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    ‘The Lost Weekend: A Love Story’ Review: When John Lennon Strayed

    There’s not much Lennon music heard in this doc about his affair with May Pang, and given how much Pang trashes his wife, Yoko Ono, it’s no surprise it was withheld.Interest in John Lennon’s personal life goes back to early ’60s Beatlemania, when a waggish producer on the Ed Sullivan Show captioned a shot of the then-moptop, “Sorry girls, he’s married.”As we have learned over and over, the emotionally damaged and frequently volatile Lennon was often no picnic as a spouse.During his second marriage, to the artist Yoko Ono, Lennon had a long and serious affair with May Pang, who had been a personal assistant to the couple in the early 1970s. This sojourn has been nicknamed Lennon’s “lost weekend,” partly because of the drunken acting out he did with Pang in tow. Also because he reunited with Ono in 1975, had a child with her, and entered a period of devoted, near-reclusive domesticity before he was assassinated in 1980.“I’m May Pang, and this is my story,” narrates the 72-year-old Pang in this documentary, which somehow required three directors — Eve Brandstein, Richard Kaufman and Stuart Samuels — to complete. The film uses a mix of copious archival footage and often melodramatic music to tell it. Oh, and one significant talking-head interview, with Julian Lennon, the musician’s first son, who is a friend of Pang’s to this day.There’s not a lot of Lennon music heard here, and given how pointedly Pang trashes Ono, it’s no surprise that it was withheld. Still, Pang credibly asserts that she was a significant presence not just for instances of Lennon behaving badly, but for high points of his solo career.Whatever the truth of Ono’s manipulations in this affair — and Pang’s claims, including that Ono asked Pang to look after Lennon in an especially personal way, are at times hair-raising — they tinge this saga with a resentment that’s off-putting. Still, if you’re up for a montage of Lennon/Pang Polaroids accompanied by the strains of Eddie Money’s “Two Tickets To Paradise,” this movie is just the thing.The Lost Weekend: A Love StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Alan Pakula: Going for Truth’ Review: A Hollywood Memorial for a Friend

    A heartfelt documentary about the director of such celebrated films as “All the President’s Men” has the feel of an A-list memorial service.“Alan Pakula: Going for Truth,” by the director Matthew Miele, is suffused with mourning. The documentary about the titular filmmaker opens with actors — Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Dustin Hoffman and Kevin Kline among them — recalling how news of his death affected them. In November 1998, Alan Pakula was driving on the Long Island Expressway when a metal pole crashed through his windshield. Piano notes sound beneath Harrison Ford’s especially affecting speechlessness.Even so, what comes as a surprise is how much this documentary honoring Pakula, the director of that dark triumvirate of 1970s films — “Klute,” “The Parallax View” and “All the President’s Men” — has the feel of a memorial service. A lovely one, a deserved one, but more a collection of beloveds gathered to share in who was lost than a rigorous reckoning with a filmmaker who had a sense of what bedeviled this country when he produced “To Kill a Mockingbird,” released in 1962, and whose insights had become even keener by the time he directed his “paranoia trilogy.”There are hints of depth. Robert Redford cites their shared sense of political paranoia. Jane Fonda (“Klute”) says that “he had an affinity for women.” Recollections from Streep (“Sophie’s Choice”), Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Bonnie Bedelia echo that sense of Pakula’s empathy. (Clips from Liza Minnelli’s performance in “The Sterile Cuckoo” offer further support.)Pakula’s work with actors or the resurgent meaning of his trilogy could have been documentaries unto themselves. But the viewer might not have gotten an adjacent set of insights from his family, particularly Hannah Pakula, his second wife. Her tender, incisive regard creates an ache even as it offers solace.Alan Pakula: Going for TruthNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Sam Now’ Review: When Mom Leaves

