Documentary Films and Programs

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      in Movies

      What an Instagram Reel Has in Common With a 4-Hour Documentary

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

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      in Movies

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

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

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      in Television

      ‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ Is a Scammer Docudrama With Bite

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

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      in Movies

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

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

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      in Television

      TikTok True Crime to Stream: ‘Dancing for the Devil’ and More

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      Across television, film and social media itself, here are four picks that explore crime stories associated in some way with the imperiled app.TikTok continues to be on shaky ground in the United States. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court upheld a law passed by Congress last year that required a ban of the Chinese-owned app unless it was sold to a government-approved buyer.Hours before the law took effect, TikTok went dark briefly, then flickered back to life when President Trump, a day before his inauguration, indicated support for the app. He then signed an executive order stalling the ban for 75 days.Whether the app will disappear for good is unclear, but in the meantime, here are four true-crime stories associated with TikTok — the most downloaded app in the United States and the world in 2020, 2021 and 2022 — that captured broader attention.Documentary Series“Dancing for the Devil: The 7M TikTok Cult”It’s of course no secret that the glossy dance videos that have populated TikTok since its inception, along with much online content, is more fantasy than reality. But that’s little comfort to the revelations uncovered in this 2024 Netflix series.“Dancing for the Devil” primarily spends time with dancers who were managed by the talent company 7M Films and were members of Shekinah Church — both entities founded and led by Pastor Robert Shinn — as well as desperate family members of those still involved with 7M. These families claim that their loved ones are essentially trapped.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Maura Delpero’s Family Story Became Her Latest Movie

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      Maura Delpero’s film “Vermiglio,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, is inspired by her own family in Italy during World War II.The mountaintop village of Vermiglio in the Italian Alps is blessed with picture-postcard views of snowy peaks and verdant valleys. It’s also the scene of a dramatic World War II story that moviegoers outside Italy will soon discover.“Vermiglio,” written and directed by Maura Delpero, is inspired by the story of Delpero’s grandparents, whose bucolic existence as a family of 10 was disrupted in the 1940s by a young Sicilian deserter romancing one of their daughters. The film won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in September, and is Italy’s submission to the list of contenders for the Academy Award for best foreign language film.Watching the movie feels like watching life itself: A succession of rustic tableaux — cow milkings, family meals, classroom lessons — are interspersed with moments of high drama that are filmed in the same slow-paced, naturalistic way, without fanfare.Delpero with the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, which the film won at the Venice Film Festival in September.Louisa Gouliamaki/ReutersIn a recent video interview, Delpero, 49, who splits her time between Italy and Argentina, spoke about life behind the camera and the future of cinema. The conversation, translated from Italian, has been edited and condensed.This movie was sparked by the death of your father in August 2019. He was one of the eight surviving children of your grandfather, the Vermiglio village schoolteacher. Can you talk about that?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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      Werner Herzog’s ‘Theater of Thought’ Explores the Mysteries of the Brain

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      In “Theater of Thought,” he talks to scientists and other experts about consciousness, quantum computing and whether parrots understand human speech.There’s a moment in “Theater of Thought” (in theaters) when Darío Gil, the director of research at IBM, is explaining quantum computing to Werner Herzog, the movie’s director. Standing before a whiteboard, Gil draws some points on spheres to illustrate how qubits work, then proceeds to define the Schrödinger equation. As he talks and writes, the audio grows quieter, and Herzog’s distinctive resonant German accent takes over. “I admit that I literally understand nothing of this, and I assume most of you don’t either,” he intones in voice-over. “But I found it fascinating that this mathematical formula explains the law that draws the subatomic world.”It’s a funny moment, a playful way to keep us from glazing over when presented with partial differential equations. Herzog may be a world-renowned filmmaker, but he’s hardly a scientist, and that makes him the perfect director for “Theater of Thought,” a documentary about, as he puts it, the “mysteries of our brain.”Emphasis on mysteries. Herzog interviews a dizzying array of scientists, researchers, and even a Nobel Prize winner or two. He asks them about everything: how the brain works, what consciousness means, what the tiniest organisms in the world are, whether parrots understand human speech, whether rogue governments can control thoughts, whether we’re living in an elaborate simulation, how telepathy and psychedelics work, and, at several points, what thinking even is. Near the end of the film he notes that not one of the scientists could explain what a thought is, or what consciousness is, but “they were all keenly alive to the ethical questions in neuroscience.” In other words, they’re immersed in both the mystery and what their field of study implies about the future of humanity.There’s a boring way to make this movie, with talking-head interviews that are arranged to form a coherent argument. Herzog goes another direction, starting off by narrating why he’s making it, then talking about his interviewees as we are introduced to them in their labs or in their favorite outdoor settings. (He also visits Philippe Petit, the Twin Towers tightrope walker, as he practices in his Catskills backyard.) Herzog’s constant verbal presence brings us into his own head space — his own brain, if you will — and gives us the sense that we’re following his patterns of thought.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024

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      The movie scenes, TV episodes, song lyrics and other moments that reporters, critics, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.The Last Scene in a Film‘Challengers’Mike Faist in “Challengers.”MGMReal tennis, like real dancing, happens when the body is rapt and alive, where visceral sensation takes over and the only thing left is the crystallization of every nerve and muscle, both aligned and on edge. That last match was a dance.— More