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      ‘Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero’ Review: A Hip-Hop Trailblazer

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      The documentary, streaming on Max, follows the queer singer-rapper on the road and at home, but the best scenes by far are when he is onstage.To watch the singer-rapper Lil Nas X in the documentary “Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero” is to witness a Black queer man embody a power that still feels very new.Directed by Carlos López Estrada (“Raya and the Last Dragon”) and Zac Manuel, this film, streaming on Max, is historically important given its subject’s place in hip-hop, a genre dominated by heterosexuality and hypermasculinity. New interview footage with Montero Lamar Hill, a.k.a. Lil Nas X, from both on the road and in his home, is juxtaposed with performances from the artist’s recent “Long Live Montero Tour,” a celebration of queer eroticism and joy.But the scenes are assembled like the wall collage of pop stars that we see in his otherwise empty bedroom, resulting in frustrating interview segments that are both broad and cursory. Lil Nas X is forthcoming in the documentary about his preshow bowel movements, for example, but is less open about more meaningful thoughts, such as how his religious journey is connected to his work.When the musician Little Richard, known for his flashy attire and complicated past, comes up in a 1972 interview clip that Lil Nas X briefly comments on, the film makes a quick point about Black queer artists who have struggled to be out. It then falters by generalizing a history that, with some added details, could have better emphasized Lil Nas X’s current impact on culture.“Saying actual words — it’s really hard to do,” Lil Nas X eventually admits. Still, the best parts of this documentary are onstage, where his freedom to be himself tells its own thrilling story.Lil Nas X: Long Live MonteroNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      Gypsy Rose Blanchard and the Big Shift in True Crime