    Sensitive and surprising, Reed Harkness’s documentary follows the reverberations in his family after their mother abruptly departs.At the heart of the disarming documentary “Sam Now” is the challenge of coming to terms with familial pain. The director, Reed Harkness, traces how his younger brother Sam and other relatives coped with the abrupt departure of their mother, Jois. Drawing on friendly but frank interviews and 25 years of home-movie adventures shot by Reed with Sam, it’s a film whose emotional reality seems to evolve before your eyes.Jois left without a word just as Sam was starting high school, baffling him and sending another teenage brother, Jared, into a spiral. Their caring father, Randy, joins the rest of the Northwest-based family in moving on rather than hashing out the past. Reed’s musing voice-over and interviews are broken up by the cartoonish superhero capers that Reed shot with the then-cheery Sam.Paired with garage rock, this approach risks becoming precious, but instead, the movie deepens in complexity as Reed intervenes. He urges Sam to search for Jois, and, instead of a peekaboo mystery, she turns up, happy and not especially regretful. She explains why she left, and — as the movie jumps forward in years — we see how her hard-to-accept decision reverberates for Sam and Jared as adults.Observantly edited, the movie mingles the perspectives of many family members without casting judgment, developing an aching poignancy that recalls recent family dramas like “Aftersun” and “Return to Seoul.” Reed’s initial overeager stylings fall back to reveal a mature reckoning with love, hurt, independence, and hard-won wisdom.Sam NowNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling Now’ Review: Breakout Crooner in Meta Form

    The Scottish musician’s infectious presence makes every familiar documentary trick here go down easy.The Scottish musician Lewis Capaldi knows the drill: In pop star documentaries, we hear the rough cut of a song and then, inevitably, we watch as the crowd eats up every word of the resulting hit. When he mocks just how commonplace that particular scene is in his own doc, “How I’m Feeling Now,” you sense he gets it — this one will be different. But the director Joe Pearlman sticks to that trajectory, where triumph comes after a tough era for Capaldi, who released his debut in 2019 and then returned home during the pandemic to live with his parents in his hometown in Scotland. That would be more of a knock had the film not already winked at embracing that conventional course as the outcome, or if Capaldi’s infectious presence alone didn’t make every familiar documentary trick here go down easy.In the film, his charmingly crass persona is in contrast to his sensitive ballads, a revealing dichotomy that runs through “How I’m Feeling Now,” which examines the fragmented ways in which people appear to be and the ways they actually are. On Instagram, where he has amassed over six million followers, Capaldi has acted like a jaunty college frat boy; in the film, we see a darker side of him, where his palpable discomfort with anxiety and Tourette’s syndrome are deserving of sympathy. Remarkably, “How I’m Feeling Now” manages to escape most of the promotional trappings of its ilk, striking a more meaningful note than other pop star docs. By the time it reaches its predictable end, I still wanted to grab a beer with Capaldi and celebrate his healing, and I don’t even drink beer.Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling NowNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    How Cold War Politics Destroyed the Band Blood, Sweat & Tears

    A new documentary chronicles the strange, intrigue-filled saga of Blood, Sweat & Tears and its disastrous Eastern Bloc tour in 1970.Last year, Rolling Stone compiled a list of “The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History.” Near the top, alongside very high-profile errors in judgment like Decca Records’ rejection of the Beatles, there was a much less familiar episode: the time Blood, Sweat & Tears embarked on an Eastern European concert tour, underwritten by the State Department while the Vietnam War was raging. The reputation of the U.S. government was in tatters for young people, meaning the band looked, as the magazine put it, like “propaganda pawns — which is, more or less, what they were.”Now the band members are telling their side of this bizarre story in the new documentary “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?” While everyone involved agrees with Rolling Stone’s conclusion — that the band’s career never recovered from that 1970 tour — the saga turns out to be more complicated than was previously known.