the passage of time in a full, well-lived life. Ruth seems thoroughly at ease in her own skin when she first appears, bustling in her kitchen. She’s preparing lunch for a visitor who, you soon learn, is the son she no longer recognizes.Written and directed by Sarah Friedland, “Familiar Touch” is the opening-night selection Wednesday in the New Directors/New Films festival and a terrific leadoff for the annual event. Ruth’s openly loving and hurting son soon hurries her to his car — she thinks that they’re en route to a hotel — and into an assisted living facility. There, she settles into a new reality as she struggles with her memory, connects with other residents and finds support among the staff. In Chalfant’s mesmerizing, eloquently expressive face, you see both Ruth’s piercing loss and a soul safely settling into the eternal now as her past, present and future fade away.Kathleen Chalfant as a woman with dementia in “Familiar Touch.”Armchair Poetics LLCChalfant’s is just one of the memorable faces in the annual New Directors/New Films series, a collaboration of Film at Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art that gathers movies from around the world. Established in 1972, the event was designed to draw attention to the kind of nonmainstream work that didn’t always make it into commercial theaters. That’s one reason that I always look forward to it; the other is that its programmers take film seriously. That’s clear throughout the lineup, which could use more genre variety, yet, at its finest, offers you personal, thoughtful, imaginative, adult work of the kind that plays in art houses and on more adventurous streamers. These are movies made and chosen by people who love the art.That love is also evident in the great diversity of men, women and children in the program, a variety that underscores the centrality of the human face as the great cinematic landscape. This year, partly because of the dystopian chatter about A.I., I was struck anew by the deep, signifying power of smiles, frowns and sneers, and how watching movies usually means watching other people. No matter if their directors tug at your heart (as in the documentary “Timestamp”) or keep you at an intellectual distance (the drama “Drowning Dry”), these movies present an astonishment of humanity. In selection after selection, old and young visages, some untroubled and others wrenched in pain, bring you face-to-face with the world.“Timestamp” follows Ukrainian classes near the front and in the center of the country.2Brave Productions/a_Bahn/Rinkel DocsWe 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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      How to Live in the Mall

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      Want your living space a stone’s throw from the Aéropostale and Hot Topic? A new documentary, “Secret Mall Apartment,” will show you the way.When the artist Michael Townsend first told the documentarian Jeremy Workman about the time he and his friends lived in a secret apartment tucked inside the Providence Place Mall, Workman thought he was being punked. Then Townsend pulled out a cracked iPad to show Workman some grainy video. “I just was dumbfounded and blown away,” Workman said in a video interview alongside Townsend. “Then I was, like, instantly, ‘I got to figure out how I could convince him to let me make a documentary on this.’”The result is the new film “Secret Mall Apartment,” which recounts how, between 2003 and 2007, eight artists created a homey apartment in an abandoned space in a shopping center. Using footage the residents had filmed on a tiny camera, Workman places the stunt in the context of the rapid gentrification happening at the top of the 21st century while at the same time relying on some heist-movie conventions. So how did they do it? Here are six steps.1. Find an abandoned space.The Providence Place Mall, in Rhode Island, home to an architectural anomaly, an unused space that caught the eye of an artist while construction was going on.Jeremy WorkmanWhen the mall was being built, Townsend noticed what he called a “nowhere space,” an “anomaly in the architecture” that served no purpose. So when Townsend and his friends decided to camp out at the mall after seeing an ad teasing that the place was so well stocked that it had everything a person needed to live, he sought out that corner as a place to sleep. How did Townsend clock it in the first place? He credited that to a fixation with the notion of space that arose as the mall was going up, part of the gentrification of his Providence, R.I., neighborhood that also resulted in the artists’ space where he lived being demolished.“It’s not just losing the home, it’s also losing historical vertebrae of the neighborhood,” Townsend said. As for the mall, “You couldn’t help but internalize that there was a lot of dead space in that structure,” he said. And thus, the notion of an apartment was born.2. Get a couch.“If you can pick one thing you’re going to move into a space, I’d pick a couch over a mattress, any day,” Michael Townsend said of the apartment where, from left, Colin Bliss and Greta Scheing are relaxing.Michael TownsendWe 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 Wild Clips to Help You Understand Andy Kaufman’s Greatness

