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      ‘King Coal’ Review: A View From Appalachia

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      A coal miner’s daughter turned filmmaker profiles a region’s relationship with fossil fuel and presents a eulogy for a way of life.In her personal documentary “King Coal,” the director Elaine McMillion Sheldon records the modern traditions — beauty pageants, local football games and modest festivals — that commemorate the once dominant natural resource that powered central Appalachia. Through archival footage and vivid narration, Sheldon notes how the discovery of the precious black rock led to an economic boom that inspired a vibrant middle class in the 20th century, born from labor struggle. She also observes how the poisonous fossil fuel destroys the environment. The film is both a cumulative eulogy for a way of life and an examination of the climate crisis through witnessing the charred remains of these rural landscapes.“King Coal,” however, isn’t merely a remembrance. By following two girls, Lanie Marsh and Gabrielle Wilson, Sheldon also considers the future of this region, which, like many industrial corners of the United States, is still struggling to imagine its own economic possibilities.Sheldon’s film doesn’t answer what lies ahead. Rather the poignantly poetic rhythms and wistful insights of “King Coal” are meant to provide closure. Healing in her documentary can take form in on-the-nose metaphors, such as the film staging a literal funeral for the anthropomorphized King Coal, or move through subtler means, like the sharing of oral history by locals in several Appalachian states.Sheldon also locates the beauty, potentiality and sorrow of the region to its surrounding mountain ranges, from forested rolling hills to the mounds of coal on river barges. But in this melancholic, thoughtfully attuned cinematic essay, no mountain is more important than the people who are still confined to the claustrophobic tunnels of the past.King CoalNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘All Up in the Biz’ Review: Showtime’s Biz Markie Documentary

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      Biz Markie created hits like “Just a Friend” and influenced a wide range of rappers, many of whom remember him fondly in this Showtime documentary.Biz Markie’s death in 2021, at the way-too-young age of 57, robbed hip-hop — hell, robbed American music, period — of one of its most idiosyncratic and singular talents.“All Up in the Biz,” a new documentary directed by Sacha Jenkins, is a cogent, affectionate and largely apt tribute to Markie, the D.J. and rapper who was known as a gifted beatboxer.The documentary uses animation along with comedic and dramatic sketches to underscore Markie’s irresistibly antic nature. For instance, while there are no documentary scenes of his extended hospitalization before his death, the artist’s wife, Tara Hall, re-enacts the loving care she gave to her husband, who’s played in the dramatization by a bemused-looking puppet.Even as the movie portrays Markie — whose birth name was Marcel Theo Hall and who is frequently referred to by friends as “Mark” — as a clown prince whose humor was a way of deflecting and transcending a tough childhood, it charts the near-parallel development of Bronx-bred hip-hop and its Long Island brand, with Markie a stellar representative of the latter. In his early days, the rapper worked on his lyrics and delivery with the Juice Crew, a collective in Queens, before he released his first EP.With respect to commercial development, Markie was, as the cliché goes, crazy like a fox, even if his charms weren’t immediately appreciated. The entertainment veteran Bernard Alexander recalls hearing the eccentrically drippy “Just a Friend” in demo form and throwing the cassette off a hotel balcony. Months later it was Markie’s breakthrough single, and the burly, goofy guy behind it was a pop star.“You get a little jealous when someone loves hip-hop more than you do,” the rapper and record producer Rakim, a close friend, says here. “Biz made me jealous.”All Up in the BizNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Showtime platforms. More

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      ‘The Eternal Memory’ Review: A Love That Lasts When Recollections Fade

