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      ‘Chasing Chasing Amy’ Review: A Fan’s Favorite

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      Sav Rodgers sets out to define the legacy of Kevin Smith’s “Chasing Amy” in this documentary, which is elevated by one instructive interview.Partway through “Chasing Chasing Amy,” Sav Rodgers, a first-time feature director and a mega fan of the 1997 movie he’s exploring, sits to interview the film’s star, Joey Lauren Adams. He begins to discuss the role when Adams cuts in.“Are you looking to me for something that I can’t give you?” she asks Rodgers. “I don’t know what it is you want from me.”The moment marks a turning point in Rodgers’s agreeable documentary, which sets out to provide a contemporary lens on “Chasing Amy.” It opens with the director sharing that he once used the story as a queer field guide and a source of comfort amid adolescent struggles. He then calls on writers and thinkers to unpack the movie’s themes and fraught position in the queer canon.But it is not until his interview with Adams that Rodgers touches on the most urgent questions of his cinematic survey. What do filmmakers owe their fans? Who can lay claim to a movie? And who defines its legacy?Adams goes on to share painful memories from that era, including leering Hollywood men — Harvey Weinstein was the producer — and jealous barbs from the “Chasing Amy” director Kevin Smith, her boyfriend at the time.Rodgers, a sheepish and at times bewildered guide, seems ill-equipped to reconcile Adams’s reflections with his admiration for Smith and “Chasing Amy,” and instead pivots the story to focus on his own personal and professional evolution. It’s a convenient ending, but one senses that Rodgers can’t see that, in his overview of the movie’s cultural impact, some perspectives are more instructive than others.Chasing Chasing AmyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Youth (Hard Times)’ Review: Working Till They Drop

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      In Wang Bing’s riveting new documentary about Chinese garment workers, a generation asks: What good is money when you have no rights?Wang Bing calls his new films about Chinese garment workers the “Youth” trilogy for good reason: Most of the people shown clocking marathon hours at sewing machines are barely in their 20s. Maybe that’s why the concrete buildings where they both work and live can feel like dystopian dorms. The men and women split their time largely between cluttered workshops downstairs and bunkrooms upstairs, where they trade war stories of long hours, short wages and bad bosses.It’s a story as old as time, or industrialization, which may be why the English title of the trilogy’s second entry, “Youth (Hard Times),” evokes Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel set in a mill town. Wang’s nearly four-hour documentary depicts the migrants who trek to these streets of Zhili in the district of Huzhou City and earn “bitter money” (to borrow the title of an earlier Wang film). To watch them toil away despite thankless conditions is to admire their resilience but also feel their time being lost.“Youth (Hard Times)” leans into the obstacles thrown at workers and how, despite iron nerves and late nights, the house always wins. Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation. Some tales are mundane but maddening: A man is pushed to work faster with a broken machine. Others combine the ache of short fiction and the brutality of a police report: A slender young man fumes to friends about getting locked up in a police station over a wage dispute, and then his boss stiffs him when his “pay book” (logging his hours) goes missing.Wang’s camerawork feels keen, even personal. Often we hustle along the buildings’ open-air terraces, which lend a theatrical sense of everybody being in everybody else’s business. Days blur into nights — the workrooms don’t seem to have much sunlight — and Wang follows the workers’ youthful energies and comings and goings, which set the film’s pace over the machine-gun chatter of sewing desks. In one workshop, one man starts working shirtless, prompting someone to quip, “That’s a bit sexy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ Review: What Lies Beneath

