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      ‘Unfinished Business’ Review: Skimming the Surface of Women’s Basketball

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      Unfortunately, this documentary about the W.N.B.A. and the New York Liberty hits the rim and then bounces out — it’s only close to good.This documentary about professional women’s basketball keeps toggling between two subjects so big, each could easily fill an entire series: the W.N.B.A. and one of its founding teams, the New York Liberty. The title refers both to the league’s constant battle for recognition since its creation in 1996 and the Liberty’s fruitless (so far) quest for a title. But “unfinished business” also describes this scattershot film, which is directed by Alison Klayman (“The Brink,” “Jagged”).The biggest asset here, as with the W.N.B.A., is the roster of formidable women. Most of the talking heads are effortlessly charismatic, especially the guard Teresa Weatherspoon, who led the Liberty’s early years, and the 2021 rookie DiDi Richards. The first anchors reminiscences about the 1990s and the second is part of the effort to recover from an abysmal 2-20 season in 2020. (The Liberty’s governor and co-owner Clara Wu Tsai is one of the documentary’s executive producers.)Aside from nail-biters from classic games, the film is hampered by elusions and little sense of drama — Klayman could have mined the Liberty’s rivalry with the Houston Comets much more effectively, for example. And for all the talk about the obstacles women face in professional sports, including sexism and homophobia, there is no mention of the contentious appointment of Isiah Thomas, who had been sued for sexual harassment when he worked for the Knicks, as Liberty team president in 2015.It’s hard to begrudge “Unfinished Business” for emphasizing empowerment and sisterhood, but these women deserved more. They can take it.Unfinished BusinessNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters and available on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      Yogi Berra on the Field: The Case for Baseball Greatness

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      A new documentary argues that the Yankee catcher was not just a malaprop-prone, beloved celebrity but also a legend of the game.In the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, there’s a sports figure who towers over the competition.Among the nine sayings attributed to one Lawrence Peter Berra, the New York Yankees catcher better known as Yogi, are phrases that may seem nonsensical at first, but on further reflection offer wisdom for the ages.“You can observe a lot by watching.”“It was déjà vu all over again.”And of course, there’s “It ain’t over till it’s over,” which provides the title for a new documentary about Yogi’s life.“It Ain’t Over” aims to be a corrective to the caricature implanted in the cultural consciousness of Yogi as an amiable clown, a malaprop-prone catcher who looked as if he were put together with spare parts. But Yogi was not only a cuddly pitchman for insurance, beer and chocolate milk, an inspiration for a certain cartoon bear, and a stand-up guy beloved by teammates; he was, the film argues, one of the best baseball players who ever lived.“This guy was criminally overlooked his whole life, at every stage,” said Sean Mullin, the film’s director.The documentary, which opens Friday, is intensely personal, tapping the eldest of Yogi’s 11 grandchildren to serve as a narrator with no pretense to objectivity in fighting for her grandfather’s legacy.It was a relatively recent slight that encapsulates the film’s defining thesis and yields the opening scene. During the All-Star Game in 2015, Major League Baseball honored the four players voted by fans as the greatest living legends. Watching that night with her grandfather, Lindsay Berra remembers becoming infuriated that Yogi had not made the cut. The director Sean Mullin and Lindsay Berra, Yogi’s granddaughter, say the Yankee’s prowess has been “criminally overlooked.” Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesMullin and Lindsay Berra, in separate interviews, emphasized that they meant no offense to the four greats honored that night — Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax and Johnny Bench. They just fervently believe that Yogi should have been the fifth man walking on the field that night in Cincinnati.