“This isn’t a music doc, it’s a political thriller,” the director John Scheinfeld said in a telephone interview. “It’s about a group of guys who unknowingly walked into this rat’s nest, and how political forces impacted a group of individuals.”It is largely forgotten just how big Blood, Sweat & Tears was in its day. “Child Is Father to the Man,” the band’s 1968 debut, drew critical notice for its blend of big-band horns with rock and soul structure and style, but struggled commercially. After the group recruited the stentorian Toronto vocalist David Clayton-Thomas, its self-titled second album exploded, generating three Top 5 singles: “Spinning Wheel,” “And When I Die” and “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy.”The band performed at Woodstock (though, like many of the bigger groups on the bill, its management refused participation in the movie that made the festival a legend), and “Blood, Sweat & Tears” won the album of the year Grammy over the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” and “Johnny Cash at San Quentin.”But in 1969, Blood, Sweat & Tears had to cancel a concert in Maryland when Clayton-Thomas was detained by Canadian immigration authorities; the United States had blocked his re-entry. No explanation was given, but the band assumed it was politically motivated.“I thought that because he’s Canadian, and we were — not collectively, but individually — speaking against the war,” the drummer Bobby Colomby said by phone, “some ultra-white congressmen probably said, ‘Who the hell does this Canadian guy think he is?’”The band’s manager, Larry Goldblatt, met with officials to resolve his singer’s visa status, and what happened next remains unclear — whether he or the State Department came up with the idea of having Blood, Sweat & Tears tour Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia as a way to promote democracy in Soviet-aligned countries that were potentially exploring closer ties to the West.“To use the language we use today, a quid pro quo was agreed upon,” Scheinfeld said. “If the band does this tour, the State Department will make David’s immigration problems go away. The band gets to keep their lead singer, and the State Department has the hottest band going working to advance their interests in Eastern Europe, so it’s kind of a win-win.”A planned movie of the tour fell apart as did a proposed TV special. The footage, smuggled out of the Eastern Bloc, was found in a vault.AbramoramaClayton-Thomas noted that such cultural exchange tours had been happening for decades, so the band didn’t think it was a big deal. “Most of the guys were jazz musicians, and they were used to the idea that Louis Armstrong would go to Moscow, and they’d send the Bolshoi Ballet to Lincoln Center,” he said by phone. Only the guitarist Steve Katz voted against the trip.It was agreed that the tour would be filmed for a possible documentary, organized by the executive producer Mal Klein. Blood, Sweat & Tears played seven concerts between June 17 and July 7, 1970, and when they first arrived in Yugoslavia, they were surprised by what they saw.“The kids were wearing ripped jeans and they had cafes and rock ’n’ roll and street fairs,” Clayton-Thomas said. “We thought, ‘Wow, they’ve been lying to us — this ain’t so bad.’ Then we went to Romania, and you could hear the Iron Curtain slam shut behind you.”Dan Klein, Mal Klein’s then 14-year-old son, tagged along and described the whole thing as feeling “like a James Bond movie.” He said the officials in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania made no effort to disguise the bugs they placed in hotel rooms, and he recounted being observed during meals.“There was a man sitting at the table reading a newspaper and drinking a cup of coffee,” Klein said by phone, “and after a while, he got up and left, and another person sat down at the same table and picked up the same newspaper and continued drinking the same cup of coffee.”But things turned from comedy to tragedy at the Bucharest concerts, where audience members got too rowdy and were beaten by security guards. The second night, the band members were instructed to dial things down, and when they didn’t, the guards set dogs loose on the crowd.“My father, in his naïveté, thought that if he got the camera people to film the policemen and the dogs attacking the spectators that it would make them stop,” Klein said. “But that was just stupid; that just made them angrier.” The crew had to smuggle its footage out of Romania, using blank reels of film as a decoy for officials to confiscate.Back in the United States, the musicians came under fire for aiding the government, accused of being a “fascist rock band” by both the underground press and mainstream journalists. The trouble immediately became evident at a hastily arranged, hostile Los Angeles news conference.