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      Not long ago, true crime storytellers had little in the way of first-person footage captured in real time to rely on. Now, as much of our daily lives are documented, the genre is transforming.There’s a moment near the end of the 2017 documentary “Mommy Dead and Dearest” where Gypsy Rose Blanchard is filming her boyfriend at the time, Nicholas Godejohn, as he lies nude in a hotel room bed. A day earlier, Godejohn had stabbed to death Gypsy’s mother, Dee Dee Blanchard. The killing was part of a plot the couple hatched to free Gypsy, who was then 23, from her mother’s grip so they could be together. In the short video, we hear Gypsy make a playful sexual comment amid her copious, distinctive giggling.Dee Dee Blanchard had abused and controlled her daughter, mentally and physically, for decades. It was believed by many to be a case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a form of child abuse in which a caregiver might induce illness to draw public sympathy, care, concern and material gifts — and the saga captured the collective interest.The snippet is the first time we see it unfolding through Gypsy’s eyes, and the point of view serves as a glimmer of what would become one of the biggest shifts in true crime storytelling.Stories like these were once conveyed through re-enactments, dramatizations and interviews with police officers, journalists, medical professionals, family and friends. If there were primary sources, those were typically scans of photos of happy families or of grisly crime scenes underpinned by voice-over narration, exemplified on shows like “20/20,” “Dateline,” “Snapped,” “Forensic Files” and “48 hours.” Home video cameras, which became popular in the 1980s, certainly changed the true crime landscape, but those recordings were generally sparse and supplemental. In rare instances, viewers might hear directly from the perpetrators or victims in interviews often conducted years after the fact.Dee Dee Blanchard, right, with her daughter, Gypsy Rose Blanchard, who endured decades of physical and mental abuse by her mother. via The Blanchard Family/LifetimeNow we have reams of first-person digital footage, which means that viewers, more than ever, are privy to the perspectives of those directly involved, often during the period in which the crimes took place, closing the distance and making the intermediaries less essential. The case of Gypsy Rose Blanchard encapsulates the trajectory of this phenomenon. Her saga, for example, received the scripted treatment with “The Act,” a 2019 limited series on Hulu, for which Patricia Arquette won an Emmy. But those looking for a definitive, unvarnished, visceral take on the events now have options and direct channels, rendering that series as almost an afterthought.The rise of social media has, of course, accelerated this dynamic. Blanchard and Godejohn’s relationship was almost exclusively online before the murder, and Facebook posts and text messages between them were used in court by prosecutors to incriminate them. Godejohn was sentenced to life in prison; Gypsy received 10 years, of which she served about seven.She was released on Dec. 28, 2023, and the following day she posted a selfie to Instagram with the caption “First selfie of freedom,” which has gotten more than 6.5 million likes. Online, she’s been promoting her new Lifetime series, “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.” “This docuseries chronicles my quest to expose the hidden parts of my life that have never been revealed until now,” we hear her say from prison.Blanchard and her husband married in 2022 while she was still in prison. via Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Ryan AndersonShe has quickly become a social media celebrity, with more than eight million Instagram followers and nearly 10 million on TikTok. Since her release, she has shared lighthearted videos like one with her husband, Ryan Anderson (they married in 2022 while she was in prison), at “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” on Broadway and more serious ones, like a video in which she explains Munchausen syndrome by proxy.Technology’s influence on modern criminal investigations has become foundational in many documentaries from recent years.In the two-part HBO documentary “I Love You, Now Die: The Commonwealth v. Michelle Carter” (2019), the story is largely told through the thousands of text messages exchanged between two teenagers, Michelle Carter and Conrad Roy III, from 2012 to 2014. The text messages led up to the exact moment of Roy’s suicide. Selfie videos that Roy had posted online are also shown. Carter spent about a year in prison for her role in his death. The documentary (by Erin Lee Carr, who also directed “Mommy Dead and Dearest”) left me “spinning in circles, turning over thoughts about accountability, coercion and the nebulous boundaries of technology,” as I wrote last year.One of the highest profile murder trials in the United States in recent years — that of the disgraced lawyer Alex Murdaugh, who shot and killed his wife, Maggie, and son Paul in 2021 — ultimately rested on a staggering recording captured moments before the murders. That video, on Paul’s phone, placed the patriarch at the scene of the crime, sealing his fate: two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.Alex Murdaugh, center, as seen in the Netflix docuseries “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal.” His murder trial was among the most talked about in recent years.NetflixThe use of that footage, along with abundant smartphone video that brought viewers into the world of the Murdaughs, in documentaries like Netflix’s two-season “Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal,” would have been unimaginable not long ago.But perhaps no recent offering illustrates this shift like HBO’s docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.” Members of the group Love Has Won live-streamed their days and nights; they filmed and posted untold hours of preachments and online manifestoes to YouTube and Instagram Live. Much of the three-episode series comprises this footage, and in turn viewers watch Amy Carlson, who called herself “Mother God,” slowly deteriorate over the course of months from the perspective of the people who were worshiping her.It’s a vantage point so unnerving and haunting, it dissolves the line between storytelling and voyeurism. When the group films her corpse, which they cart across numerous state lines, camping with it along the way, we see all that, too, through the eyes of the devotees. Several of the followers continue to promote her teachings online.Amy Carlson, center, who led a group called Love Has Won, as seen in the HBO docuseries “Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God.”HBOIt was clear this month in the comments on Blanchard’s Instagram that many were uncomfortable with her re-emerging as a social media presence. Some found it odd that she would participate so heavily and publicly immediately after her release. Others thought it was in bad taste for her to celebrate her freedom while Godejohn serves a life sentence.The greatest criticism of the true crime genre is that horrors are being repackaged as guilty-pleasure entertainment, allowing viewers to get close — but not too close — to terrible things. And perhaps the best defense of true crime is that it allows viewers to process the scary underbelly of our world safely. It is a strange dance between knowledge, observation and entertainment.Either way, the fourth wall is cracking, and perhaps the discomfort this might cause has been a long time coming. More

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      Depardieu Sexual Assault Suit Dropped Over Statute of Limitations

