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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

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      ‘Anthem’ Review: Flying High

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      In this naïve, nostalgic documentary, a pair of musicians go on a road trip with the ambitious mission of creating a new national anthem.“Anthem” opens with a series of archival scenes from American history: from John F. Kennedy’s 1961 address championing space travel to Barack Obama speaking about the necessity of dissent; from members of the Ku Klux Klan waving the American flag to the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol; from the Black Power protest at the 1968 Olympics to Colin Kaepernick taking a knee on a football field. The montage strikingly illustrates the idea that nationalism can take wildly different forms that have little to do with national symbols.Yet the film that follows seems to miss this point. Peter Nicks’s documentary follows two Black artists, the film and television composer Kris Bowers and the record producer Dahi, as they embark on a road trip with the goal of creating a new anthem that — unlike “The Star-Spangled Banner,” which borrows from a British tune — feels homegrown and representative of America today. Their naïve belief that a song can make people of all stripes, even those persecuted by the country, feel included reminded me of the celebrity “Imagine” music video from March 2020. It feels like lip service that doesn’t confront the real issues.Bowers and Dahi’s journey is fascinating: they explore blues in Mississippi, country music in Tennessee and Native drum circles in Oklahoma, accumulating a melting-pot portrait of American music. Yet their conversations are gratingly anodyne, invoking platitudes like “truth,” while the visuals insipidly jump between screens, close-ups of faces and slow motion shots of the two on the road. Any thorny moments, as when a singer from a military family clashes with an immigrant vocalist over questions of national pride, are brushed aside too quickly. Where the film’s archival footage demonstrates the limits of respectability politics, “Anthem” ends up being overly respectable — and inevitably reductive.AnthemRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed’ Review: Living a Double Life

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      Stephan Kijak’s new documentary seems keenly interested in the ways in which the closeted actor’s sexuality manifested itself, largely unintentionally, in his movies.“Rock Hudson’s Home Movies,” the director Mark Rappaport’s landmark 1992 video essay about the life and death of the famous gay actor, is a playful, provocative and singular meditation on celebrity, homosexuality and the nature of truth onscreen. Through a combination of archival footage from Hudson’s filmography and invented narration by an actor playing Hudson, the movie offers a speculative, pseudobiographical portrait of Hudson’s innermost thoughts, using what we know about him now to imagine what he might have been thinking then.More than 30 years later, Stephen Kijak’s “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed” is a more straightforward account of Hudson’s life and death, centering on the details of his biography and the testimony of those who knew him. We hear from lovers, co-stars and friends about how hard it was for Hudson to live as a closeted gay man in Hollywood in the 1950s and ’60s while representing the movie industry’s platonic ideal of the straight romantic lead, forced by circumstance to live a double life and publicly repress his true desires and needs.But like Rappaport, Kijak seems keenly interested in the ways in which Hudson’s sexuality manifested itself, largely unintentionally, in his movies — coded but legible on the surface of the image. Rappaport demonstrated this wittily, by taking gestures and stray lines of dialogue from various Hudson films out of context and emphasizing their gay connotations and undertones, and by skewering the actual gay innuendo rampant in Hudson’s films with Doris Day and Tony Randall as screamingly obvious. This device is so effective, in fact, that Kijak borrows it wholesale, repeatedly interposing these moments of gay serendipity, many of them identical to those in “Home Movies.”Kijak thanks Rappaport in the credits, so we can charitably describe this as homage rather than plagiarism. But the comparison to Rappaport’s superior film does “All That Heaven Allowed” no favors. The historical context it provides for Hudson’s rise through the studio system in the early 1950s is thin and superficial, leaning on several rather broad pronouncements about the trends of the era from experts such as the film scholar David Thomson; while its efforts to shape a coherent narrative out of Hudson’s career lead to a number of dubious claims Kijak makes very little effort to actually support, including the specious characterization of Anthony Mann’s great western “Winchester ’73” as a “cheap adventure film” and the flippant, totally unfair dismissal of Douglas Sirk’s delightful 1952 comedy “Has Anybody Seen My Gal?” as having been somehow “beneath” Hudson’s standards.The latter half of the film shifts its focus from Hudson’s life of deception as a closeted movie star and toward his declining status, deteriorating health and his eventual death from an AIDS-related illness in 1985. The movie is clearer and more persuasive about this chapter of Hudson’s story, adopting a more plaintive tone as it explores an atmosphere of disdainful hysteria that prevailed at that time.Kijak threads together interviews, archival footage and tabloid news headlines to show how Hudson’s fame helped bring the AIDS crisis into the (straight) public consciousness — and how the society that had embraced him as a heterosexual matinee idol swiftly abandoned him in his time of need. (The film is justly, satisfyingly hard on Nancy Reagan, who curtly rejected Hudson’s pleas for help as he was dying.) In the end, with only Hudson to deal with, Kijak gets the big picture.Rock Hudson: All That Heaven AllowedNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      ‘Casa Susanna’ Documentary Revisits Haven for Cross-Dressing