“I always thought from the beginning that I figuratively wanted to put Grandpa back in the picture with the documentary,” said Lindsay Berra, who is an executive producer on the film.The filmmakers marshal the statistics and an impressive array of former players and other baseball experts to back up their claim. Yogi — who died in 2015 at 90 — was a core part of 10 World Series championship teams as a player, more than anyone else. He won three Most Valuable Player awards, played in All-Star games in 15 straight years and in 1956 caught the only perfect game in World Series history. And only two major leaguers have ever hit more than 350 home runs while striking out fewer than 450 times: Joe DiMaggio and Yogi.The statistic that most impresses Lindsay Berra comes from 1950. That season, Yogi went to the plate 656 times and struck out just 12 times: “That to me will always be astonishing, because guys today strike out 12 times in a weekend.”Yogi Berra leaping into the arms of pitcher Don Larsen after the only perfect game in a World Series, in 1956.Associated PressAll this passionate lobbying is not mere special familial pleading. Jon Pessah, who wrote the 2020 biography “Yogi: A Life Behind the Mask” (and is not in the film), said the idea that Yogi’s baseball prowess has been overlooked “is 100 percent true.”Besides the hitting feats, Yogi willed himself into becoming a terrific defensive catcher and was expert at guiding his temperamental pitchers. (During Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, he did not shake off one of the 97 pitches Yogi called.)“After studying his career, you say, wow, this guy carried the Yankees in the ’50s,” a decade that bridged DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle, Pessah said. “You look at what he meant on the field and at the plate, he was a force.”The unfair, and incomplete, perception of Yogi has much to do with his stubby stature and comparisons with his famous teammates. DiMaggio was slick and polished, and married to Marilyn Monroe; Mantle was the blue-eyed, golden-haired, all-American boy from Oklahoma. Yogi — well, no demeaning or belittling description seemed off-limits to the writers who covered him. Early in his career, a Life magazine article referred to him as “knock-kneed” and “barrel-shaped,” and likened his running style to that of “a fat girl in a tight skirt.” That was all in one sentence.His first manager called him an ape. In newspaper and magazine articles, Yogi’s looks were compared to those of a gargoyle, a gorilla and an orangutan.“Can you imagine reporters writing today that someone looked like a gorilla and was too ugly to be a Yankee?” Lindsay Berra said. But Yogi ultimately didn’t mind playing the butt of jokes, sloughing them off as just another test of character. “I think he knew inside who he was,” Mullin said. “There was a real confidence at a very base level.”Growing up the fourth child of Italian immigrants in St. Louis, Yogi quit school after eighth grade to help support his family, although he pretty much just wanted to play baseball. Constantly underestimated, he ultimately signed with the Yankees. He was drafted during World War II and was in a rocket boat at Omaha Beach on D-Day.Back from the war, he played on a Yankees farm team for a year before being called up late in the 1946 season. He was in the majors for good.As seen in the documentary, from left: Larry, Tim and Dale Berra, sons of the Yankee great. Dale said it was stern words from his father that helped him kick a cocaine addiction.Daniel Vecchione/Sony Picture ClassicsWhile proving naysayers wrong with his hitting prowess and improving defense, he also displayed deep-seated integrity. At a time when racism still thrived in Major League Baseball despite Jackie Robinson integrating the game in 1947, Yogi showed respect to Robinson and other Black players; he later became very good friends with Larry Doby, the first Black player in the American League.But a charmed life — he also had a storybook marriage to his hometown sweetheart, Carmen — does not make for the most dramatic of films.To add some texture to his portrait, Mullin examined both Yogi’s larger cultural significance and his personal pain.Yogi became one of the first celebrity endorsers, hawking the chocolate milk drink Yoo Hoo, Doodle fish oil, Camel cigarettes and, really leaning into the persona later in life, Miller Lite and Aflac insurance. “He never resented the way he was viewed but he was savvy enough to know it made business sense,” Pessah said.Yogi’s son Dale followed him into the majors, but a promising career was derailed by a cocaine addiction. Rehab didn’t help, and neither did encouragement from his family. It took an ultimatum, delivered by Yogi, at an intervention in 1992.“You’re not going to be my son anymore unless you make a decision to not do drugs again,” Dale Berra said his father told him. He has been clean since.The other deep wound in Yogi’s life came in 1985, inflicted by the Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. Serving as manager for Steinbrenner was a decidedly unsafe proposition, and 16 games into Yogi’s second season, he was fired. What angered Yogi most wasn’t the firing, it was that Steinbrenner didn’t have the guts (or decency) to deliver the blow himself. Yogi, always a man of his word, vowed never to return to Yankee Stadium until Steinbrenner apologized.It took nearly 14 years before a rapprochement was brokered, leading to Yogi Berra Day at the stadium in July 1999. Forty-three years after the World Series perfect game, Don Larsen was reunited with his former battery mate to throw out the ceremonial first pitch.Yogi didn’t have a glove with him, so he borrowed one from Joe Girardi, a Yankees catcher at the time. Those there that day still marvel at what they then witnessed. David Cone proceeded to pitch another perfect game for the Yankees. A life well lived had its magical coda. More