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      Hélène Darras, a French actress, had accused Gérard Depardieu of groping her in 2007 on a movie set. A separate investigation of the actor is proceeding, Paris prosecutors said.A sexual assault lawsuit filed against Gérard Depardieu by a French actress has been dropped because it was past the statute of limitations, prosecutors in Paris said on Monday, but the French actor is still under investigation in a separate case.In the lawsuit that was dropped, the actress Hélène Darras had accused Depardieu of groping her on the set of “Disco,” a comedy released in 2008. Her suit had been filed in September but was made public only last month, shortly before she appeared in a France 2 television documentary alongside three other women who also accused Depardieu of inappropriate comments or sexual misconduct.The documentary, which showed Depardieu making crude sexual and sexist comments during a 2018 trip to North Korea, set off a fierce debate in France that prompted President Emmanuel Macron and dozens of actors, directors and other celebrities to defend Depardieu, splitting the French movie industry.Depardieu, 75, has denied any wrongdoing, and he has not been convicted in connection with any of the accusations against him.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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      Menachem Daum, Filmmaker Who Explored the World of Hasidim, Dies at 77

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      His acclaimed documentary “A Life Apart” presented a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable.Menachem Daum, a filmmaker who co-produced a groundbreaking 1997 documentary that illuminated the cloistered world of America’s Hasidim, died on Jan. 7 in a hospital near his home in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He was 77.His death was confirmed by Eva Fogelman, a friend and the author of a book about Christian rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. She said Mr. Daum had been treated for congestive heart failure.What made the documentary, “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” so striking was Mr. Daum’s ability to get people who scorn movies and television sets to sit on camera for revealing interviews, allowing him to chronicle their mores and rituals. The resulting film offered a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable; here it offered scenes of Hasidim joyfully dancing.That achievement was not a given. Mr. Daum, though ultra-Orthodox, was not Hasidic himself. And although he had earlier made a film about caregivers for the aged, he was scarcely a seasoned filmmaker.But he was well versed in the Torah, the Talmud and the intricacies of Orthodox Jewish observance. He spoke Yiddish — the Hasidic lingua franca — and lived in a Hasidic neighborhood. He teamed with an experienced filmmaker, Oren Rudavsky, the son of a Reform rabbi, to produce and direct the documentary.The Hasidic movement was founded in the 18th century in Eastern Europe by a rabbi known as the Baal Shem Tov, who felt that Judaism had overemphasized intellectual qualities to the detriment of spiritual fervor and sincerity.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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      ‘Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest’ Review: A Barrier-Breaking Ascent

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      This documentary tells the story of Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, the first Nepali woman to summit Earth’s highest mountain.Summiting Everest would be the feat of a lifetime for almost anyone. For Pasang Lhamu Sherpa, the first Nepali woman to reach the peak, it also meant challenging traditional gender norms in Nepal. And it required transcending a role that Nepali mountain guides have historically played — namely, helping tourist mountaineers rather than taking the lead.The documentary “Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest,” directed by Nancy Svendsen (whose brother-in-law was a brother of Sherpa’s), explains how its title subject became a famed figure in Nepal. Opening with footage of a memorial procession in Kathmandu in 1993, it makes clear at the outset that her record requires a sad asterisk: Although she reached the summit on April 22 of that year, she died on descent.“I wasn’t born a mountaineer,” Sherpa says in an interview excerpted at the film’s start. “I’m just a housewife.” According to the documentary, the first mountain she climbed to its peak was not in Nepal, but Mont Blanc in Europe. What she learned there served as inspiration for an ascent closer to home.Drawing on interviews with family members and fellow climbers, “Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest” describes the various social, national and financial obstacles that Sherpa encountered. Jan Arnold, a New Zealand doctor and climber who was on Everest contemporaneously, vividly explains the physical toll that acclimating to the mountain can take.While the interviewees speak of Sherpa with sincerity and affection, “Pasang: In the Shadow of Everest” never locates a satisfying big-picture idea or formal approach that would make it more than a straightforward tribute.Pasang: In the Shadow of EverestNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘June’ Review: More Than Johnny Cash’s Wife