“We came back saying, ‘Yeah, Nixon is awful, Vietnam is the worst thing in the world, but communism? You don’t want that here,’” Colomby said. “But back then, for the extreme left, that wasn’t acceptable to say.”Henry Kissinger even sent Richard M. Nixon a memo about the tour, and the president scrawled a note at the bottom inquiring how “youth leaders might get the message.” On July 25, the band played a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden. Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies staged a protest, throwing horse manure onstage.The damage was simply too great. “Blood, Sweat & Tears 3,” which was actually released during the Eastern European tour, went to No. 1, but the group never had another hit single, and album sales plummeted. The strains of the tour and the backlash exacerbated tensions between band members, and by the end of 1971, four of the nine musicians — including Clayton-Thomas — had left the group.In its heyday, the band was among the biggest in the country, beating out the Beatles and Johnny Cash for the Grammy for album of the year.AbramoramaAs for the planned documentary, there was no formal directive, but Scheinfeld suspects that the footage, especially of the Romanian riots, was deemed too negative to help American efforts to thaw the Cold War. The feature film morphed into a proposed TV special, but that also seemed to go nowhere. What started as a win-win wound up being a disaster for all sides.And that was the end of the story, until Scheinfeld — whose film subjects have included John Lennon and Harry Nilsson — was introduced to Colomby, who had seen “Chasing Trane,” the director’s 2017 John Coltrane documentary. They got to talking, Scheinfeld learned about the 1970 tour debacle, and he set out on a coast-to-coast mission, combing through storage vaults and government facilities to locate the lost material.Scheinfeld determined that while 65 hours of film had been shot, both the production company and the postproduction house had gone out of business in 1971. After months of fruitless searching, an email showed up from a vault that Scheinfeld had already checked: Someone had found a reference to Blood, Sweat & Tears in a file, which turned out to be a pristine, 53-minute print of the abandoned television edit. That footage became the spine of “What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?”For Colomby, revisiting this pivotal chapter revealed much that he didn’t know, but he offered no apologies and no regrets for making the deal and taking the trip.“We were the most innocent musicians you ever met in your life,” he said. “We just wanted to play well and do something that would affect music in a positive way. So if you ask, ‘Would you do this again?’ In a heartbeat. It was fascinating. It was eye-opening in every sense of the word.” More

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    ‘Living with Chucky’ Review: What a Doll

    This documentary takes a personal look at the legacy of one of horror’s most lasting and loved villains.In 1988, the horror film “Child’s Play” introduced a red haired, sailor-mouthed, killer-possessed doll named Chucky. The film was a box office hit, spawning six sequels and a Syfy series, positioning Chucky — the monster-child of the writer-director Don Mancini — alongside Jason and Freddy as one of horror’s most enduring one-name antiheroes. There were killer doll movies before, but “Child’s Play” is the ne plus ultra that “M3gan” bows before.With an influential history to mine, it’s a shame the franchise-spanning documentary “Living With Chucky,” written and directed by Kyra Elise Gardner, feels like hagiographic DVD featurettes meanderingly stitched together. There are flashes of insight, from the actress Jennifer Tilly, who in several films voiced Chucky’s girlfriend, Tiffany; the director John Waters, who praises the films’ queerness; and the actor Alex Vincent, whose performance as Andy, Chucky’s young owner, made the original as heartbreaking as it was heart-pounding. But in the final stretch, Gardner, the daughter of the “Child’s Play” special effects artist Tony Gardner, goes in front of the camera, pausing from documenting the franchise and its impact to placing herself in it, a head-scratching pivot. The film could have used more outsider voices, including fans, to position the character’s legacy.Chucky aficionados who know this stuff already might still stick around until the end, and the Chucky-curious with 105 minutes to kill might get a kick out of the film’s crash course in Chuckydom. (There are spoilers galore.) But horror agnostics likely won’t last through a dive this deep.Living with ChuckyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields’ Review: Girlhood, Interrupted

