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      ‘The League’ Review: A Crucial Baseball Legacy

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      Sam Pollard’s new documentary traces the history of the Negro leagues.If you thought that Jackie Robinson was the first Black player in professional baseball, “The League” would like to offer a correction. Moses Fleetwood Walker became a catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings in 1884, before organized baseball was segregated and more than 60 years before Robinson broke the major leagues’ color line.This documentary from Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”) traces the history of the Negro leagues that formed in the intervening years. And while the sport’s post-World War II integration was long overdue — one commentator cites the absurdity of Black and white men fighting together at Guadalcanal but being banned from competing on a diamond — “The League” notes that, as the majors grabbed star players without buying out their contracts, the Negro leagues and the economic communities built around them never received adequate compensation.Pollard presents the subject matter straightforwardly, occasionally dryly, with authors, historians and — in archival material — the players themselves sharing stories of team rivalries and of visionary owners. Among the (sometimes tragic) figures singled out are Rube Foster, credited here with increasing the tempo of the game and persuading other team owners to form a league; Josh Gibson, who still has one of the best season batting averages ever recorded; and Effa Manley, an owner of the Newark Eagles, a team raided for talent after the color barrier fell. The film even complicates the picture on some baseball legends. Larry Lester, a founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, notes that when Babe Ruth set the home run record — later broken by Hank Aaron — he did it at a time when racism had kept out many of the best pitchers.This history has surely been well-covered elsewhere, but “The League” recounts it movingly.The LeagueRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Andrew Ridgeley on George Michael and Life After Wham!

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      “The only thing I ever wanted to do from the age of 14 was to be in a band,” but he is content with the duo’s short career, which is chronicled in a new documentary.If you weren’t a teenager in 1984, it might be hard to understand this, but here goes: There are Gen X-ers who remember where they were the first time they saw the video for the Wham! clap-along pop anthem “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.”In it, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, the heartthrob frontmen of Wham!, wear big smiles and beachy short shorts as they perform their infectious bop — titled after a note Ridgeley had once left on his family’s refrigerator — for a small crowd of adoring fans. There were fingerless gloves, neon face paint, white “Choose Life” T-shirts that had nothing to do with abortion: It was a new-wave dance party for cool kids who thought Mötley Crüe sucked.Ridgeley, who turned 60 in January, remembers making it as great fun.“It was our first video with an audience,” he said during a recent video interview from his home in London. “The atmosphere was really quite excitable and exciting.”Ridgeley and his bandmate are the subject of “Wham!,” a new documentary that premieres on Wednesday on Netflix. Directed by Chris Smith, it charts the British group’s climb to pop stardom, beginning with its ferocious appearance on the music show “Top of the Pops” in 1982, through the global success that followed the albums “Fantastic” (1983) and “Make It Big” (1984), and finishing with the 1986 farewell concert in London.The film, which is itself directed like a power-pop video, explains how the duo’s modern mix of disco, funk, pop and soul, in songs like “Young Guns (Go for It),” “Careless Whisper” and “Freedom,” helped make Wham! one of the biggest pop groups of the late 20th century, even though it lasted just four years. Unlike bands that split over artistic or personal disagreements, Wham! didn’t have a rise and fall. “It was just a rise and they called it a day,” Smith said.They didn’t break up either, said Ridgeley, but rather “brought Wham! to a close in a manner of our own choosing.”Michael and Ridgeley at the height of their early popularity.NetflixFans might be disappointed to learn that in the documentary Ridgeley is heard but not seen as he appears today: debonair and patrician, with silver hair and a still-cheeky smile. Smith said it would have thrown the film’s mythic aspirations off balance if Ridgeley were on camera but not Michael, who died seven years ago at 53.After Wham!, Ridgeley told me, he and Michael were “no longer living in each other’s pockets” as they had done since they were kids. But their bond was fixed.If Ridgeley is tired of being known mostly for his friendship with Michael, he didn’t show it. He brightened when chatting about Michael, whose loss left Ridgeley feeling “like the sky had fallen in,” as he said in 2017. But he didn’t seem