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      The standup, who’s the subject of a new documentary, expanded the ambition of comedy. These videos show how far ahead of his time he was.Andy Kaufman became one of the most influential comedians ever in a brief amount of time — really only a decade, from his first national television appearance to his death from lung cancer in 1984 at 35. In between, his comic stunts blurred the lines of reality and fiction and found a variety of ways to provoke audiences and upend expectations, while doing more than any club performer to expand the conceptual ambition of comedy, turning stand-up into performance art. What makes this even more remarkable is that he did almost none of it via regular roles in movies or high-profile television, with the exception of the sitcom “Taxi.”And yet, Kaufman and his many characters were a constant presence in popular culture, clubs and wrestling matches and on talk and variety shows, many of which are long forgotten. These bits have lived on the internet, divorced from the context in which they appeared. Now on YouTube, the Andy Kaufman rabbit hole is deep and packed with pleasures. A new documentary on his life, “Thank You Very Much,” was made by artists who clearly spent a long time exploring it. Here are 10 of the best examples that show how Kaufman broke from the past and anticipated the future.Foreign ManThe first Kaufman character to break out was the tentative, thick-accented immigrant from the Caspian Sea known as Foreign Man, an antecedent to Borat but sweeter, more sensitive and deluded. He mangled Borscht Belt jokes that fizzle like this one-liner: “My wife’s cooking is so bad, it’s terrible.” Before he turned into Latka Gravas on “Taxi,” Foreign Man showed up in short sets on shows like “Van Dyke and Company.” In one of the first, Foreign Man loses a Fonzie look-alike contest, becoming upset at Dick Van Dyke, who, unlike some television hosts who interacted with him (see Dinah Shore), clearly delights in Kaufman. To make things right, the host offers him the opportunity to tell some jokes. Playing an overly enthusiastic innocent with a shaky grasp on English and an even looser grasp on American humor, Kaufman fumbles through some bits and a terrible Ed McMahon impression. Somehow his errors endear him to the audience. Kaufman’s large, anime-like eyes do a lot of the work.Celebrity InterviewerSilence. Kaufman uses it as well as any comedian, building suspense, tension and most of all, awkwardness. On his ABC special taped in 1977 but broadcast two years later, he used that technique magnificently in a spoof of a disastrous talk-show interview that anticipated everything from “The Eric Andre Show” to “Between Two Ferns.” As the host, looking down on his guest, the “Laverne & Shirley” star Cindy Williams, from a desk towering high above her, (a disparity he would take to more extreme heights later in his career), he stops talking entirely, and the banter ends. Then the camera moves from him to her and back again, unease building. It’s almost a minute of dead air but seems much longer. Then he asks: “You have hobbies? You have any diseases?”Bongo PlayerWe 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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      ‘Secret Mall Apartment’ and the Case for Art in Unexpected Places

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      Jeremy Workman’s documentary looks back at a project that may sound like a joke but had serious underpinnings.What is art? Everyone has a different definition, not just at this moment in history but across eras. Art is a pretty picture. Art is what’s in a museum. Art is what makes us human. Art is something to sell, or buy, or make, or make fun of. Art is everything, or nothing at all.Defining art isn’t the stated aim of “Secret Mall Apartment” (in theaters), Jeremy Workman’s new documentary about artists who in 2003 managed to create and live undetected for four years in an apartment nestled in a shopping mall in Providence, R.I. That sounds bizarre because it is.Inspired by a commercial for the mall, Providence Place, in which a mother claims she wishes she could live there because it would make shopping so convenient, the artists found an empty, secluded space away from the retail corridors and planned a kind of performance art happening: They’d live there for a week, documenting it, subtly poking fun at developers’ obsessions with so-called underutilized spaces.It seems like a practical joke, but the context was deadly serious, as Workman shows by structuring the film akin to a spiderweb. At the center is the mall apartment itself and the reasons the artists ended up staying several years. This story is built out with interviews with the participants — many of whom had never revealed their involvement — and with footage they shot on the tiny digital cameras we used to tote around back in the mid-aughts, small enough to fit in an Altoids tin.Sprawling from this central story — full of funny anecdotes about almost getting caught and their solutions to problems like an undetectable wall — is a sober set of concerns. Chief among them is the way that city officials and developers were addressing urban decay in Providence, and how the centerpiece of their solution was meant to be the mall. Workman makes ample use of news video to demonstrate how locals talked about the project at the time, including working-class residents who noted that the planned shops and the positioning of the mall entrance away from the less affluent part of the city signaled that it wasn’t meant for them at all. He also enlists a crew to construct a full-scale model of the apartment so that the original dwellers can experience it again.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 Best True Crime to Stream: 1970s and ’80s Kidnappings