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      A passionate and propulsive documentary about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba spins its web in many directions.There are many ways to judge a documentary, but a solid one is this question: Could this movie be an article? A great documentary shouldn’t merely be informative, or even tell a good story; it should also be a movie, harnessing every tool at the filmmaker’s disposal. In making “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous.It’s also demanding, a full dissertation crammed into one feature film, complete with citations and footnotes. (Literally.) You can’t zone out during this film. But that doesn’t mean it’s dry or academic. “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is a furious and elliptical film, a piece of true history structured like a spider web and drenched in real urgency. The story at its center is the rise to power and eventual C.I.A.-led assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was elected in May 1960, shortly before his country gained its independence from Belgium. Congo, a country rich with natural resources that were vital, among other things, to Western countries’ weapons of war, had been colonized by Belgium since the late 19th century.Or is that the story? “Soundtrack” entwines a number of threads, all of which are knotted into one another, though the links aren’t always clear till the movie’s thunderous conclusion. The Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev visits the United States and addresses the United Nations, denouncing American racism and demanding an end to colonialism. Black jazz musicians, like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, are sent to perform around the world as “ambassadors” of American good will and freedom, yet segregation is still the law back home. Leaders of African and Asian countries, newly admitted to the United Nations, form a voting bloc that could threaten the influence of world powers like the United States and the Soviet Union. Leaders of newly independent African nations speak of forming a United States of Africa. And while Eisenhower calls for no foreign interference into African politics, the C.I.A. has other plans.“Soundtrack” largely centers on events of 1960, depending almost entirely upon archival footage as well as the memoirs and writings of leaders and operatives from the time. Text — beautifully designed text, in fact, the work of the designer Hans Lettany — provides historical context and voices from the moment, underscored by on-screen citations (right down to the page number). But Grimonprez swirls the timeline a bit, jumping backward and forward just enough that the links between events — Louis Armstrong’s visit to Congo just as Lumumba is under house arrest and C.I.A. agents arrive in the country, for instance — start to emerge.But what really makes “Soundtrack” work is, well, its soundtrack. The film returns over and over to Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln performing their 1960 album “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.” These famed jazz musicians and many more provide a kind of score, a gorgeous, buoyant, anxious momentum. We watch them play and talk about their music, their hopes for their travels. Yet it’s probably no accident that this film’s title echoes the lauded 2010 documentary “Soundtrack for a Revolution,” which explores the power of Black activists, and in particular their music, in the Civil Rights Movement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘After: Poetry Destroys Silence’ Review: A Study in Trauma

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      Richard Kroehling’s documentary presents a mixture of poets’ responses to the Holocaust and argues for the importance of the form in addressing trauma.“After: Poetry Destroys Silence,” directed by the multidisciplinary artist Richard Kroehling, positions itself as a counter to the philosopher Theodor Adorno’s statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” This experimental film, a combination of documentary, poetry reading and archival assemblage, insists on the need for poetry as a means of remembering and addressing trauma.Versions of the argument are made directly to the camera — and with unwarranted defensiveness — by the poets Alicia Suskin Ostriker and Edward Hirsch. The poetry featured onscreen makes the case for itself. The film highlights a variety of authors, including the Holocaust survivor Paul Celan (1920-70), heard in a haunting old recording reciting his poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), and the contemporary Brooklyn poet Taylor Mali, who shares a poem about his first wife’s death.The actor Geza Rohrig (“Son of Saul”) appears in a dual capacity as a documentary interviewee and as a poet himself; in addition to reciting his own work, he recalls the obsessive visits he made to Auschwitz. Melissa Leo turns up in something closer to an acting role in a segment based on Kroehling’s poem “Lost Photo.” Kroehling buttresses this already unusual mix of modes with a use of onscreen text that clearly evokes Jean-Luc Godard, while also demonstrating that Godard’s dense layering of image, language and sound is difficult to imitate. “After” presents a sincere plea for the right of artists to respond to horror, but it makes for an inert, academic viewing experience. The director hasn’t found a rhythm or pace to lend momentum to this exploration of disparate material.AfterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Martha Stewart Gives Netflix’s ‘Martha’ a Scalding Review

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      When a reporter phoned about her new documentary, the lifestyle star didn’t hold back: “I hate those last scenes. Hate them.”Most business titans spout niceties — insipid, banal, stale — when speaking to reporters on the record. It can be impossible to get them to say what they really think, and if they accidentally let something colorful slip, a saw-toothed publicist inevitably arrives to try to scrub it away.But not Martha Stewart. As a media savant, she may understand that startling candor cuts through the clutter and gets her heard. Or maybe, at 83, she just has no more you-know-whats left to give.Even so, I was not quite prepared for a recent phone interview with her. I called to discuss her experience with the documentarian R.J. Cutler, whose “Martha” documentary arrived on Netflix on Wednesday after a run on the fall festival circuit. I figured our chat would last 10 minutes. She’d say a positive thing and a negative thing and go back to making TikToks with Snoop Dogg.Out came roughly 30 almost uninterrupted minutes of sharp critique. “R.J. had total access, and he really used very little,” she said, referring to her archive. “It was just shocking.”After a couple of failed attempts to interject a question, I decided it was best to just get out of her way. Below are some of the things she’s sore about (some lightly edited for clarity).Cutler declined to comment on specific points. “I am really proud of this film, and I admire Martha’s courage in entrusting me to make it,” he said. “I’m not surprised that it’s hard for her to see aspects of it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Dahomey’: Mati Diop’s New Documentary on the Painful Legacy of Looted Artifacts

