Documentary Films and Programs

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      ‘Notes on Displacement’ Review: Seeking a Fresh Start in Europe

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      The artist and director Khaled Jarrar accompanies a group of people from Syria on their way to Germany in this documentary.As its title implies, “Notes on Displacement” is more of a scattered assemblage of scenes than a polished documentary. It follows the director, the Palestinian artist Khaled Jarrar, over travels from Greece to Germany — by boat, bus, train and frequently by foot — as he accompanies a group of refugees from Syria seeking a fresh start in Europe.Nadira, the matriarch of the main family in the film, was born in Nazareth in 1936, and Mona, her now-adult daughter, was born in a refugee camp for displaced Palestinians in Damascus. Part of what Jarrar, who was born in the West Bank city of Jenin, aims to show is the psychology — and absurdity — of being uprooted in two ways. (“When you get a German passport,” Jarrar tells Nadira near the end, “you can visit Palestine.”)Jarrar, credited with the cinematography and sound, trails his subjects from camp to camp. (“Our dream,” one person says of the twists and turns, “has become to know where we are.”) Although the director occasionally identifies himself as an artist or insists to an authority figure that he has a right to continue filming, there are some points when he needed or chose to keep his camera hidden from view.It is clear that this rudimentary setup means that a lot of the trek was lost. Many night scenes are barely legible, and there are still other moments when Jarrar, on the fly, appears to have been more concerned with recording sound than image. But this hectic, disorienting style is surely part of the message, given that the filmmaker pointedly saves basic biographical information for the closing titles. In its form, “Notes on Displacement” mirrors the terrifying, dangerous journey it chronicles.Notes on DisplacementIn Arabic, with subtitles. Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      ‘The 2025 Oscar Nominated Short Films’ Review: Bite-Size Stories, Big Ideas

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      The themes run from sweet to harrowing in this year’s selections.Live ActionPerhaps it’s a sign of the times, that drumbeat of anxiety pulsing through the live action segment of this year’s Oscar nominated short films. Proximity to Valentine’s Day notwithstanding, this stress-filled collection boasts nary a spark of romance nor a scintilla of comedy. There’s cruelty, injustice and existential angst aplenty, though — a thematic through line that suggests any filmmaker seeking a statuette had better wake up and smell the oppression.Luckily, a nasty scent doesn’t have to mean ugly visuals. In “Anuja,” a very pretty picture with a disarmingly perky vibe, a 9-year-old garment-factory worker (Sajda Pathan) must make a risky, life-altering choice. Produced in cooperation with a nonprofit that supports street children (of whom the charming Pathan is one), Adam J. Graves’s movie feels a touch pandering, less raw and organic and more like a carefully manufactured gift to softhearted audiences.By contrast, “The Last Ranger” — which also centers on a child confronting adult barbarity — is a gorgeous and grounded observation of a real-life attack on an endangered South African rhinoceros. Told through the friendship between a curious young girl (Liyabona Mroqoza) and a courageous park ranger (Makhaola Ndebele), this unsettlingly serene film, beautifully directed by Cindy Lee, shapes the complexities of wildlife conservation into a story that’s both touching and tragic.Tragedy of a different sort awaits in “I’m Not A Robot” as a spiraling music producer (a spectacular Ellen Parren) is barred from accessing her computer files after failing successive Captcha tests. Sharp, shiny and original, this increasingly alarming movie, deftly written and directed by Victoria Warmerdam, raises weighty issues — including the right to die and what it means to be human — with energy and empathy.Humanity is in short supply in “A Lien,” an achingly timely immigration drama from the filmmaking brothers David and Sam Cutler-Kreutz. Set in a Manhattan government building where a young couple (Victoria Ratermanis and William Martinez) have arrived with their small daughter for a green card interview, the film brilliantly conveys our powerlessness in the face of an impenetrable and terrifying bureaucracy. Unfolding in agitated close-ups and a stressful, naturalistic sound design, “A Lien” will raise your blood pressure, whatever your legal status.Infinitely more subtle, yet every bit as disquieting, “The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent” places us on a Bosnian passenger train that’s been boarded by armed paramilitaries. As they demand identity cards and begin loading passengers onto trucks, the movie focuses its tension on a single compartment where three men will make life-or-death decisions. In barely a dozen minutes, the Croatian director Nebojsa Slijepcevic (referencing an infamous 1993 massacre of innocent civilians) examines the cost of speaking up and, perhaps more important, the soul-destroying consequence of staying silent. — JEANNETTE CATSOULISWe 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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      in Music