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      This documentary from Maite Alberdi looks at how a couple faces one partner’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis.The word “Alzheimer’s” isn’t spoken until well into “The Eternal Memory.” While that may be because this documentary’s subjects rarely mention it themselves, withholding the diagnosis also seems like a deliberate choice by the director, Maite Alberdi (“The Mole Agent”).An uncannily intimate portrait of a couple adapting their relationship to a disease that affects the mind, “The Eternal Memory” doesn’t aim to hold spectators’ hands. Like Paulina Urrutia, whose husband, Augusto Góngora, is the one with Alzheimer’s, the viewer must continually reassess Góngora’s lucidity, which for long stretches is hardly in doubt. Part of Urrutia’s strategy is to gently quiz him about their lives. Does he remember their first date? Was it at one of their homes? (The correct answer is no: Neither can cook.)Góngora — who died in May, after the film was completed and first shown — was a TV journalist in Chile who participated in underground newscasts during the Pinochet dictatorship. Urrutia is an actress who served as culture minister during the Chilean president Michelle Bachelet’s first term. Their occupations add another layer of reflexivity: In different ways, both were involved in telling other people’s stories and preserving the national memory.Urrutia, who is shown taking over the shooting of the documentary once the pandemic necessitated isolation, is almost surreally unflappable; she is rarely seen losing patience with Góngora, although there is a heart-rending scene in which she informs him that he has gone a whole morning without recognizing her. Could any film completely capture such a private dynamic? Surely not, but at moments, “The Eternal Memory” appears to come close.The Eternal MemoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Rodriguez, Singer Whose Career Was Resurrected, Dies at 81

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      Two albums in the early 1970s went largely unnoticed in the United States, but not overseas. Then came the 2012 documentary “Searching for Sugar Man.”Rodriguez, a Detroit musician whose songs, full of protest and stark imagery from the urban streets, failed to find an American audience in the early 1970s but resonated in Australia and especially South Africa, leading to a late-career resurgence captured in the Oscar-winning documentary “Searching for Sugar Man” in 2012, died on Tuesday. He was 81.A posting on his official website announced his death but did not say where he died or provide a cause.Rodriguez’s story was, as The New York Times put it in 2012, “a real-life tale of talent disregarded, bad luck and missed opportunities, with an improbable stop in the Hamptons and a Hollywood conclusion.”Rodriguez — who performed under just his surname but whose full name was Sixto Diaz Rodriguez — was playing bars in Detroit in the late 1960s, his folk-rock reminding those who heard it of Bob Dylan, when the producer Harry Balk signed him. In the documentary, Dennis Coffey and Mike Theodore, who would go on to produce his first album, “Cold Fact” (1970), told of hearing Rodriguez at a particularly smoky establishment called the Sewer on the Detroit River, where he was playing, as he often did, with his back to the audience.“Maybe it forced you to listen to the lyrics, because you couldn’t see the guy’s face,” Mr. Coffey said.A single released under the name “Rod Riguez” went nowhere. “Cold Fact,” released on the Sussex label, drew a smattering of favorable notices; its first track, “Sugar Man,” gave the documentary its title.“Rodriguez is a singing poet/journalist, telling stories of today,” Jim Knippenberg wrote in The Cincinnati Enquirer. “He does it with a voice much like Dylan’s, very Dylanesque imagery and a musical backing dominated almost entirely by a guitar. But he’s not a Dylan carbon. Rodriguez is much more explicit.”Mostly, though, the album went unnoticed in America, as did its follow-up a year later, “Coming From Reality.”