    Lana Wilson’s documentary blossoms in moments of cultural commentary, where it builds a mood of reminiscence gone rancid.In the 1978 Louis Malle drama “Pretty Baby,” Brooke Shields plays a child whose virginity is auctioned off in a New Orleans brothel. She was 11 at the time of filming. That film’s title gets reappropriated in the director Lana Wilson’s absorbing documentary, “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields,” which emulsifies its biography of Shields with lucid insights into the culture that shaped her.Posed before a calming gray backdrop, the 57-year-old Shields seems preternaturally well-adjusted and is an enthusiastic chronicler of her own career. But like many tidy celebrity portraits, “Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields” (on Hulu) hits its stride when cinematic memoir takes a back seat to cultural commentary.Before Shields even hit puberty, the media had taken to framing her as either a Lolita or a demure darling — a Catch-22 that Wilson, through interviews with journalists and other actresses, positions within a history of Hollywood exploitation. Trapped in this binary, Shields failed to crystallize her identity until college, and the film’s second half traces her road to self-realization thereafter.The documentary’s most absorbing ingredient by far is its excellent collage of archival footage. “I knew it was going to be done in good taste,” a precocious preteen Shields is shown to say of Malle’s film in an interview around its release. Assembled alongside analysis, this clip and others build a mood of reminiscence gone rancid and suggest a generation of women transformed by the prototypes society boxed them into.Pretty Baby: Brooke ShieldsNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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    Michael Blackwood, Who Captured 20th-Century Artists on Film, Dies at 88

    He made cinéma vérité movies — more than 160 — about musicians (Thelonious Monk), architects (Frank Gehry), composers (Philip Glass) and sculptors (Isamu Noguchi).Michael Blackwood, a prolific documentarian who explored the work of 20th-century artists, architects, musicians, dancers and choreographers in more than 160 films and yet never became widely known, died on Feb. 24 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.His wife, Nancy Rosen, confirmed the death, in his sleep, but said she did not know the cause.Mr. Blackwood filmed his subjects in the unobtrusive, no-frills cinéma vérité style, seeking to capture the creative process behind their art, often in studio visits. Sometimes they were their own narrators; sometimes there were no narrators at all. Mr. Blackwood was invisible to viewers.He followed the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk on tour in Europe. He tagged along as the minimalist composer Philip Glass prepared for the 1984 premieres of his opera, “Akhnaten,” in Houston and Stuttgart, Germany.He observed the creative process of the Bulgarian-born conceptual artist Christo during his creation of epic environmental projects like “Running Fence” and “Wrapped Walkways.” And he let Isamu Noguchi explain his approach to his art as they walked among his sculptures.A scene from “Monk,” one of Mr. Blackwood’s two documentaries about the jazz pianist and composer Thelonious Monk.Michael Blackwood Productions“I go from one piece to the next,” Mr. Noguchi said in the 30-minute film, “Isamu Noguchi” (1972). “It’s a continuous development. It’s not something that I have intellectually arrived at as a way of doing things. I change with the work.”Mr. Blackwood took a similar approach to his own work, which he often undertook with his brother, Christian, a cameraman, director and producer. He moved from project to project on subjects that reflected his eclectic personal tastes, remaining largely under the film world radar and giving few interviews. Most of his films were carried on European television networks, but some were shown on public television stations in the United States and at art house theaters in Manhattan. They were also sold to libraries and museums.“He made the films he wanted to make and hoped people would want them,” Ms. Rosen said in a phone interview. “Any money he made from distributing his films was plowed into the next film.”Mr. Blackwood felt a particular urgency to make films about artists like Philip Guston, Larry Rivers, George Segal and Robert Motherwell.