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      ‘The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons’ Review

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      A new documentary explores the artist’s sly conceptual works, and what it means when white people try to own something Black.The title of this new documentary about the artist David Hammons is a mouthful: “The Melt Goes On Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons.” It’s playing at Film Forum, and I don’t envy whoever has to make it fit the marquee. But they should figure that out because the title feels crucial to the aim of this movie, a sly, toasty, piquant consideration of Hammons’s conceptual art, the way it mocks and eludes easy ownership. Which is to say: the way his art is aware of — the way it’s often about — the stakes for Black people navigating the straits of the market.The movie has all the trappings of a serious nonfiction assessment: scholars, critics, curators and luminous comrades speaking to the humor, funk, atmosphere and texture of the Hammons experience, the acid and ingenuity, the bang of it. The way only he, seemingly, could tile whole telephone poles with bottle caps and affix a backboard and a basketball hoop atop each one, and then plant them, as he did in 1986 with “Higher Goals,” outside a courthouse in Downtown Brooklyn, where they took on a tribal, sky-scraping, palm-tree majesty that winked at the long odds of reaching the N.B.A.’s summit. That piece is like a lot of Hammons’s work: tragicomic. A small forward would need to pole-vault up to those baskets.Maybe it would’ve been enough for this film, which Harold Crooks directed with the critic and journalist Judd Tully, to get into Hammons’s gift for withering, radiant transfiguration of everyday materials (Black hair, chicken bones, liquor bottles, those caps, fur coats, jelly beans, a hoodie’s hood), of the public’s opinion of art, of status. (In 2017, at the Museum of Modern Art, he hung a drawing by one of his mentors, the crucial, visionary Charles White, across from one Leonardo da Vinci made, which the British royal family owns.) It would have been enough to behold the assortment of thrilling footage of Hammons at work, in conversation and, in one contentious encounter, under interrogation by a group of students. And, for a long, satisfying stretch, that happens here. This is a substantial, patiently made, entertaining portrait, with a percussive, rhythmic jazz score by Ramachandra Borcar and some emphatic spoken word courtesy of Umar Bin Hassan of the Last Poets.But eventually, the rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process starts to vanish. Most of the critics, scholars and fellow artists go bye-bye, which means so long to the bulk of its Black participants. In come the gallerists, collectors and dealers. The money. This is where “The Melt Goes On Forever” seems like it wants to play Hammons’s game. It’s up to something that has to do with whether a Hammons can ever be owned and what it means for work whose foremost concerns are a kind of in-the-wild presentation to be for sale. Suddenly, it feels like Crooks and Tully have stopped making a straight-ahead documentary and started making … a piece.This was probably the case from the film’s outset. In 1983, Hammons created several dozen snowballs (out of real snow, big as a softball, small as a melon ball). He put them on a rug and sold them in the cold, near the corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place. Bliz-aard balls, he called them. The movie opens with a moony story from a woman who remembers, as a girl, buying one of the snowballs for about a dollar. (Hammons — in a roomy overcoat, kempt beard, ascot and winter fedora — seemed homeless to her.) She turns out to be a gallerist, and her story is a prelude of the movie’s big market-bound dismount, at the end of which is a separate childhood memory, from the dealer Adam Sheffer, of encountering Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale and the impact it had on him. (He remembers being afraid at the sight of Hammons out there that day.)Sheffer tells the filmmakers that, as an adult, he wound up working with and befriending Hammons’s daughter Carmen. To her bewilderment, Sheffer wanted to purchase a snowball for $1 million (a commission, presumably; the movie doesn’t ask him to clarify) and tried, tried, tried to line up an insurer first — but alas. Thwarted, he whips up an email to Carmen (“if you come across any other interesting Hammons …”) that her mischievous father prints, frames and displays alongside a permanent snowball for a rare retrospective at the Mnuchin Gallery on the Upper East Side, seven years ago. Sheffer says he tried to buy that, too.Someone else — someone who collects Hammons’s work, we’re told — makes a substantial offer on the same piece. And Hammons decides to — well, this movie really is worth seeing; and if you’re unfamiliar