“Getting the records cut was easy,” Rodriguez told The Sydney Morning Herald of Australia in 1979. “Getting them played was a lot harder.”Rodriguez performing in Paris in 2013. He found a fan base overseas and went on tour after the documentary was released to rave reviews.Pierre Andrieu/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe was being interviewed by an Australian newspaper that year because, while he had settled into a life as a laborer and office worker in Detroit (though still playing bars and even running unsuccessfully for various political offices), he had — unknown to him — been developing fans overseas. Australia was one place where his music had found an audience, and in 1979 he was invited to tour there. He returned in 1981 for a few shows with the band Midnight Oil and released a live album in Australia.Rodriguez’s music had found an even bigger following in South Africa, which was still under apartheid and cut off from the rest of the world in many respects. He seemed to have no idea how popular he was there, especially among white South Africans uncomfortable with apartheid and the country’s rigidly conservative culture.“To many of us South Africans, he was the soundtrack to our lives,” Stephen Segerman, owner of a Cape Town record store, said in the documentary. “In the mid-’70s, if you walked into a random white, liberal, middle-class household that had a turntable and a pile of pop records, and if you flipped through the records, you would always see ‘Abbey Road’ by the Beatles, you’d always see ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ by Simon and Garfunkel, and you would always see ‘Cold Fact’ by Rodriguez. To us, it was one of the most famous records of all time. The message it had was ‘Be anti-establishment.’”In the mid-1990s Mr. Segerman began trying to find out more about the mysterious artist known as Rodriguez and how he had died; rumors were rampant that he had killed himself onstage, died of an overdose, and so on. He joined forces with Craig Bartholomew-Strydom, a journalist who was also searching for Rodriguez, and eventually they found the singer, still living in Detroit. A 1998 tour of South Africa followed, with Rodriguez playing six sold-out shows at 5,000-seat arenas.“It was strange seeing all those bright white faces, all of them knowing every word to every one of my songs,” he told The Sunday Telegraph of Britain in 2009.After the South Africa tour he played shows in England, Sweden and other countries. In the United States, the label Light in the Attic rereleased “Cold Fact” in 2008 and “Coming From Reality” in 2009.“Searching for Sugar Man,” which focused on two men and their search for Rodriguez, won the Oscar for best documentary feature.Sony Pictures Classics/courtesy Everett Collection
      And there was another round of rediscovery ahead. In 2012 Malik Bendjelloul released “Searching for Sugar Man,” his first and only documentary (he died in 2014), to rave reviews. The film, which won the Oscar for best documentary feature, concentrated on the search by Mr. Segerman and Mr. Bartholomew-Strydom and included an interview with Rodriguez, who in the aftermath found himself at the Hamptons International Film Festival and embarking on a fresh round of touring.Matt Sullivan founded Light in the Attic Records, which reissued Rodriguez’s albums.“His words and music were brutally honest and raw to the core,” he said by email. “It instantly struck a chord the second we heard it, and still does, nearly 20 years later.”Sixto Diaz Rodriguez was born on July 10, 1942, in Detroit. His mother, Maria, died when he was a boy. His father, Ramon, was a laborer who became a foreman at a steel plant.He said that he started playing the guitar at 16.“Of course I’ve been into Dylan forever,” he told The Times in 2012, “and also Barry McGuire, the whole ‘Eve of Destruction’ thing.”During his period of relative anonymity after the release of his albums, he earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Wayne State University in Detroit.Information about his survivors was not immediately available.The “Coming From Reality” album includes a song called “Cause,” a lament about hard times and life’s disappointments.“They told me everybody’s got to pay their dues,” Rodriguez sings. “And I explained that I had overpaid them.”But in the 2009 interview with The Sunday Telegraph, he was more serene about his unusual career path.“My story isn’t a rags to riches story,” he said. “It’s rags to rags, and I’m glad about that. Where other people live in an artificial world, I feel I live in the real world. And nothing beats reality.” More