into talking much about his life now, other than to say he enjoyed cycling.The documentary includes archival media coverage and tons of concert footage, including scenes of groundbreaking shows in 1985, when Wham! became the first Western pop group to perform in China.But it’s Ridgeley’s mother who supplied the most personal treasures. Since her son’s grade-school days making music with Michael, she kept about 50 meticulously organized scrapbooks stuffed with photos, reviews and other ephemera. They include snapshots from the mid-1970s when Ridgeley first got to know Michael as Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, the son of a Cypriot father and a British mother.Ridgeley was also the son of an immigrant father — his dad was Egyptian — and a British mother, and he hit it off immediately with the boy he called Yog, a nickname he used often in our interview. The scrapbooks paint a vivid portrait of boys who loved Queen and “Saturday Night Fever” and desired to make music a career.“The only thing I ever wanted to do from the age of 14 was to be in a band, write songs and perform,” Ridgeley said with a 14-year-old’s enthusiasm in his voice, adding that fame and celebrity “were never a motivating factor for either of us.”Ridgeley said he and Michael knew Wham! would have a finite life span because Michael’s songwriting began “developing and evolving in a way and at a speed” that Wham! couldn’t accommodate. In November, Michael will be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.Since Wham!’s heyday, Ridgeley has battled the perception that he’s famous only because he was in a duo with a more talented artist. The documentary makes a case in his favor though, tracing how Ridgeley, a guitarist, collaborated with the composer and performer Michael.Still, Ridgeley acknowledged that his musicianship wasn’t in the same league as Michael’s, “one of the finest, if not the finest, singing voices of his generation,” he said, sounding like a proud brother.Ridgeley said his bond with Michael endured even after Wham! ended.NetflixWhen Michael came out to him after they filmed the video for “Club Tropicana” (1983), 15 years before he did so publicly, Ridgeley said he supported him with love and a shrug. Michael was more freaked out by how his father might react than how the public would, Ridgeley said; had Michael come out during the Wham! years, Ridgeley said he and fans would have had his back.“I didn’t think it was going to affect our success, and in the long term it probably wouldn’t,” he said. “It would have been difficult for a while for him, there’s no doubt about that. It would have required management by us all. But after the initial sensationalism, it’s on the table isn’t it?”After Wham!, Ridgeley released a 1990 solo album that flatlined and he did a short stint as a Formula 3 driver, but he has otherwise stayed out of the limelight. The British tabloids have kept breathless tabs on his love life — including his 25-year relationship with Keren Woodward, a former member of another ’80s pop group, Bananarama — much as they did when they gave him the Wham!-era nickname Randy Andy.Ridgeley didn’t pursue fame further because being in Wham! gave him “everything he wanted,” said Shirlie Kemp, a friend from school and a Wham! backup singer. Not just professionally.“I don’t think I ever met anyone else who was on par with George the way Andrew was, intellectually and with a sense of humor,” said Kemp, whose husband is Martin Kemp of the ’80s band Spandau Ballet. “It was the best relationship I’d ever seen George have with anyone.”Ridgeley said “few stones remain unturned” as he’s worked the past five years on projects that are all-things-Wham! In 2019, he published a memoir, “Wham! George Michael & Me,” and had a cameo that year in the romantic-comedy “Last Christmas,” which was inspired by the group’s eponymous chart-topping holiday single. Later this month comes “Echoes From the Edge of Heaven,” a Wham! singles collection.He still seems to be in awe of what he and his best friend made together.“I could never quite really get that we had achieved the same kind of success as the artists that we revered like gods when we were growing up,” he said. “We were playing Wembley Stadium, the same place Elton John played. You can say, ‘I am the same.’ But in your own mind, you’re never the same.” More

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      ‘Wham!’ Review: They Made It Big, Then Broke Up