with his witty solution, you deserve to hear it from the film itself.But tales like these are where the movie gets that title. It comes from the artist Halsey Rodman, who, in an interview, is clever about the inherent conundrum of Hammons’s snowy ephemera. The work is incomplete, he surmises, because, in memory as much as in one’s hands, the melt goes on forever. A proverb that does the work of parody.An animated scene from the documentary shows Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale from 1983, when he offered snowballs for purchase near the corner of Cooper Square and Astor Place.Tynesha Foreman/Greenwich EntertainmentThis feels especially true once the movie ends in that blitz of auctions, acquisitions and shows: the sale of Hammons’s “African American Flag”; the Mnuchin event; the eviction of the late writer and assembler of interesting people Steve Cannon from his gathering spot and home. It’s a home one otherwise supportive gallerist calls “pretty cruddy,” a home where, on one of its walls, Hammons painted what he called “Flight Fantasy.”The film’s emphasis on possession and dispossession (Cannon’s story needs its own proper telling) becomes so strong that it kind of topples over the movie’s sense of scholarship. And without the intellectual rigor of a Bridget R. Cooks or Kellie Jones or Betye Saar or Suzanne Jackson or Robert Farris Thompson or Henry Taylor to continue guiding us (and the filmmakers, honestly), things get murky.With each alacritous tale of somebody trying to tame or take a Hammons, a kind of pungency set in. And all I wanted was to be in a clearer, cleaner, happier movie about white people trying to own something Black. I wanted to be in the movie about the time Nike wooed Michael Jordan. I wanted to be in “Air.” Both that and “The Melt Goes On Forever” are honest, in their ways, about the stakes of ownership and the racial eternity of this dilemma. I just think the people who made the Jordan movie are better storytellers. I left that movie high. It knows capitalism is an emotion. It knows the thorny racial transaction that makes this country run. And I know Nike doesn’t own Jordan or even his skill, just a symbol of them, his silhouette. Indeed, he’s never depicted in “Air” as more than a back of the head. And Hammons, here, never sits for an interview. (He’ll be 80 this year.)This movie’s homestretch should make me just as happy. Hammons seems like the victor in his attempt to satirize not so much the transaction of art for dollars but the covetous, oblivious, entitled nature of certain transactors. In “Air,” Jordan knows his worth — well, his mother does. When the white folks at Nike meet her demands, corporate justice is served. But that’s a fantasy that “The Melt Goes On Forever” scrubs raw.Maybe Crooks and Tully are actually better than I think at doing what Hammons’s art does and letting the gallerists’ and dealers’ values speak for themselves. Their movie’s not telling me what to feel at all. I’m just feeling it, feeling baffled, dismayed, leveled with, winked at. But I’d also like to know if these gallery folks know how anti-Hammons their aims are, how they’re losing at his game while excelling at their own. (What does Carmen Hammons think?!) The movie’s right. It’s a grand folly. The melt really does go on forever. But do these people get it? That’s not how the game works, of course. Obviously, Hammons knows that. And so, I suppose, do the people who keep trying to beat him at it.The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David HammonsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Slava Ukraini’ Review: Tour of a War-Torn Nation

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      The French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy travels to different parts of Ukraine in this dispatch-documentary, shot in the second half of 2022.The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy does not pretend that “Slava Ukraini,” a war dispatch that he directed with Marc Roussel, is a polished documentary. In his closing narration, he describes it as an “unfinished film that we deliver as such, from the road.”For better and worse, that is how it plays. Lévy’s second documentary on the war in Ukraine (the first, “Why Ukraine,” aired on television in Europe) follows his travels to cities around the battered country in the second half of 2022. He meets with soldiers and civilians to capture the human stakes of the fight, with the goal of rallying the world against complacency in the face of the Russian president Vladimir V. Putin’s aggression.Lévy’s effort demands respect. Public intellectuals in the United States seldom travel through war zones with a camera running. (For that, we have Sean Penn.) They do not head into the center of a still-smoldering Bakhmut as the rumble of combat echoes in the background. Nor do they stand across the Dnipro River from an active Russian military position, in apparent view of a sniper. “For the time being, there is only sporadic fire,” Lévy explains over footage of himself hastening back to a car.It is also facile to