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      Across television, film and podcasting, here are five stories of child abductions that shook parents across the United States.Documentary Film“Chowchilla”It took just a few minutes into this 2023 documentary for me to be dumbfounded that I had never heard about this chapter in American history, when an entire school bus of children and their driver, 27 people in total, disappeared mid-route on a hot summer day in 1976 in the small California town of Chowchilla.What unfolded from there and the motivation behind the kidnapping are beyond imagination. In fact, those responsible for the crime were inspired in part by the Clint Eastwood movie “Dirty Harry.”In this documentary, from CNN Films and streaming on Max, we hear from some of the abductees, who recall the experience in great detail. Unlike many other such stories, we learn quickly that no one died in the ordeal, but that doesn’t make the decades-long fallout less tragic.The trauma was so acute that the survivors were able to help catapult the field of child psychology forward. “Chowchilla children are heroes,” Lenore C. Terr, a child psychiatrist who has studied the victims in depth, said in the film. “And they continue to teach us what childhood trauma is.”Documentary Series“The Beauty Queen Killer: 9 Days of Terror”For this three-part 2024 docuseries from ABC News, Tina Marie Risico — who survived a nightmarish nine days with the serial killer Christopher Wilder in 1984 before he made the astonishing decision to release her — sits down to tell her story for the first time.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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      ‘Fight for Glory’ Is an Ecstatic Treat

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      This three-part documentary about the 2024 World Series has an interesting task: Retell a story that is already pretty good and pretty legible.A lot of TV sports documentaries in the post-“Drive to Survive” world take a broad, rudimentary and personality-driven approach: Make the sport welcoming to new viewers, and give extant fans new access to their faves. After “The Last Dance,” we also got a wave of sit-down interviews and ostensible introspection — the stories behind the story.“Fight for Glory: 2024 World Series,” a three-part documentary that arrives Friday, on Apple TV+, is playing a different game.This mini-series, directed by R.J. Cutler (“The September Issue,” “Martha”), is almost all on the field. Rather than cutting away to seated talking-head interviews, the additional intel and commentary is delivered in voice-over, while the camera stays on the game. Only a few players get any back story, and only one, the Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman, drives the emotional arc of the show.“Glory” has an interesting task, which is to retell a story that is already a pretty good, pretty legible story without the documentary. Championships have built-in stakes; the Yankees and the Dodgers are internationally known legacy franchises; many of the players here are already huge, huge stars; and some of the contextualizing footage is from news conferences. There is no excavation of the unknown. The games have been played.Instead, “Glory” is a distillation, an ecstatic highlighting of highlights in their most alluring form. Sure, there’s a brief interlude about the battle between a batter and a pitcher, but that takes all of one at-bat. The hero here is home runs, and not just any home runs but grand slams — and not just any grand slams but a walk-off grand slam from Freeman, the World Series M.V.P.The Yankees fan in me was of course writhing in agony while I watched this. But the sports hedonist in me was dancing a jig. Just the good parts, please, and make them extra good. Never let me go more than a few minutes without hearing the crack of a bat and the roar of a crowd — a Yankee Stadium crowd, when possible. Feature only super-duper fans, and show them only losing their minds. Replay the injuries in slow motion. Frame the errors as egregious and the homers as a symbol of processing personal tragedy. Show us some loving families so that we may experience their joy as well. Take us all out to the ballgame, why don’t you. More

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      ‘Art for Everybody’ Review: The Hidden Life of the ‘Painter of Light’