      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sues NBC Over Documentary That He Says Defamed Him

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      The documentary, “Diddy: Making of a Bad Boy,” began streaming on NBCUniversal’s Peacock platform last month.Sean Combs, the music mogul facing federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges, sued NBCUniversal and its streaming service Peacock on Wednesday, accusing them of airing a documentary that “shamelessly advances conspiracy theories” about him.The documentary, “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,” is one of several about Mr. Combs’s life and career that have been developed amid mounting allegations of sexual abuse and violence that led to the criminal charges and more than three dozen civil lawsuits.Mr. Combs, who is in a Brooklyn jail awaiting his criminal trial, has pleaded not guilty to the charges, has denied sexually assaulting anyone and has depicted the allegations as fabrications or distorted accounts of consensual sex. In recent weeks, he has begun to go on the offensive, filing lawsuits against people and companies he says have defamed him.The newest defamation suit focuses in part on a segment of the Peacock documentary in which one interview subject asserts that Kim Porter, Mr. Combs’s longtime girlfriend with whom the mogul had three children, had been murdered.The documentary includes an image of Ms. Porter’s autopsy report, which says she died of lobar pneumonia, and notes that the local police did not suspect foul play. She died in 2018 at 47 years old.But it also includes an interview with Albert Joseph Brown, a former singer who goes by the name Al B. Sure!, that the suit characterizes as defamatory. In the interview, Mr. Brown, who had a child with Ms. Porter, describes seeing her and says, “It was two, three weeks prior to her murder — am I supposed to say ‘allegedly’?”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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      A Sly Stone Primer: 15 Songs (and More) From a Musical Visionary

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      The Sly & the Family Stone leader is the subject of a new documentary directed by Questlove. Here’s what to know about his brilliant career and crushing addiction.In Sly & the Family Stone’s prime, from 1968 to 1973, the band was one of music’s greatest live acts as well as a fount of remarkable singles including “Everyday People” and “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” There was a shining optimism to its sound, which mixed funk with the ecstasy of gospel, a little rock and a touch of psychedelia — as well as a vision of community and brotherhood that stood out in a period of political separatism.The visionary behind it all was Sly Stone, who wrote, produced and arranged the music, winning acclaim as the author of invigorating anthems and an inventor of new, more complex recording sounds. But by the early 1970s, he was ravaged by drug addiction, kicking off a cycle of spirals and comebacks and sporadic, desultory live appearances. Now Stone, 81, is the subject of “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius),” a documentary directed by Ahmir Thompson, better known as the Roots drummer Questlove, that debuts on Hulu on Thursday.Stone, who was born Sylvester Stewart and grew up in Vallejo, Calif., had gospel in his blood. His father, K.C., was a deacon in a Pentecostal church, and Sly began performing with his younger brother Freddie and younger sisters Rose and Vet in the Stewart Four, which released a single, “On the Battlefield,” in 1956 on the Church of God in Christ label.In 1967, “Dance to the Music” became the first of Sly & the Family Stone’s five Top 10 singles.Stephen Paley/Sony, via Onyx CollectiveAs he learned to play guitar, bass, keyboards, drums and harmonica, Stone’s ambition swelled. In 1964, he produced and co-wrote Bobby Freeman’s No. 5 hit “C’mon and Swim,” and soon talked himself into an on-air gig at KSOL, the Bay Area’s AM soul music powerhouse, where he read dedications in his nimble baritone and mixed in Bob Dylan and Beatles songs to the format. “I think there shouldn’t be ‘Black radio.’ Just radio,” he later told Rolling Stone. “Everybody be a part of everything.”After having a small local hit in the Viscaynes, one of the few integrated groups in doo wop, he assembled Sly & the Family Stone with a lineup of men and women, Black and white. In 1967, “Dance to the Music” became their first of five Top 10 singles. Two years later, they performed at Woodstock, providing one of the weekend’s high points. The days of playing nightclubs were over. “After Woodstock, everything glowed,” Stone wrote in his 2023 memoir.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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      What an Instagram Reel Has in Common With a 4-Hour Documentary