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      The documentary “Casa Susanna” explores the Catskills boardinghouse community that allowed denizens to express their identity when that was taboo.Sébastien Lifshitz’s documentary “Casa Susanna” remembers a community of cross-dressing men and transgender women who found refuge in the Catskills in the 1950s and ’60s. Their gathering place, a Victorian boardinghouse, was christened Casa Susanna after one of its founders, Susanna Valenti, a translator and broadcaster, who was married to Marie Tonell, a New York wig maker. The couple ran Casa Susanna until the late 1960s, but its existence came to broader awareness with the 2005 publication of a book collecting Casa Susanna snapshots that had been found in a New York flea market.Lifshitz, who is French, has been making movies about gender and identity since the early 2000s. “The story of Casa Susanna wasn’t supposed to be visible, or ‘out,’ so it is still a miracle that we are able to know the whole story today,” he said. He interviewed two alumnae, Katherine Cummings and Diana Merry-Shapiro, who shared their journeys and struggles, and revisited their stomping grounds in the Catskills. (A version of the house’s story was portrayed in “Casa Valentina,” a 2014 play by Harvey Fierstein.)I spoke with Lifshitz about making this documentary, which airs on PBS on Tuesday as part of “American Experience.” at a moment of increased visibility and turmoil around issues of identity. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Some of the photos came from a book project, while others were from the collection of Cindy Sherman.via the Art Gallery of Ontario and ArteHow did you first encounter Casa Susanna?The first time I heard of it was the publication of the book in 2005. I bought it then because I’m also a photo collector. For many years I’ve bought snapshots at flea markets and garage sales in France. I’ve been into queer pictures and all these invisible people since I was a kid. In 2015, I did a big exhibition with the photographs I was collecting on cross-dressing, and I talked with a photographer, Isabelle Bonnet, who had made a memoir about Casa Susanna. I said we should do a film about it [the documentary credits her as a collaborator], because it is a very important story about pre-queer culture, this underground network of cross-dressing.What struck you as special about Casa Susanna?The creation of this refuge was something extraordinary. If you had the desire to cross-dress, nothing around you could help you to understand it at the time. These very intimate questions were impossible to talk about with anybody else. Most of the men in the Casa Susanna community were white people from the middle class that had good jobs and a bit of money, and were married, some with kids. What is also fascinating is that this community was created with certain rules. For example, homosexuals or transsexuals were forbidden. They only accepted people who presented themselves as men who cross-dress. So it’s weird to think that, in a way, they had re-created conservative rules within this setup, probably because they were afraid.What was it like for Katherine and Diana to talk about their memories?It was very important to them because, as they say, it’s a part of who they were. For Diana, it was the first time that she was outing herself. She’s 82, but this is the first time that she could say to everyone, “This is my life. This is who I am.” Probably because she is this very mature age, she felt the need to be true with herself and all the people that are still around her. She also wanted to pay tribute to all the pioneers she met. And she should be proud, because she was very brave. What is also fascinating about Diana is that she had [gender confirmation surgery] when she was young, and from that moment, she became an invisible woman in American society. We were so lucky to find her and Kate. Kate died just a few months after the filming. That’s why all these invisible stories are so precious.For Betsy [Wollheim], it was the first time that she could tell the story of her father, Donald Wollheim. He was a science-fiction writer and publisher, but people didn’t know his secret story. I thought it was interesting to understand through Betsy what it was for a traditional American family to have a father as a cross-dresser and probably a transgender person. And through Gregory [Bagarozy], we see how he understood his grandma, Marie, and Susanna.The Casa Susanna guests followed a code of female representation that aimed for a “woman next door” feel. Collection of Cindy Sherman, via ArteWhere did you get the colorful Kodachrome photographs in the film?I had the pictures from the book, of course, which are now in the Art Gallery of Ontario. But a second part comes from the collection of Cindy Sherman. I knew that Cindy had pictures of Casa Susanna because she found an album in a flea market in New York. So I contacted her and she was really into it and said, of course you can use them. Cindy’s work is about Americana and stereotypes of representation in America, and she was fascinated by the way people are staging themselves in the pictures, because she stages herself. The way the men at Casa Susanna used female representation and respected a code in terms of clothes, they didn’t want to look like a pinup or a Hollywood queen. Most of them probably wanted to look like their mothers, sisters or wives. Like the woman next door, in a bourgeois way.A third source was the pictures that Betsy’s father had, because he was completely obsessed with questions of identity. He had all the documentation he could find at that time, and Betsy kept everything from his archives.How do you view this slice of American history in light of new anti-trans laws in this country?I am shocked that today you still can hear all these words against the transgender community. These are attitudes and words from another time, and I thought that it could never happen. We used to think that the civil rights that were won are for forever, but they are not. We need to be the guardians of these rights. Films, books, exhibitions and all these things are a way to educate and make people understand that identity is diverse, and this diversity is so important. In French we say richesse. It’s a treasure you need to protect. I love to see what makes you who you are. More