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      A new movie documents George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley’s storming of the pop airwaves as the duo Wham! and laughs past the thorny questions.The new documentary about George Michael, Andrew Ridgeley and the music they made as Wham! — it’s just called “Wham!” — found me in a moment of need for a nostalgic, fantastical elixir, something short, sweet and tangential to my feeling of national blues. For one thing, Wham!, the duo, made soul music that popped. And the movie dances past all of the thorny moral and ethical questions of white people making Black stuff. Those questions don’t exist at all in this movie. That’s the fantasy. And I’m here for it. But also: Wham! didn’t have any thorns.Here were two white boys from England of solid Greek Cypriot (George) and Egyptian (Andrew) stock, born during Motown’s ascent in the early 1960s and, in adolescence, bonded to each other as disco was handing the party baton to new wave and rap. They synthesized it all (plus a little Barry Manilow and Freddie Mercury, and some Billy Joel) into a genre whose only other alchemists, really, were Hall and Oates. In every one of the duo’s roughly two dozen songs — including “Everything She Wants,” “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “I’m Your Man,” jams all — there’s influence but, in the movie’s conjuring, no anxiety. Race doesn’t quite exist here.The film doesn’t bother with journalism or criticism or music history. Just a lot of pictures and archival interviews, performance footage, outtakes and music videos. It’s essentially adapted, by the director Chris Smith and some very busy editors, from scrapbooks that Ridgeley’s mother kept, celebrating everything from the duo’s first attempt to storm the airwaves in 1981 to its acrimony-free breakup in 1986. That’s where things end, a year before the release of Michael’s megahit album “Faith,” and decades before his death in 2016 at 53. There’s no mention made, either, of Ridgeley’s misapprehended, out-of-print solo album from 1990, “Son of Albert.”There aren’t even any talking heads. The disembodied voices of Michael and Ridgeley guide the whole thing — rumination and memory as narration. (Most of Michael’s comes from a BBC Radio interview.) They explain how they met as schoolkids in the mid-1970s and took over a mini-block of 1980s culture. You get to hear Ridgeley still warmly call Michael by his nickname, Yog, for he was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou, and see both their looks pinball from leather bar to Richard Simmons.Nothing here’s overthought or pumped up. To invoke the words of a different beacon of catchiness, “Wham!” is a teenage dream. You could drink it from a coconut. You’re permitted to embrace Michael’s dexterous approach to Black music and Ridgeley’s affable interpretation of Michael’s blueprint as the way — a way — things could be. Easy, frictionless. You hear Michael rhyme on “Wham! Rap” just about as bodaciously as Grandmaster Flash or with some of Kurtis Blow’s humor, and no cold sweats follow. The homework had clearly been done. So, instead you say: He just … had It.I mean, the early 1980s were awash in young white Brits making hits, at least partially, out of slicked-up Motown: ABC, Bananarama, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Soft Cell. I’d say that sound came most naturally to Michael; it seemed most elastic to him. He really could make the most of a “do do do” or a “yeah yeah.” He had a knack for tattoo melodies and chord progressions so juicy that you want to bite into every section of almost every song.Michael learned early on how to shade his singing. He could get it to coo and wail and susurrate; Ridgeley, played a feisty, insinuating, shirt-unbuttoning guitar, an element I can now hear (and thanks to this film, appreciate). They made three albums in as many years, then stopped when the costs of fame became too much for Ridgeley but were barely meeting Michael’s expectations for himself. Wham!, for Michael, was the ground floor. To hear both men tell it, he was the stronger songwriter, and he really knew how to produce a record.My favorite story in the documentary involves a trip to Memphis that Michael took to record “Careless Whisper” with the legendary Muscle Shoals rhythm section under the supervision of the producer Jerry Wexler, another legend. Michael didn’t like what they did with the song. The movie lets you hear some of it, and the trademark warmth is what seems to be missing. There’s something almost metronomic about it. (If there were a moment for somebody to come in and do some explaining, this would be it. What exactly displeased George and eventually Andrew?) But I love this story because it stars these different generations of white soul musicians with divergent tastes in Black music. Maybe Wexler and the boys didn’t hear “Careless Whisper” the way Michael did. But he had the confidence (and the nerve) to take it home and redo it until it became the screen of silk and smoke we know today.“I’m never gonna dance again, the way I danced with you”? What a work of melodrama! Where’d it come from? Who did Michael do wrong? “Wham!” alludes to personal struggles — Michael with his sexuality; Ridgeley with partying. Michael recounts coming out to Ridgeley early on but to almost no one else. Success becomes his identity. In the film, that identity’s lowest moment happens at the end of 1984, when “Last Christmas,” on its way to being Wham!’s fourth U.K. chart-topper in the calendar year, is kept from the spot by “Do They Know It’s Christmas?,” the all-star charity-for-Africa record, which Wham! is on. Michael is bummed that he keeps himself stuck at No. 2.Michael chose to let ambition define him. But there is a kind of desperation in the average Wham! song, a crisis about either being trapped in lovelessness or excluded from love — a crisis audible, even to my young ears, as a wail from the closet. (The bouncy, blow-dried music videos were always a different story: What closet?) Meanwhile, the movie about the men who made these songs is all bright side. A little desp rarely sounded so good. A pair of more candid, if more conventional, documentaries exist about the darkness and light of Michael’s life. This one? It’s a prequel, one that personifies the Wham! Experience: over before you know it.Wham!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Paul Justman, Who Shed Light on Motown’s Unsung Heroes, Dies at 74