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      A new documentary by Kristen Vaurio details the life and career of the singer-songwriter, who was a member of country music royalty.The singer June Carter Cash was born in 1929 into the Carter Family, an influential early country music group, and toured with Elvis Presley in the 1950s. She married Johnny Cash in 1968 and became part of his touring show. She also wrote, with Merle Kilgore, of one of Cash’s greatest hits, “Ring of Fire.”Despite her contributions to music, her solo endeavor in 1999, “Press On,” elicited little interest from the major labels, but the album went on to win a Grammy regardless. Archival footage of its making anchors the new documentary “June,” directed by Kristen Vaurio.The phrase that gave that album its title, “Press On,” is a neat encapsulation of June’s life philosophy. Her love story with Cash, and her perseverance as he battled addictions, is one of the most renowned in the annals of 20th-century celebrity.“I thank God for people like her who still thought I had a little good in me,” Cash said in an archival interview. And John Carter Cash, the sole child of June and Johnny, says of the love his parents shared: “To get a window on that strength and beauty we have but to listen” to their music.The critic Robert Christgau once characterized Carter Cash, who died in 2003, as “that rare thing, an interesting saint: fiery, feisty, creative, proactive.” Contemporary interviews here with the likes of Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Carter Cash’s stepdaughter Rosanne Cash and Carter Cash’s daughter Carlene Carter, expand on her gifts, both musical and maternal.The bare facts of Carter Cash’s story are such that the filmmakers would have had to really mess up to not produce a movie that entertains and moves a viewer to tears. “June,” rest assured, does the job well.JuneNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      ‘Apolonia, Apolonia’ Review: A Whole Life in Art

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      The painter Apolonia Sokol is the ostensible subject of a wide-ranging documentary about life itself.“For as long as I can remember, I’ve seen the world through my camera,” a woman’s voice says in the early moments of “Apolonia, Apolonia.” Onscreen, we’re watching — presumably through that same camera — a young woman, strong features, entrancing smile, dark circles under her eyes, bearing the expression of a person who’s not afraid of the lens one bit. “But no motif,” the voice continues, “has caught my eye as she did.”The face belongs to Apolonia Sokol, but the voice belongs to Lea Glob, the filmmaker who followed Sokol off and on for 13 years. The pair first met in 2009, and Glob, who is Danish (and speaks mostly in Danish throughout the film), decided to make Sokol the subject of a film school assignment: to create a documentary portrait of a person. She was, she tells us, entranced by Sokol’s life. Raised in a theater in Paris, then in Denmark after her parents split up, having weathered a life-threatening disease as a teen, Sokol returned to Paris when she turned 18 with aspirations to “walk in the footsteps of the great painters.” By that time, the theater (which her father had run) was barely holding on, but Sokol created a world in it nonetheless. That world grabbed Glob and wouldn’t let go.The age-old documentarian’s question — who is really the subject of a nonfiction film? — constitutes a major theme that runs through “Apolonia, Apolonia.” Glob speaks of entering the “magical theater” in which Sokol “played the starring role,” but even as the artist ages, the theater closes and life shifts drastically, Glob stays along for the ride. “Whether I captured Apolonia with my camera or she captured me with her theater, I don’t know,” she says. Glob’s method is observation, without a particular end or point in mind, very nearly to a fault. She even admits, late in the film, that she couldn’t really figure out when to turn off the camera — a question that plagues many an observational documentarian, and most artists and writers, too. Every time Glob thought the film might be finished, Sokol’s life morphed again: a move to New York, to Los Angeles, stints working with artists and for businesspeople. Each time, Glob went back to film some more.This is not the kind of documentary intended to help you learn about the life of the painter Apolonia Sokol. Unless you’re deep in the art world, you may not even know who that is. Instead, it’s a movie about life and how it’s lived, with Sokol’s portraiture forming a pleasing harmony rather than a narrative backbone. The film moves roughly forward in time, but jumps backward and sideways sometimes, as if Glob — in making sense of the present — is remembering something she watched long ago. It’s easy to refashion any artist’s life as a narrative of inevitability, but Sokol paints with no guarantee that she’ll ever break into the mainstream art world. We watch her grueling uncertainty through the eyes of someone who also isn’t really sure what she’s making. The point here isn’t to document the rise of a star, but to observe the process of making.That fact alone sets “Apolonia, Apolonia” apart from the deluge of subject-approved documentaries that have flooded the market and film festivals in the past several years. Those movies are frequently hagiographic, though not inevitably so. The intended audience is the famous subject’s fans, or those who wish to be. Thus these films come with a built-in viewership, which brings along a healthy budget. They’re safe investments for funders and streamers, and the ecosystem is built for them. But they offer few surprises.In a movie like “Apolonia, Apolonia,” however, there’s no obvious path along which the story will unfold when filming begins, which makes it hard to pitch to the people who hold the purse strings. Instead, most of the director’s work comes in the editing stage, when the recurring threads in all that footage become more clear. The subject of this film is expulsion, and the way that Sokol’s story parallels that of women who have been cast from their homes because they refused to fit established molds, and must make new lives elsewhere. This theme is echoed in a more melancholy key in Sokol’s friend Oksana Shachko, a feminist activist whom Sokol took in when she became a refugee from her native Ukraine (and was “already an icon,” as Glob puts it). They live together for years, and describe themselves as a couple, as soul mates, though the nature of their intimacy is kept a bit coy in the film. What matters is their spiritual and creative connection, the support they give to each other in their pursuit of creativity and determination to avoid motherhood.Glob, on the other hand, gets pregnant and bears a child during the course of the filming — a fact that interests Sokol for how it represents a creative woman evolving her life. At the start of the film, the 20-something Sokol seems to be constantly performing for the camera, showing Glob the tapes her parents made of her own conception and birth. But as time wears on, the friendship between them, which slips on and off screen, grows into something more symbiotic. Mirrors appear: Sokol’s youthful illness is reflected in Glob’s life-threatening pregnancy complications. Sokol’s portraiture keeps shape-shifting as she matures as a painter, just as Glob’s portrait of Sokol keeps mutating.“Apolonia, Apolonia” is beguiling as a portrait of women with ambition, but also bittersweet. Glob repeatedly refers to her filming and Sokol’s painting, their work of creating portraits, as cheating death — something they both do in their real lives, too. “The truth is, I never had that control,” Glob says. It took her more than 13 years to understand what she was looking at: “life itself, larger, tougher, and more beautiful than I’d ever imagined.”“Apolonia, I’m going to turn off the camera now,” she says, as we see the smiling face of an older, wiser Sokol, less interested in performance now than in a full life. And then the screen goes black.Apolonia, ApoloniaNot rated. In Danish and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got’ Review: A Lens on a Jazz Luminary