“There are no film portraits in existence of the artists of the early century, but barely a few haphazard meters of footage on such great figures as Rodin, Renoir and Kandinsky,” he told the Canadian magazine Vie Des Arts in 1981 in one of his rare interviews. “What a pity!”His fascination with architecture led him to make films about some of its stars, including Louis Kahn, Richard Meier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Peter Eisenman and Frank Gehry.In his review of “Frank Gehry: The Formative Years” (1988) in The New York Times, the architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote that Mr. Blackwood “has built up an admirable oeuvre of films about architects and architecture,” and that Mr. Blackwood has Mr. Gehry “ramble though his work in a way that is both inviting and informative.”A scene from “Isamu Noguchi” (1972), a 30-minute film about Noguchi’s approach to sculpture.Michael Blackwood ProductionsMichael Adolf Schwarzwald was born on July 15, 1934, in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland) and moved to Berlin when he was 2 years old. During World War II, his parents sent him for his safety to Lubeck, on Germany’s Baltic Coast, to one of a network of children’s homes run by the Lutheran Church.His father, Gerhard, who was Jewish, did forced labor jobs in Berlin during the war; his mother, Elinor (Feist) Schwarzwald, converted from Lutheranism to Judaism but subsequently rejoined the Lutheran Church to survive in Nazi Germany and protect her family. She worked at the Finnish consulate. After the war, his parents started a business that made sets and curtains for the German film industry and local theaters.The family, including his brother, emigrated to New York in 1949. Michael changed his surname to Blackwood and dropped his middle name after becoming a United States citizen in 1955.After his graduation from George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan, he found work with a special film unit of NBC. He swept the floors at first, but eventually learned to edit and direct there, which led him to make his first film, “Broadway Express” (1959), a 19-minute portrait of people riding the New York City subway, set to a jazz score.In 1961, after leaving NBC, Mr. Blackwood moved to Munich, West Germany, where he directed documentaries for public television. He returned to New York in 1965 and soon began making his own independent documentaries. In 1968, he and his brother directed two films about Monk for West German television: “Monk,” which focused on recording sessions and performances in New York and Atlanta, and “Monk in Europe,” about a European tour.Much of their footage was used in another documentary, Charlotte Zwerin’s “Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser” (1989). Jon Pareles wrote in a review in The Times that “Monk’s feet were as busy as his hands, and Mr. Blackwood’s alert camera crew zeroed in on them.”“Although Monk’s recorded piano sound is percussive,” Mr. Pareles went on, “the film shows him using the sustain pedal within single notes, using extraordinary finesse.”In a 1993 film, “The Sensual Nature of Sound,” Mr. Blackwood examined four distinctive performers and composers — Laurie Anderson, Tania León, Meredith Monk and Pauline Oliveros — devoting significant time to their discussions of their own work.“The thread that ties together so much of Blackwood’s work,” Sasha Frere-Jones wrote last year on the website for Pioneer Works, a Brooklyn culture center that was streaming some of Mr. Blackwood’s films, “is a sense of patience and respect, so that even when the documentary form includes narration, it usually comes from the painters and musicians themselves.”Mr. Blackwood also made films about subjects who were not artists, like the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hans Bethe and the diplomat George F. Kennan, and several about Germany and German Americans.In addition to his wife, he is survived by their son, Benjamin; his daughter, Katherine Blackwood and a son, Daniel, from his marriage to Ela Hockaday Kyle, which ended in divorce; and six grandchildren. His brother died in 1992.Mr. Blackwood’s last three films were all completed in 2014: one about the expansion of the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.; another about the painter Carroll Dunham; and the third a portrait of Greg Lynn, a leader in computer-aided architectural design.One film remains — one that Benjamin Blackwood said he may complete — about the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein’s “Greene Street Mural,” an installation created in 1983 at the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan. It measured 18 feet tall and 96½ feet wide and was destroyed, at Mr. Lichtenstein’s direction, after six weeks.“His priority wasn’t making an art piece,” Benjamin Blackwood said by phone, referring to his father’s cinematic ambitions, “but to make a film about the art his camera was capturing.” More