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      Thomas Kinkade turned himself into a ubiquitous brand — but there was more to him than that, a new documentary shows.One of my high school jobs was stocking shelves and tending the register in a Christian bookstore in upstate New York. “Bookstore” is a bit of a misnomer: while we did sell books — Bibles, relationship manuals about love languages, “Left Behind” novels — most of the store’s floor space was devoted to things that were not books at all: Christian music CDs and cassette tapes, plus “gift” items, usually displayed in themed zones: baptisms, amusements and brands like Willow Tree, Precious Moments and Veggie Tales.When I was there in 2001, our biggest sellers came from one section in the store that was set up to resemble a small living room, with a couch and a rug and a wall hanging. This was the Thomas Kinkade section, named for the artist who created the images of colorful homes nestled into sweet landscapes that were then painted and embroidered and printed onto anything a typical Christian bookstore patron might desire. You could buy Thomas Kinkade collectible plates, Thomas Kinkade throw blankets, Thomas Kinkade lamps, Thomas Kinkade crosses, Thomas Kinkade mass-produced cross-stitched Bible covers. With the flick of a button, Thomas Kinkade framed prints would convert images of glowing windows to actual glowing windows via little embedded lights. You could deck your whole life out in Thomas Kinkade.Kinkade, who turned out these original images and called himself the “Painter of Light,” is the subject of the new documentary “Art for Everybody,” directed by Miranda Yousef. Kinkade is sort of the Kenny G of American art, ubiquitous and beloved and very easy to deride. The documentary brings in a variety of art critics, journalists and historians to do just that, with reactions ranging from sniffs to an earnest consternation over what Kinkade’s anodyne, even retrograde images signify about their buyers. The New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, who profiled Kinkade in 2001, provides some background from a decidedly outsider perspective: she hadn’t heard of Kinkade in his ’80s and ’90s heyday, and found him to be as much of an oddity as a cultural phenomenon.But I suspect Orlean is an outlier, and not just because according to the documentary, at one point one in every 20 American households purportedly purchased “a Kinkade” — meaning a licensed print — to put on the wall, and possibly many more. For those who grew up in and around Christian culture in the United States, especially the evangelical flavor, he was ubiquitous from the 1980s onward, present in church lobbies and grandma’s living room. As the art critic Blake Gopnik notes in the film, Kinkade “fed on the disdain” of critics and the establishment, positioning himself as diametrically opposed to an art world seen as degenerate and anti-family during the 1980s and ’90s culture wars. Kinkade served up a vision of a perfect, beautiful world, with himself as a defender (as he says in archival video) of “family and God and country and beauty.”All of this was very lucrative for Kinkade, who was a marketing genius — one interviewee suggests Warhol might have been jealous — and an outspokenly religious family man. But that makes his death in 2012, at the age of 54, even more startling. After a precipitous decline owing to mounting alcoholism and including public urination, heckling and erratic behavior (plus a failed stint in rehab), Kinkade died of an alcohol and Valium overdose.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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      How ‘No Other Land’ Became an Unlikely Box Office Success

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      The Oscar-winning documentary has surpassed $2 million at the box office despite the lack of a traditional distribution deal.“No Other Land” has racked up festival awards, critical acclaim and the Oscar for best documentary feature. Yet the film, a narrative exposé about Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes directed by two Palestinians and two Israelis, has not been acquired by a traditional North American distributor. This is partly a reflection of the collapse of studio interest in newsy documentaries as well as hesitance around a movie that condemns Israeli policies.But as the filmmakers rolled out the movie without the marketing muscle and prestige of a typical release, it has flourished. By the admittedly parched standards of post-pandemic theatrical releases of topical documentaries, it is a hit.“No Other Land” has been a top 25 film each of the past three weeks since its Oscar win, according to the film database Box Office Mojo, with ticket sales set to eclipse $2 million domestically by the end of next weekend. It was playing on 130 screens across the country last weekend, a small number when compared to the thousands of a studio blockbuster, but robust given its circumstances. (The film’s theatrical rights have been acquired in more than 20 other countries.)“Documentaries are having a harder time theatrically these days,” said Connie White, who has programmed “No Other Land” at a dozen theaters from Brookline, Mass., and Pleasantville, N.Y., to Tucson, Ariz., and Omaha. “This is remarkable.”At Film Forum in Manhattan, “No Other Land” sold out seven shows its opening weekend in February and a week’s worth of evening screenings after its Oscar win. It “is shaping up to be among the highest-attended films in our 55-year history,” said Sonya Chung, the cinema’s president and director.At the national Alamo Drafthouse chain, which screens studio tentpoles like “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Snow White,” “No Other Land” has been the 14th-biggest film since its Jan. 31 release, a spokesman said.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