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      ‘Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular Music’ Review: Wish You Were There

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      Only 650 people got to experience one of the 21st century’s artistic feats, until this documentary. Unfortunately, it misses some of the performance’s key aspects.The writer and performer Taylor Mac spent the first half of the 2010s developing an epic project, “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music,” that covered 240 years’ worth of American history. Mac would perform large excerpts at concerts, then on Oct. 8-9, 2016, did the whole caboodle as an ultramarathon of 246 songs. The show took over St. Ann’s Warehouse, in Brooklyn, in a 24-hour-long “radical faerie realness ritual sacrifice” that amounted to a transcendent artistic and political gesture. (Full disclosure: I was there.)Now, an HBO documentary by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (“The Celluloid Closet,” “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice”) offers a necessarily abridged look at Mac’s towering achievement, which showcased an incredible range as an interpreter, a theatrical gusto and a mischievous, often biting humor. Key collaborators like the costume designer Machine Dazzle and the makeup artist Anastasia Durasova also explain what went into their many painstakingly intricate creations.But there is some ambiguity: The film is structured as if it were documenting the St. Ann’s happening, including time stamps, but some of the performance footage actually is from Los Angeles. The doc also does not illuminate how Mac dealt with the marathon’s grueling physical demands, or describe the surreal ambience that set over the Brooklyn venue as the hours ticked by and sleep deprivation set in. We do see some of the audience participation, which was an integral part of the show, but we don’t hear from attendees. It’s a loss, because the event was, in essence, about the making of community through the ages but also through one day and night.Taylor Mac’s 24-Decade History of Popular MusicNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘The Stroll’ Review: Telling Their Own Stories