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      Here is what I see when I scroll through Instagram Reels on my phone. A woman wakes up in bed, goes to the kitchen and pours coffee, inviting me to follow along with her morning routine. One swipe, and someone is making a “viral kale pasta Caesar salad.” Another swipe reveals a demonstration of “peel-and-stick stair treads,” which I can purchase on Amazon at the link in her bio. A man feeds a puppy a lemon wedge; it is not pleased. One of my own colleagues appears, explaining why we should start taking bird flu seriously.Here’s an ad for a serum for aging skin. Here’s an ad for a nifty battery-powered sconce. Here’s someone teaching me French slang, and someone else auditioning for a Broadway show. Another morning routine, another coffee. A cat steals salami off the kitchen counter.At some point, I must have indicated to the app that these intrigued me — that’s how “the algorithm” works. But with the possible exception of bird flu they are thoroughly ordinary versions of things I’ve already seen a hundred times.Everyone’s social video feed is different, an infinite number of variations molded around each individual user. Yours might be much more sprightly or eccentric than mine. But all of our feeds are at their core tremendously banal: They’re just windows into what people do with themselves all day, repeated over and over again. And we watch, because, for some reason, we love watching humans be humans.I STARTED THINKING ABOUT REELS at a screening of a Frederick Wiseman documentary the other day. (I do not think this is a sentence that has ever been written before.) It was “Aspen” (1991), which is among the 33 newly restored films and a handful of more recent ones in the series “Frederick Wiseman: An American Institution” at Lincoln Center through March 5, in an extensive retrospective that joins simultaneous retrospectives in Paris and Los Angeles.“Aspen” peeks into daily life at the Colorado ski resort town among the wealthy, mostly white, mostly older denizens who have homes there, as well as others, mostly people of color, who live in far more modest housing. Structured as a series of scenes without any single protagonist, it seems at first like a neutral portrait. But the longer you follow it, the more you realize it’s actually about the racial, religious and economic lines along which social groups divide in a barely-post-Reagan America.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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      in Movies

      ‘Paint Me a Road Out of Here’: Faith Ringgold’s Gift to Prisoners

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      In this documentary, the artist depicts what a more just and beautiful world might look like.In 1971, the artist Faith Ringgold received a grant to make a painting for a public institution in New York City. She decided to ask the prisoners in the Women’s House of Detention on Rikers Island what they wanted to see in a painting. “I want to see a road leading out of here,” one incarcerated woman told her.Ringgold took that idea and ran with it. She didn’t paint a literal road. Instead, her canvas — entitled “For the Women’s House” and installed at the prison in January 1972 — is divided into eight sections. In each, women are depicted performing jobs traditionally held by men at the time: bus driver, construction worker, basketball player, president. The road is implied: Seeing women in positions and roles they don’t always occupy can open up the viewer’s world. She might be in a prison for now, but there’s a place for her worth aspiring to beyond these walls.This was Ringgold’s imagination at work, always depicting what a more just and beautiful world might look like, particularly for the people whom the powerful prefer to ignore. Ringgold and “For the Women’s House” both appear in the documentary “Paint Me a Road Out of Here” (in theaters), directed by Catherine Gund, and hearing and seeing her talk is reason enough to see the film. Ringgold died in 2024 at 93, and is widely considered one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, a native New Yorker who was unflagging in her activism and commitments to dismantle racism wherever it surfaced. As a Black woman and an artist, she insisted on coupling political meaning with her work, which is suffused with curiosity and joy.“Paint Me a Road Out Of Here” is not a biographical film about Ringgold, even though you’ll learn a lot about her biography from it. The film has bigger aspirations, connecting art, prisons, activism and an expansive life. One major subject in the film is the artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, an executive producer of the film whose prison reform work often draws on her own experiences while incarcerated. Shortly after her own arrest, for example, Baxter went into labor — 43 hours while shackled to a bed.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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      in Television

      ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ Is a Scammer Docudrama With Bite