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      After establishing himself as a leading music video director in the 1980s, he found acclaim with his 2002 documentary about session musicians.During the filming of a climactic scene in his critically acclaimed documentary, “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” a celebration of the unheralded session musicians behind countless 1960s hits, Paul Justman could have found himself foiled by Detroit’s harsh winter.Arriving at the city’s MacArthur Bridge one morning to interview the guitarist Eddie Willis about Motown’s fateful move to Los Angeles in 1972, Mr. Justman and his crew found the bridge blanketed with fresh snow, seemingly impenetrable. But the director was undeterred.“To Paul, this was an opportunity,” his brother, the musician Seth Justman, said by phone. “The glistening snow helped accentuate the feeling of loss.”Throughout his career, Mr. Justman blended a photographer’s eye with a musician’s feel for the pulse of pop as a prominent director of music documentaries and videos.He died on March 7 at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles. He was 74. His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was confirmed by his brother.While Mr. Justman enjoyed a long and varied career, he is best known for “Standing in the Shadows of Motown.” That film, released in 2002, brought to light the lasting contributions made to pop music by the session musicians, known as the Funk Brothers, who fueled countless era-defining Motown hits despite working in obscurity.“This salute to the literally unsung and underrecognized studio heroes of Motown is so good because it is one of those rare documentaries that combine information with smashing entertainment,” Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times wrote in a review. “And it is one of the few nonfiction films that will have you walking out humming the score, if you’re not running to the nearest store to buy Motown CDs.”Among Mr. Justman’s other documentaries were “The Doors: Live in Europe 1968” (1990) and “Deep Purple: Heavy Metal Pioneers” (1991). He also made features, including the 1983 battle-of-the-bands tale “Rock ’n’ Roll Hotel,” which he directed with Richard Baskin, and “Gimme an ‘F,’” a romp about cheerleaders, released the next year.Still, none of his films could match the ubiquity of the music videos he made in the 1980s, capturing the era’s Day-Glo look and Pop Art sensibility as MTV reshaped the pop landscape.Mr. Justman brought a quirky sense of deadpan to videos like the Cars’ “Since You’re Gone,” Diana Ross’s “Muscles” and Rick Springfield’s “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” as well as the MTV staple “Centerfold” by the J. Geils Band — for which his brother happened to play keyboards.Some of the studio musicians behind the Motown sound got back together for “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” among them, from left, Eddie Willis, Joe Messina. Joe Hunter and Bob Babbitt.Entertainment Pictures/Alamy Stock PhotoPaul Evans Justman was born on Aug. 27, 1948, in Washington, the second of three children of Simon Justman, a government systems analyst, and Helen (Rebhan) Justman, a school drama teacher.Growing up in Washington, in Newton, Mass., and in Margate City, N.J., Mr. Justman was drawn to music (he played drums and guitar in rock bands as a teenager) and dance (at 9, he choreographed his own routines for courses at the Boston Conservatory). He also fell in love with photography.After graduating from Earlham College in Indiana in 1970 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy, he moved to New York City and took a job with a team making short films about American culture for Swedish television.He soon started working as an assistant to Robert Frank, the lauded documentary photographer and filmmaker. He eventually served as an editor on Mr. Frank’s notorious warts-and-all documentary about the Rolling Stones’ raucous 1972 North American tour, which became famous, in part for its obscene name, although it was never officially released.Mr. Justman, who moved to Los Angeles in 1980, was also a fixture behind the scenes with the J. Geils Band as it was climbing from the clubs of Boston toward fame. In the mid-1970s, he made a short documentary, “Postcards,” about the high-energy blues-rock band’s frenzied life on the road. That film, which featured appearances by the rock critic Lester Bangs, was broadcast on PBS.In addition to his brother, Mr. Justman is survived by his wife, Saundra Jordan, and his sister, Peggy