dismiss Lévy, as some have, as a conflict-chasing opportunist. He’s been at this long enough. Lévy first wrote as a war correspondent in the early 1970s. His documentary “Peshmerga,” on Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State in Iraqi Kurdistan, and its follow-up, “The Battle of Mosul,” were released here in 2020.Yet Lévy does not make especially cohesive documentaries, and “Slava Ukraini” consists, like the Iraq films, of a disjointed, often insufficiently contextualized collection of interviews and interactions from his travels. It is hard not to wish for a version of “Slava Ukraini” in which Lévy played a less central onscreen role, or at least one without so much obtrusive scoring or voice-over.Occasionally his commentary is poetic. A breathtaking hand-held shot shows him trudging through a trench with soldiers as he reflects in narration “on this archaic habit of men burying themselves so not to die.” Yet more often, at least as subtitled, his words are so florid (“And we walk, under an insolently blue sky, looking for miraculous survivors”) that they risk trivializing his encounters. The camera says a lot without him.But artistic values aren’t really the point, which is to meet Ukrainians and to see different corners of the bombarded country, where residents, Lévy suggests, have in many cases become inured to the sight of a bombed office building or to the sound of warning sirens. “If there’s an evacuation, where will I go?” says a woman making borscht outdoors. Lévy visits a synagogue that sheltered outsiders, an act that he says serves as “a magnificent rebuttal to Putin’s propaganda about the inexpiable war between Ukraine and its Jews.” Survivors in liberated Kherson gather around generators to charge their phones, preparing to call people who may have been killed.Maybe Lévy didn’t need to be the one to put them in a movie. But he’s the one who did.Slava UkrainiNot rated. In French, Ukrainian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Anxious Nation’ Review: The Kids Aren’t All Right

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      Young people discuss their troubles with anxiety and panic in this unfocused advocacy documentary.Among American youth, anxiety is an epidemic. “Anxious Nation,” directed by Vanessa Roth (the short documentary “Freeheld,” which won an Oscar) and Laura Morton, persuasively argues as much. Yet when it comes to the causes of this mental health crisis or the precise ways in which it manifests, the documentary falters, unable to distill its empirical material into insights.The film opens with home-video footage of Morton and her teenage daughter, Sevey. In a voice-over, Morton explains that Sevey has suffered lifelong anxiety and near-daily meltdowns, and that the trials inspired Morton to explore adolescent anxiety in a film. She proceeds to talk to a handful of struggling teenagers and some of their parents, who describe distressing episodes that run the gamut and include tantrums during homework, compulsive behaviors and suicidal ideation.The sensation of panic or dread is not easy to describe, and the young subjects comport themselves exceptionally well. Rather than pair these accounts with observational footage, however, the directors reach for visual interest by interspersing scans of children’s artwork and lingering on the images with slow pans. (A title card at the end of the film reveals that the pieces were created by young people asked to illustrate their experiences with anxiety.)Interviews with psychologists offer a few concrete guidelines for parents: Steer clear of catastrophizing, for one, and avoid accommodating irrational anxieties. But as an advocacy documentary, “Anxious Nation” is unfocused, and ultimately feels like less than the sum of its parts.Anxious NationNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In select theaters and available to watch through virtual cinema. More

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      ‘King Charles, the Boy Who Walked Alone’ Review: Reflections on a Monarch

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      A sort of cinematic advance man for this week’s coronation, the documentary makes a show of seeking balance but often tips its hand in favor of Charles.Several times in this picture its interviewees attempt to contradict the impression that King Charles is an “old dry stick.” Hence the documentary, directed by Jim Nally, is juicier than its sad-sack title indicates. The “boy who walked alone” phrase comes from Johnny Stonborough, who was a schoolmate of the then Prince of Wales at Gordonstoun, a strict Scottish boarding school (referred to by some, says Stonborough, as “Colditz in a kilt”) where Charles’s father sent him to “toughen him up.” Not only did Charles not make many friends there, but he also endured bullying from upperclassmen under approval from the headmaster.Once out of school, though, he did rather well with members of the opposite sex. The picture teems with contemporary interviews with former Charles-daters who speak of his wit, his “cheekiness” and his