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      Brigitte Berman’s dazzling 1985 look at the self-taught virtuoso clarinetist and bandleader is showing after a restoration.The documentarian Brigitte Berman has made two spectacular pictures about American jazz pioneers. The first, “Bix: ‘Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet’” (1981), chronicled the life of the brilliant and tragically short-lived cornetist and composer Bix Beiderbecke. It screened in a restoration at Film Forum a couple of years back. Now, her follow-up to that movie, “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” (1985), is similarly restored and booked at Film Forum.Shaw, the clarinetist and bandleader, was a devotee of Beiderbecke, and is interviewed in Berman’s Beiderbecke film. When Shaw walked away from music for a first time, early in what would be a lengthy but nevertheless self-truncated jazz career, he tried to write a novel about Bix. He couldn’t complete it, he says here, because the story had “depth and connotation that I wasn’t philosophically or mentally prepared to cope with.”Shaw was not only a self-taught virtuoso but also often the smartest guy in any room he was in. When he came back to the bandstand, his recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” was a smash hit of the swing era. An unselfconscious civil rights pioneer, he hired the Black singer Billie Holiday to sing with him at a time when that just wasn’t done.Charming as well as erudite, he married eight times, to Lana Turner and Ava Gardner among others. The marriages didn’t last because of his cantankerousness. The fame he avidly sought in his early years — “like any other American kid, I wanted more of everything,” he notes — eventually struck him as inane and repellent. An all-star roster of interviewees, including the luminaries Mel Tormé and Buddy Rich, contributes to an unfailingly entertaining saga. The movie on its first release did so well — it won an Oscar — that it prompted the ever-unsatisfied Shaw to sue for a bigger share of the picture’s profits.Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve GotNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More