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      Mati Diop examines the fate of 26 treasures — sometimes from their point of view — looted from Benin in 1892.There are many voices in Mati Diop’s new documentary, “Dahomey” (in theaters), and one of them belongs to Artifact No. 26. “I lost myself in my dreams, becoming one with these walls, cut off from the land of my birth as if I was dead,” it says in French, its timbre tweaked to contain both a low rumbling bass and a higher, more feminine sound. “Today, it’s me they have chosen, like their finest and most legitimate victim.”Artifacts technically do not talk, but this imaginative element frames the rest of Diop’s film. The movie comprises mostly observational footage shot during the shipping and repatriation of 26 objects that France had looted from the kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin) during the invasion of 1892. They had resided until 2021 in Paris, in the Quai Branly museum, which houses Indigenous art and cultural items from Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas.The return of those 26 antiquities was part of a much bigger story that began with a report on the restitution of African treasures commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron of France in 2018. That November, he announced that the items would be handed over, and that his government would study and consider giving back other objects removed from African nations without consent. He stopped short of following the report’s full recommendation, which was to return all items if asked. The move kicked off years of debate among former colonial powers in Europe, including Germany and Britain, about similar treasures in their national museums and archives.It took years to actually give back those initial 26, which included effigies of the rulers King Behanzin and King Glélé, two thrones and four painted gates from Behanzin’s palace. “Dahomey” homes in on their fate as a way of exploring the complexity of the very act of repatriation — not for the Europeans, but for the Beninese. We watch conservators and curators carefully pack everything up. (The camera briefly takes the point of view of Artifact No. 26, with the sounds of screws going into the top of the crate and then noises of transit.) They’re then unloaded in Benin, and officials arrive for the occasion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Menendez Brothers: How True Crime Is Re-Examining Old Cases

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      A thriving genre built on podcasts and documentaries, coupled with younger generations’ more skeptical worldview, helped revitalize interest in this case and others like it.There’s a montage during the new Netflix documentary “The Menendez Brothers” in which comedians, late-night hosts and other pop culture figures of the 1990s mock Lyle and Erik Menendez. The brothers had recently delivered testimony at their first murder trial, detailing their accounts of sexual abuse at the hands of their father, Jose Menendez, whom they had gunned down and killed in 1989, alongside their mother, Kitty.There was a 1993 “Saturday Night Live” skit that had John Malkovich and Rob Schneider mimicking the brothers in the courtroom, weeping dramatically and sarcastically. On the “Late Show,” the comedian Sandra Bernhard told David Letterman, “These two arrogant brothers are gonna fry,” to whoops and laughter from the audience.“I called Jay Leno’s show once, to protest them making fun of them,” Joan Vander Molen, Kitty Menendez’s sister, says in the documentary. “That’s all they did. They just made fun of them.”Some 30 years later, Lyle and Erik Menendez, who were 21 and 18 when the murders were committed, have gone from pariahs and punchlines to something approaching sympathetic figures in the eyes of a growing number of people.They’ve also gone from the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in prison to having a chance at freedom after George Gascón, the Los Angeles district attorney, announced on Thursday that he would recommend a resentencing that would make the brothers eligible for immediate parole.Gascón cited the work the brothers have done to improve the lives of their fellow inmates. “I believe they have paid their debt to society,” Gascón said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band’

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      At 75, Springsteen is doggedly committed to live performance. This documentary chronicles how he keeps up on tour, and why.While it was Lou Reed who coined the adage that one’s life could be saved by rock ’n’ roll, Bruce Springsteen embodies it. It may be paradoxical, to assert that the performer transcends the genre for which he relentlessly waves the flag, but at this point in time, Springsteen is the world’s greatest living entertainer, full stop. “Road Diary,” a new documentary directed by Thom Zimny, offers dynamic proof for this argument.The movie’s full title is “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,” and many of the current members of that group have been with Springsteen since they were barely out of their teens. The most colorful and funny member, Steven Van Zandt, who also works as an actor (“The Sopranos”), is a prominent talking head because he’s a born raconteur.More than the funny stories, the movie is about Springsteen’s artistic mission.He sings about the things that make life worth living: friendship, love, community and the sense of a higher calling.Seeing Frank Sinatra at the beginning of his Diamond Jubilee World Tour, when he was 75 and in good health, one could see that he seemed bored by the whole thing. Springsteen turned 75 last month, and never seems bored for even a moment. He’s a man on a mission.The tour chronicled here is ongoing; Springsteen plays in Montreal next week. The punchline of this engaging movie is one that Springsteen lifts from his early influence: Van Morrison. Addressing the camera on his way to another stage, he cheerfully yells, “It’s too late to stop now.”Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street BandNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Hulu and Disney+. More