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      Jess Search, a Force in the Documentary Genre, Dies at 54

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      As one of the leaders of Doc Society, she supported countless filmmakers, with an emphasis on underrepresented groups and unconventional stories.Jess Search, a producer on dozens of important documentaries and a catalyst on many more as one of the directors of Doc Society, a nonprofit organization she helped found in 2005 that supports documentary filmmakers, died on July 31 in London. She was 54.Doc Society said in a statement that the death, in a hospital, was caused by brain cancer. Search had announced last month that she was stepping away from the organization because of her illness.Search had been a central figure in the documentary scene in Britain and beyond for years. She was gender nonconforming (she used the pronouns “she” and “her” but preferred not to use the gendered courtesy title Ms.), and she had a special interest in promoting work by filmmakers from underrepresented populations or that dealt with out-of-the-mainstream subjects.She was a producer or executive producer on some of those films, like Matthew Barbato’s “Alexis Arquette: She’s My Brother” (2007), about a sex reassignment surgery, and Agniia Galdanova’s “Queendom,” which was released earlier this year and is about a queer Russian performance artist.Her family and colleagues said she was even more devoted to her work at Doc Society, which she led with several other directors and which describes itself as “committed to enabling great documentary films and connecting them to audiences globally.” Since its founding, it has backed hundreds of documentary projects, supporting emerging filmmakers financially and with expert input.“Jess was a builder,” Laura Poitras, director of the Oscar-winning “Citizenfour” (2014), about Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor who leaked classified information, said by email. “A builder of communities, infrastructures (material and immaterial), and imaginations.”That film had support from Doc Society, which at the time was called the Britdoc Foundation. (The name changed in 2017 to better reflect the organization’s global focus.) So did “While We Watched” (2022), about the travails of independent television journalism in India, on which Search is credited as an executive producer. Vinay Shukla, its director, called Search “ragingly courageous and resolutely funny.”“It was an impossible film,” he said by email, “and I’d wake up to find new holes in our boat everyday. I would spin and spiral. And then I’d get on a call with Jess and everything would be all right. She would read me poems over Zoom while figuring out my legal strategy. She was always 10 steps ahead.”Tabitha Jackson, who was director of the documentary film program at the Sundance Institute for years and was the Sundance Film Festival director from 2020 to 2022, said Search invigorated the entire genre.A poster for “While We Watched,” about the travails of independent television journalism in India. Search was an executive producer.MetFilm Distribution/Courtesy Everett Collection“In her championing of the field of independent film, and the art of impact and the impact of art, Jess often said that ‘If you are going to move people to act, first you have to move them,’” she said by email, “and that was apparent in the many independent films she was deeply involved in.”“But beyond individual films,” she added, “her strategic laser focus and abundant kinetic energy evangelized and galvanized a collective that could turn a moment into a movement and a challenge into an opportunity for transformation.”Jess Search was born on May 15, 1969, in Waterlooville, England, near Portsmouth, to Phil and Henrietta Search. She grew up in Sevenoaks, southeast of London, and attended Tonbridge Grammar School before earning a bachelor’s degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford University. In 2008 she added a master’s degree from Cass (now Bayes) Business School.In an interview at the 2021 BFI London Film Festival, Search said she had no particular career aspirations after earning her undergraduate degree but chose her path for an unusual reason.“I knew I was gender nonconforming,” she said, “and at that time, leaving university at the very beginning of the ’90s, I knew that I couldn’t work anywhere that had any kind of formal or informal dress code.”Being a lawyer or management consultant was out, she said, “because I’ll have to turn up every day wearing clothes I don’t want to wear.”“So,” she added, “I was like, ‘I think I’d better go into the media,’ because that seemed like a space where it was less formal.”An uncle working in television hired her as his assistant. That led to a job as a commissioning editor for independent film and video at Britain’s Channel 4, which at the time was programming a wide variety of documentaries. In the BFI interview, she expressed a particular fondness for “the Box,” a cardboard box where unsolicited films and ideas for films were collected.“This box was full of amazing, crazy stuff that people just sent in to us,” she recalled in the interview. The channel programmed mainstream documentaries as well, she said, but the Box provided “that sense that anything might happen, that anything might be in there, and you might hear from anyone around the world with something to say.”In 1998 Search was one of the founders of Shooting People, a networking organization for people in the documentary world. In late 2004 Channel 4 shut down its independent film and video department, prompting her and others to start what became Doc Society.Search is survived by her wife, the producer and director Beadie Finzi, and their children, Ella Wilson and Ben Wilson.The outpouring of tributes to Search on social media and elsewhere after her death included a statement from Joanna Natasegara, an Oscar-winning producer who had worked with her.“She believed documentaries could change the world,” she said, “and she spent much of her life lifting up others and proving her thesis.” More

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      Claire Simon Finds a New Subject: Herself