delightful flirtatiousness. But even as he enjoyed himself on beaches and polo fields with women he was well aware he could never marry, he still kept his eye on one; the movie reminds us that he’d met Camilla Rosemary Shand when he was a teen, and he did not take his eye off her after marriage made her Camilla Parker Bowles.The movie itself highly approves of the match. About an hour into proceedings, there’s a spate of Princess Diana-bashing during which the phrase “not to speak ill of the dead” is never uttered. Near the movie’s end, a “royal journalist” and a “royal biographer” wax rueful that Prince Harry has lashed out at Dad Charles, who is maybe, in their opinion, the last royal to really care about the monarchy. Gosh. If there’s one thing this movie demonstrates, it’s that whatever the actual function of said monarchy, it does give Britain’s taxpayers their money’s worth in drama if nothing else.King Charles, the Boy Who Walked AloneNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      ‘Nuclear Now’ Review: Oliver Stone Makes the Case for Power Plants

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      The director’s new documentary considers our complicated relationship to nuclear energy and argues that it is our best hope against climate change.Given Oliver Stone’s track record of diving into political controversies with his work (“Platoon,” “JFK,” “Snowden”), it is perhaps surprising how staid his approach is to his new documentary, “Nuclear Now.” All the more surprising is that the film’s measured tone is what lends it its visceral power. With his straightforward proposal — that nuclear energy has been the solution to climate change all along — Stone looks past politics, providing an antidote to the climate doomerism that many viewers have probably felt over the last several years.The film, a vital rejoinder to the 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” considers both the past and future of nuclear power and, by laying out the simple facts of the ever-worsening state of climate change, makes a compelling case for it as the energy source that can most reasonably and realistically help us face the crisis.Stone, who wrote the film with Joshua Goldstein and narrates it, knows the perceptions he’s up against. The documentary’s first half wrestles with the enduring fears that nuclear boosters have struggled to debunk — the result of a few snowballing factors, the film argues, including the association of nuclear power with nuclear warfare and the exceptional disasters that occurred in 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, and in 2011 at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station.The latter sections, concerning the innovations and obstacles to future applications of nuclear power, veer somewhat into the weeds. But the film’s aversion to formal or rhetorical bombast as it discusses scientists’ hopes for a better future is its own balm. We’re staring down catastrophe, Stone explains matter-of-factly, but our greatest tool is already in our grasp.Nuclear NowNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and Hallelujah’ Review: The Show Must Go On

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      A documentary about the country star, whose mother and singing partner, Naomi Judd, died last year, mostly fails to kindle unguided emotions.As portrayed in the new documentary “Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and Hallelujah,” the country artist Wynonna Judd experiences, in real time, a cruel kind of suffering. Her mother and longtime singing partner, Naomi Judd, died by suicide last year. In the director Patty Ivins Specht’s film, Wynonna is left to pick up the pieces.The film’s wistful opening frames are hauntingly emotional, showing the two women in conversation in their early years of performing as the Judds. But Wynonna is also a superstar with a history of her own, one that Specht’s film mostly omits in favor of a sweeping statement about perseverance and the importance of a solid support system in the face of tragedy.The doc, which captures the singer on a tour she was supposed to share with Naomi, seems content to exist primarily as a lifeline for others who have experienced loss. When Wynonna’s sister, the actress Ashley Judd, appears, it’s clear they’re working on their relationship, but not why they have to. Earlier, though, when Wynonna flips through old family photos at her mother’s home, that action is heartbreakingly specific. For the viewer, it’s a more palpable feeling.The rest of “Between Hell and Hallelujah” amounts to a performance-focused tour diary with Hallmark-movie energy. Though Wynonna powers through the songs with admirable grit and grace, Specht’s approach is too awkwardly methodical and cloyingly vague to kindle enough unguided emotions. Without those rich details that make a song like the Judds’ “Flies on the Butter” come to life, the film plays like a country song with more chorus than verse.Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and HallelujahNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More