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      The Netflix series, starring Kaitlyn Dever, tells the story of an Australian blogger who found fame and money by lying about having cancer.“Apple Cider Vinegar,” on Netflix, is the latest scammer docudrama, another galling true story zhuzhed up for maximum bingeyness. This one is about two scams, though: an Australian woman perpetrating a cancer fraud, and the wellness industry more broadly.Kaitlyn Dever stars as Belle Gibson, who rose to fame as a cancer and food blogger. The show weaves her story together with that of two other characters who actually do have cancer: Milla (Alycia Debnam-Carey), Belle’s blogger idol, who is convinced she can heal her own cancer, and later her mother’s, with juicing, and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), a breast-cancer patient desperate for alternatives to the brutality of chemotherapy. Presumably “Coffee Enema” was not as enticing a title as “Apple Cider Vinegar,” but that pseudoscientific practice occupies a lot screen time here. A lot.The story unfolds in jumbled timelines, mostly between 2009 and 2015. The size and gnarliness of the lesions on Milla’s arms situate where she is in her prognosis, and Lucy grows increasingly wan. Belle’s “journey,” in contrast, is told by the state of her veneers — the brighter and shinier, the more recent. Belle’s grifts began in her teens, but she started honing her cancer story on mommy message boards as a young mother. “One of the worst things that can happen to a person happened to me!” she declares, lapping up each molecule of pity she can wring from others.“Vinegar” has more depth and bite than many other scam stories, with more hypotheses about what might motivate someone to perpetrate social frauds: bad mom, absent dad, rapacious need for attention — the same things that lead a lot of people to a life on the stage. Alienation and desperation are powerful motivators, and Devers’s performance makes Belle just sympathetic enough to reel you in.For those who want more from the world of cancer frauds, the documentary series “Scamanda,” based on a podcast of the same name, airs Thursdays at 9 p.m. on ABC. (Episodes arrive the next day on Hulu; the series debuted on Jan. 30.) Amanda Riley lied for years about having cancer, blogging about it and giving talks at her church, scamming friends and community members out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Where “Vinegar” focuses on the perpetrator, “Scamanda” is more concerned with the victims, with their humiliation and revulsion over being had. It’s a mediocre doc, but the story is wild. More

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      At Sundance Film Festival, a Sense of Uprooting Onscreen and Off

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      As it searches for a new home beyond Park City, Utah, the film festival showcases a neo-western, a promising comedic debut and two unsettling documentaries.If a festival can be summed up in one word, then the word for this year’s Sundance Film Festival is weird. That was the adjective that drifted through my mind as I circled in and out of screenings, chatted with other attendees and scanned local headlines. Weird could apply to some of the selections in the event, which ends Sunday. But it wasn’t so much the lineup that struck many of us, it was the festival, the pre-eminent American showcase for U.S. independent cinema and beyond. The vibe felt off, we murmured, the energy muted.For good reason, too. The fires in Los Angeles County were still burning when Sundance opened on Jan. 23. Park City, Utah, is a long way from the Hollywood sign, but Sundance and the mainstream industry have always been codependents, and when the mainstream feels unsettled, you can feel the anxiety in the air. Making matters worse is that the conflagration in California is just the latest crisis facing the movie world, which continues to grapple with the aftershocks of the pandemic and back-to-back strikes, along with its self-inflicted wounds.Adding to this Great Movieland Unsettlement is Sundance’s search for a new home. Last year, the festival announced that it was exploring alternatives to Park City, where it has been held for decades. Among the stated reasons is that the event has outgrown the resort town, which has a population of just over 8,200 and an infrastructure that remains ill-equipped to handle such a large annual inundation. Every year, tens of thousands of movie lovers swarm into Park City, straining resources and local patience. Now, after a search, Sundance has settled on three alternatives: Cincinnati; Boulder, Colo.; and Salt Lake City, where the festival already screens movies, with some events remaining in Park City.Questions about where Sundance will land percolated throughout this year’s event, which features the usual great and good, bad and blah selections. Among the standouts is Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary “The Perfect Neighbor,” which tracks how friction between a white woman and her multiracial neighbors in Florida turned progressively heated and then horrifyingly lethal. Consisting largely of imagery culled from police body cameras and interrogation interviews, it offers up a horrifying look at everyday racial animus and stand-your-ground laws. It also underscores, as the white woman makes one 911 call after another, that there’s nothing funny about the prejudices and pathologies of a so-called Karen.“The Alabama Solution,” a documentary by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, looks at the state’s notoriously deficient prison system.Sundance Institute, via Associated PressWe 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