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      In this documentary, transgender sex workers speak for themselves without sanitizing or sensationalizing their experiences.At several points in “The Stroll,” Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker’s loving portrait of New York City’s transgender sex workers, moments of striking candor break through the conventions of documentary.An interviewee pauses warily in the middle of a conversation to check if it’s OK to reveal explicit details of her sex work, to which Lovell (who is transgender and a former prostitute herself) responds with, “Girl, you’re fine!” Later, as Lovell walks with another of the film’s subjects, Izzy, through the now-gentrified meatpacking district in Manhattan where they once both plied their trades, Izzy suddenly bursts into tears, interrupting the scene with a pained, “I can’t do this. I hate this place.”These scenes might have ended up on the cutting room floor in a different documentary. Here, their inclusion reinforces the novelty of “The Stroll”: It’s the rare movie that allows transgender sex workers to speak for themselves without sanitizing or sensationalizing their experiences.Lovell’s own story mirrors that of many of her interviewees, who include the ballroom icon Egyptt LaBeija and the activist Ceyenne Doroshow. (Drucker, a trans artist and activist, remains behind the camera.) Lovell ‌arrived in Manhattan as a teenager in the 1990s, seeking an escape from a hard life at home in Yonkers, ‌but she was fired from her coffee shop job when she began transitioning. So she turned to “the stroll”: a stretch of West 14th Street that cut through a blood-splattered neighborhood of meatpackers, and offered a haven for cruising gay men and transgender prostitutes. It allowed Lovell and her colleagues not just to make a living but also to find community — even a semblance of family.Inspired to take on the storytelling reins after being featured in a 2007 documentary, Lovell, along with Drucker, assembles interviews and archival images that sparkle with joy, banter and sorority, even as they detail brutality and precarity. What unfurls is a micro-history of New York: from the 1970s, with the city’s early gay rights movements (which often excluded transgender people), to the broken-windows policies of the ’90s and the economic fallout of Sept. 11, to the gentrification that began to sweep the city when Michael Bloomberg took office as mayor in 2002.As the city became seemingly safer, prettier and richer for some, its most vulnerable denizens paid a steep price. “I can’t believe how many times I had to go to jail for the Highline Park to be built,” Lovell says wryly. But if “The Stroll” is an indictment and elegy, it is also a remarkable document of the self-determination of the women and workers who learned, in the face of the worst odds, to fend for themselves and each other.The StrollNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy’ Review

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      A documentary examines how the winner for best picture of 1969 captured shifts in American life.How many ways did “Midnight Cowboy” occupy the nexus of the cultural changes of the 1960s? The documentary “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy” cites plenty.The film was revolutionary in its depiction of sex, and particularly in its acknowledgment of the existence of gay life. It tweaked the movie-cowboy archetype at a time when westerns allegorized the United States’ involvement in Vietnam. Its screenwriter, Waldo Salt, had been blacklisted in the 1950s. It took advantage of the possibility of filming on location in New York and of capturing aspects of the city — such as hustlers and homelessness — that had scarcely been shown onscreen, or had been limited to experimental cinema. A late interlude in the film documented elements of the Warholian art scene.And in winning the Oscar for the best picture of 1969, “Midnight Cowboy” may have represented a rare instance of the Academy Awards’ accepting important shifts in American life. (Or perhaps the academy looked forward and backward simultaneously: Two interviewees note that John Wayne, a supporter of the war and an icon of a more conservative America, took best actor that year for “True Grit.”)Whether “Midnight Cowboy” deserves or can bear the weight that “Desperate Souls” accords it, the director Nancy Buirski presents these issues with a good mix of small-bore and big-picture insights and only the occasional overstatement or fuzziness. The documentary might have pinned down more clearly, for instance, why “Midnight Cowboy” received its X rating, later changed to R.But “Desperate Souls” convincingly argues that there’s no other time at which Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) could have become enduring movie characters, let alone have the tenderness between them depicted so subtly. (The documentary was inspired by Glenn Frankel’s 2021 book, “Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic.”)Buirski’s film gives much of the credit to John Schlesinger, the celebrated British director who was shooting his first movie in America. “Desperate Souls” notes that in his next film, “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (1971), he would break ground again in showing gay life (and, through Peter Finch’s character, perhaps acknowledge some of his own outsider’s perspective as a gay, Jewish, relatively upper-class Briton).Interviewed in the documentary, Voight recalls making a facetious — but accurate — prediction to Schlesinger that they would live in the shadow of the movie. (He’s also shown in a screen test that makes you wonder how he got the part.) Schlesinger (who died in 2003) and Hoffman are heard in voice clips.But some of the strongest commentary comes from writers who can stand outside the film itself, like Charles Kaiser (author of “The Gay Metropolis”), the critic Lucy Sante and J. Hoberman, a regular New York Times contributor (whom I also know personally). All situate the film in a historical context, its importance in which, Sante suggests, came at least partly by chance: “When people express their own time, it’s generally by accident.”Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight CowboyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More