Suttle Kligerman.Not all Mr. Justman’s work with the J. Geils Band was behind the camera. He often collaborated on songs with his brother, and he contributed lyrics for all the songs on the band’s final studio album, “You’re Gettin’ Even While I’m Gettin’ Odd” (1984), recorded after the kinetic frontman, Peter Wolf, left the band. (Seth Justman handled most of the lead vocals.)But, his brother said, it was Mr. Justman’s ever-present videos that helped break the band into the pop stratosphere. His “Freeze Frame” video, featuring band members dressed in white and splattering one another in paint as if they were human Jackson Pollock canvases, received heavy airplay on MTV. The song hit No. 4 on the Billboard singles chart in 1982.But it could not match “Centerfold,” from the previous year, in ubiquity. The video for that song, featuring models marching around a high school classroom in teddies and, famously, a snare drum filled with milk, become a token of Generation X pop culture, and the song became the band’s first and only No. 1 hit.“MTV was really starting to cook,” Seth Justman said of “Centerfold,” “and that cinematic and energetic approach, along with splashes of humor, resonated and lit the fuse. The song, and the video, shot like a rocket.” More

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      ‘Every Body,’ a Documentary on Intersex Lives, Champions the Power of Activism

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      With “Every Body,” Julie Cohen looks at both what her subjects have been through and how they are translating those experiences into action.The new documentary “Every Body” gets intimate with its subjects, from their birth records to their body parts. The film is about being intersex, an umbrella term for people who were born with anatomic or genetic characteristics that don’t match the typical definition of male or female.By some estimates, said Julie Cohen, the writer-director of “Every Body,” one in 1,500 people have intersex traits “significant enough that they may receive medical intervention.”“Part of the point of the film is there are more intersex people out there than you know,” she said in an interview by phone.But until recently, they were often closeted, told by the medical establishment and family members to keep their conditions secret. That may now be changing.The film, out Friday, focuses on three intersex activists: Alicia Roth Weigel, a political and business consultant and the author of a forthcoming memoir, “Inverse Cowgirl”; River Gallo, a filmmaker and actor; and Sean Saifa Wall, a public health researcher and a founder of the Intersex Justice Project, which opposes medically unnecessary and invasive surgery for intersex children.All three had procedures as children, to remove or add testes, surgeries they wish had not been done. On one of their first outings together, at a demonstration for intersex rights, “River was telling their personal bodily story through a bullhorn,” Cohen recalled. “We were all like, whoa, this person is amazing.”Cohen was an Oscar nominee in 2019 for the hit documentary about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “RBG,” which she directed with her frequent collaborator Betsy West. They have also made films about the legal scholar and activist Pauli Murray, and Gabby Giffords, the former congresswoman.“Part of the point of the film is there are more intersex people out there than you know,” said Julie Cohen, right, the director of “Every Body.” Laura Nespola/Focus Features Cohen was drawn to the subject of intersex activism through the story of David Reimer, who was born a boy but raised as a girl after a botched circumcision. He resisted the gender reassignment, which was falsely claimed as a success by the Johns Hopkins psychologist who oversaw it. Reimer eventually came forward publicly, to prevent others, he said, from going through what he did. (He died by suicide in 2004.) His honesty helped debunk the idea that social conditioning could determine his gender identity.Depicting the startling reality of many intersex people’s lives offers what Cohen called “a holy crap element.”“I like a holy crap documentary,” she said. “But I also really like what I think of as hug documentaries, where you kind of want to hug everyone that’s in it.” Her movie, she said, is both: “It’s a holy crap documentary, but it also makes you want to hug the people that have been through what our participants have been through.”These are excerpts from our conversation.In light of David Reimer’s death, did you purposely choose people who were already public about being intersex?Exactly. I didn’t want the interview with me to be their first or even their second experience with this. And I was taken aback — it turned out that I had to ask very few questions before they started talking extremely personally. They tell me that their whole lives — between not only their doctors, but whole groups of residents who come in — they’re just used to talking about their bodies. They feel like that’s something they do on command and that’s part of their activism.Were there still details that surprised you in their stories?Seeing Saifa’s neonatal