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      The French director Claire Simon was making a movie about a Paris hospital when she found out she had cancer. So she became a character in her own film.Midway through filming “Our Body,” a sprawling documentary about the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital, the movie’s director, Claire Simon, received some medical news of her own: She had breast cancer.Four weeks into the shoot, Simon had discovered a lump beneath her armpit. But rather than cease production, she decided to improvise and turn the camera on herself.“I had to film a lot of naked women,” Simon in a recent video interview. “Then I was naked, too, and I was just like them. This changed my point of view entirely; it helped me cope and be calm in the face of my own sickness.”Motivated by the desire to show what she called the body’s “hidden truth,” Simon is but one patient among dozens in her documentary’s celebration of the body, depicted in all its wondrous and terrible iterations. “Our Body” — which played in this year’s Berlin International Film Festival and is showing at Film Forum in New York from Aug. 4 — assembles intimate patient-doctor consultations and surgical procedures into something like a volume of short stories. The subjects include abortion, artificial insemination, birth, gender transitioning, menopause and, eventually, disease and death.The veteran French filmmaker, a prolific creator of documentaries and fictional narratives that blur the boundaries between those two modes, has made a career out of turning the experiences of ordinary people into epic tapestries of human life.Often, she begins with a place. A Paris train station provides the setting for two films: “Gare du Nord,” (2013) an ensemble drama about briefly intersecting lives, and “Human Geography (2013), a documentary composed of interviews with the station’s inhabitants.“If you dive into pockets of everyday life, the world becomes very large,” Simon said. In “Our Body,” she added, she was concerned by questions like, “How does our civilization treat the female body?,” and, “What is the relationship between the body and words?”“I had to film a lot of naked women,” Simon said. “Then I was naked, too, and I was just like them. Cinema Guild”Our Body” is set in the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital.Cinema GuildBy capturing long, uninterrupted scenes of patients speaking with their doctors, “Our Body,” underscores the alienating nature of medical jargon. Yet these observational scenes also create room for the kind of bracingly personal testimonies that have long characterized Simon’s work. See, for instance, her 2018 documentary “Young Solitude,” a series of frank discussions with suburban high schoolers; or “Mimi” (2003), a kind of hangout movie in which Simon’s gregarious friend Mimi relates her life story as she drifts through Nice, France, her hometown.Simon was also raised in southern France (though she was born in Britain) by a family of painters and writers. She studied Arabic and anthropology in Algeria before teaching herself how to edit and use a camera. In the 1980s, she began making narrative shorts and eventually received a scholarship to attend a prestigious documentary workshop led by Jean Rouch, known as the father of cinéma-vérité.It was around this time that Simon discovered some of her most crucial inspirations, like Raymond Depardon, Robert Kramer and Frederick Wiseman — “my great master,” she said. Wiseman’s influence is apparent in Simon’s fascination with public spaces and lengthy conversations. “The Competition” (2016), a study of the admissions process for La Fémis, France’s most prestigious film school, seems to take up his mantle — Simon herself has described the film as “Wisemanesque.”According to Abby Sun, the director of artists’ programs at the International Documentary Association, Simon’s work nevertheless represents a significant departure from Wiseman’s detached and unobtrusive style.Simon’s movies are “metatextual, and they exhibit a knowing, personal touch. They show her as part of the fabric of the place or situation she’s filming,” Sun said, citing as examples a series of films Simon had made about her daughter, the philosopher Manon Garcia.The relationship between Simon and her subjects helps determine the shape of the film. This connection is key to her form of auteurism.“There’s a clear sense that there’s something collaborative going on, that there’s been a dialogue between the filmmaker and the subject,” said Eric Hynes, a film curator at the Museum of the Moving Image.Simon in Los Angeles, in August. “I feel that I have many, many more films to make,” she said.Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York Times“Nowadays, we’re constantly asking, ‘Where’s the consent? How do we know that the subject feels comfortable with what’s being filmed?’,” he added. “Claire has been at the vanguard of what we consider a responsible way of making documentaries for 20 plus years now.”Simon said although she considered herself a sloppy camera operator, she refuses to give the job to anyone else. Looking through the viewfinder allowed her to connect more organically with what she’s filming, she said. “If I’m holding the camera, I’m able to improvise and change my mind and I don’t have to bother with justifying myself,” she said. “As a woman, it’s a huge relief.”Having successfully undergone cancer treatment, Simon isn’t just relieved, she’s energized. Toward the end of the interview in late July, Simon gleefully announced that it was her birthday that day. She had just turned 68. “I feel that I have many, many more films to make,” she said.“Mr. Wiseman is 93, and he’s made another beautiful one this year, like he does every year,” she added. “That means I’ve got a little time yet.” More

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      ‘Charm Circle’ Review: Welcome to Queens