medical records. There are three boxes: male, female and ambiguous. Someone had literally checked ambiguous, crossed it out and then checked female. And then put a note underneath — which Saifa reads aloud in the film — saying basically, just to keep everything easier for everyone, Mom has been told that this baby should be raised as a female. And whatever surgeries are necessary to lock down this baby being female, that’s what we’re going to do.River Gallo in “Every Body.” The director said that because of their dealings with doctors, the film’s subjects were used to talking about their bodies “and that’s part of their activism.”Focus FeaturesThe film is arriving at a time when anti-trans legislation is surging. How do intersex rights get caught up in that?The majority of the legislation against gender-affirming care for trans children and teens has what I call the intersex loophole. So actually you can do surgery on infants or children, you can get hormones. Alicia summarizes [those contradictory views] in the movie, saying, you know, “We don’t think trans kids are normal, so you’re going to withhold all care for them. And we don’t think intersex kids are normal, so feel free to enforce whatever treatment you may want.”What is the connection between this film and your other films?A lot of it has to do with the power of activism, how people can make changes by taking on fights that seemed so challenging.Another big connection would be finding joy and humor and the life-affirming side of very difficult situations. RBG was fighting against some really ugly and mean sexism and misogyny through a lot of her early career. And yet she did it with grace and strength and humor, and found love and romance. Same thing with Pauli Murray. Gabby Giffords’s story has so much trauma in it, but she came through with just this exuberant, won’t-be-kept-down life force.I actually asked Saifa at one point: Can trauma and joy be part of the same story? And he looked at me like it was kind of a stupid question. Like, of course, that’s the human condition. Trauma and joy always coexist. Do you think that these stories may be more readily accepted now because of a new understanding of the fluidity of gender?The growing awareness of the existence of people who identify as nonbinary is very relevant to this movement. I think one of the original concerns [was that] every person needs a gender immediately.But no, you can come up with a best-guess gender and raise the child that way, so that by the time your child starts to express a gender identity — which experts say is happening by 5 or 6 anyway — then you can go in that direction. And you haven’t mistakenly done irreversible, or reversible only with great pain, medical and surgical interventions.Or maybe you don’t have to do surgery at all. Why is it that important to have reproductive organs fit some textbook idea of what normal is? When we’re all starting to understand that there’s a fair amount of variation in people’s bodies — whether they’re intersex or not. More

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      ‘Every Body’ Review: Celebrating the ‘I’ in L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+

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      The documentary follows three openly intersex people, set against the larger backdrop of decades of secrecy and unnecessary surgeries.In medical literature, intersex is a term used to describe individuals who are born with physical, chromosomal or hormonal characteristics that are consistent with both male and female sex traits. In the world, intersex people are the “I” in L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+, and they have built a community around common political interests. The warmly engaging documentary “Every Body” follows three interview subjects, all of whom are openly intersex. The film’s subjects — Sean Saifa Wall, River Gallo and Alicia Roth Weigel — discuss their personal medical histories and place their experiences in context with a larger political fight for intersex bodily autonomy.As intersex people, Wall, Gallo and Weigel share the common experience of receiving medically unnecessary surgery intended to bring their physical appearance in line with the gender identity that was assigned to them at birth. They were told as children to keep their medical status secret. Now, as adults, all three engage in political activism to put an end to such medically unnecessary surgeries.The film benefits from its choice of subjects, as Wall, Gallo and Weigel are all endearing and deeply informed. Their candor animates the unimaginative talking head interview footage from the director Julie Cohen (“RBG”). But beyond casting, Cohen’s best directorial choice is to show examples from the history of intersex medical care.Cohen highlights the influence of Dr. John Money, a Johns Hopkins psychologist who helped to establish the standard for treatment of intersex individuals. The film compellingly uses clips from the interview program “Dateline” to show the devastation that was inflicted upon David Reimer, the most famous of Money’s patients. The contrast between Reimer’s archived grief and the hope of the film’s interview subjects is powerful, effectively demonstrating the life and death stakes of intersex liberation.Every BodyRated R for nudity. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Umberto Eco’ Review: Remembering a Literary Explorer