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      In this tender and funny documentary, Nira Burstein films her parents in their house in Queens without making excuses about their unsettled lives.Not many documentaries about families are truly able to get into the unkempt reality of home life, without tidy explanations and dramatic beats. In the touching and funny “Charm Circle,” Nira Burstein films her parents in their shambolic house in Queens with a persistent, loving curiosity about their relationship with each other and with their three adult daughters.Burstein lets us see her parents, Raya and Uri, for the people they are, rather than simply diagnosing their situation, which is only part of their story. Each of them faces psychiatric issues, as does their daughter Judy, who is developmentally disabled. Financial troubles also loom. But with a skill that’s easy to take for granted, the filmmaker portrays the matter-of-fact eccentricities of their personalities and their love, anger, and confusion — the emotional weather system of it all.Raya gazes at the hilariously quotable Uri with adoration, but can’t stand his temper. Uri was a real estate agent until a “nervous breakdown,” he says; Raya’s psychiatric challenges led her to be hospitalized. Home videos show how some habits and disputes have persisted for years. One daughter, Adina, fled to live on the West Coast, and is planning to marry two women, which Uri finds at odds with Jewish law.Uri and Raya (who have disarmingly direct affects) show a mix of insight and innocence that also feels like a faithful rendering of the vulnerability within a relationship. The nickname for their residence, “The Glass House,” recalls the famously troubled family of J.D. Salinger’s stories — an apt echo for this film’s rumpled intimacy.Charm CircleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. Watch on the Criterion Channel. More

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      ‘A Compassionate Spy’ Review: Back to the U.S.S.R.

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      The scientist and spy Theodore Hall is profiled in this warm, low-key documentary.The subject of the absorbing documentary “A Compassionate Spy” might be the brilliant atomic physicist Theodore Alvin Hall, but its star is his nonagenarian widow, Joan. Funny, candid and eager to share, this delightful woman — and her unwavering support for her husband’s espionage during World War II — sets the tone for a film that leaves no doubt as to the location of its sympathies.These will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the work of the film’s writer and director, Steve James, whose empathy for his subjects has always been evident. And by placing Hall’s leaking of nuclear secrets to the Soviets within the context of the couple’s romantic and robust marriage, James gently wraps the viewer in the warmth of Joan’s memories. The effect is sneakily disarming.“I felt so proud of him,” she confesses to James during one of several interviews. “Ted was trying to prevent a holocaust.” Recruited by the Manhattan Project in 1944 at the age of 18, Hall was the youngest scientist working on the development of an atomic bomb and eager to win a race against the Nazis. Later, fearing the consequences of a single country’s monopoly on such a terrible weapon, he decided (with the help and encouragement of his best friend, the poet Saville Sax) to pass classified nuclear details to the Soviet Union. Despite being subjected to F.B.I. interrogations and decades of surveillance, Hall was never prosecuted, his spying concealed from the public until a few years before his death in 1999.Ensconced in her cozy home outside Cambridge, England, Joan (who died last month) is an entertaining booster of her husband’s legacy. Recalling her close postwar friendship with Hall and Sax at the University of Chicago (in nostalgic re-enactments, we see the threesome gamboling on the grass like well-fed puppies), she cheekily hints at a youthful love triangle and reveals that Hall confessed his spying before their marriage. She was unfazed.Hall’s own feelings about the espionage — expressed in clips from various interviews, including the 1998 docuseries “Cold War” and excerpts from a VHS tape belonging to Joan — would grow more nuanced. (The film’s title comes from his citing of compassion as a “major factor” in his decision to leak.) Strangely, he admits no fear for his own safety, and even had to be dissuaded from trying to prevent the 1953 executions of the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.Noting America’s political about-face from pro-Russian propaganda (like Michael Curtiz’s 1943 movie “Mission to Moscow”) to Red-scare paranoia, James keeps his camera calm and the talking heads to a minimum. The dramatizations are nicely filmed, if a little hokey, and the overall velvety tone is peppered with piquant details, like Hall communicating with the Russians in a code derived from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”Wry, shy and fragile-looking, Hall gets off lightly here, with little interrogation of his patriotism, personal ethics or fears of a nuclear world’s potential for catastrophic error. (He candidly describes working on the bomb as “exhilarating.”) The general impression given by this warm, low-key film is that the spying was a simple act of pacifism. Countervailing voices are faint and few; anyone seeking more vigorous pushback will have to look elsewhere.A Compassionate SpyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More