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      A new documentary delves into the infectious curiosity and passions of the Italian scholar and author of “The Name of the Rose.”“To be intellectually curious is to be alive,” Umberto Eco once said. The Italian thinker, who died in 2016, was a professor, a novelist — who wrote, most notably and at one time inescapably, “The Name of the Rose” — a semiotician, a columnist and a connoisseur of arcana. He also conveyed a twinkling sense of fun around reading and thinking about the world and literature, a notion that erudition could be not just edifying but entertaining.“Umberto Eco: A Library of the World” celebrates the man and his many bookshelves, but it’s his symbolic appeal that comes across above all. Davide Ferrario’s documentary front-loads the physicality of books, with drooling pans of libraries from Turin, Italy, to Tianjin, China, before easing into Eco’s eclectic interests, with clips of him dispensing aperçus and quips about memory and the noise of modernity.Eco’s passion for the literary canon is clear, but we hear more about his wanderings through his favorite oddities, such as Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century Jesuit scholar who wrote sprawling and sometimes wrongheaded treatises. Well-intentioned dramatic readings from Eco’s writings are punctuated with fond anecdotes from his children and a grandson that burnish the image of Eco as the extravagant scholar. His love of arcana supplies an outward eccentricity that seems to interest the film more than his semiotic work or political commentary (in which he was a critic of Silvio Berlusconi since the 1990s).Eco’s 1980 debut novel, “The Name of the Rose,” a murder mystery set in a 14th-century monastery, became a surprise runaway success. Eco neatly describes the appeal of such detective-style investigation as being essentially spiritual, asking, who is behind all this?; he’d continue with more esoteric adventures like “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1988). Throughout his work, the frisson of fiction and its assorted deceptions attracted Eco, from speculative travelogues to the phenomenon of lying.Viewers (and readers) of a certain age may come away wondering whether Eco’s profile has faded somewhat. Ferrario’s documentary presents a figure who feels more firmly European than international, not to mention old-fashioned. (He was definitely a guy who liked to explain his scorn for his cellphone.) But exploring fictional worlds with Eco for a guide remains a diverting and often enlightening pursuit.Umberto Eco: A Library of the WorldNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Review: ‘In the Company of Rose’ Is a Pleasant Portrait

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      When the theater and film director James Lapine first met Rose Styron, he knew her as William Styron’s widow. He learned there was a lot more to her.In 2014, the film and theater director James Lapine was invited to a Martha’s Vineyard lunch with the writer Rose Styron, the widow of the novelist William Styron (“The Confessions of Nat Turner,” “Sophie’s Choice”). At the lunch, Lapine proceeded to record an impromptu interview with Rose. Unlike lesser mortals, Lapine (a protean force in American arts who wrote the book for and directed Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” among other things) has the means to spin a feature film out of such an encounter.Composed of archival footage and interviews done with more polished equipment over the years, “In the Company of Rose” is a pleasant portrait of an admittedly rarefied world, but one that doesn’t transcend its vanity-project origins. Perhaps it doesn’t intend to. As Lapine, who narrates the film, admits, “I’ve often jumped into projects without really knowing what I was doing.” In her account of her life, Rose, too, seems to have moved forward without too much calculation. She recalls being unimpressed by Styron at a reading for his first novel, “Lie Down In Darkness,” they only clicked later, in Rome, where Rose was studying and William was living on a fellowship.Rose is kind, cheerful, frank, and she has a knack for telling stories laden with famous figures without sounding as if she’s name-dropping. She typed Styron’s work for nearly a decade. On becoming interested in human rights, she traveled for Amnesty International. She says that she and her husband resembled a stereotypically 1950s American couple, and that they managed their marriage “mainly by not talking about things, instead of talking about them.” But when Styron had depression in the 1980s she was a stalwart helpmate in his recovery, and encouraged him to write “Darkness Visible,” the memoir that has become one of his best known works. As existences in rarefied worlds go, this one plays as well-lived.In the Company of RoseNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More