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      Rock Hudson Documentary Shows His Life Through a New Lens

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      The documentary on the movie star, whose death in 1985 changed how the public viewed AIDS, is premiering at the Tribeca Festival.Rock Hudson was the ultimate midcentury movie star, turning heads and breaking hearts as the camera lit his chiseled face and rugged frame. The double life he led as a gay man — and his death from AIDS-related causes at 59 in 1985 — have sealed him in Hollywood lore, but he is largely unknown to new generations of film fans.For Stephen Kijak, the director of the documentary “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed,” premiering Sunday at the Tribeca Festival (and streaming on Max on June 28), the actor was a fascinating figure to explore, both as a quintessential midcentury movie star and a gay icon.Mr. Kijak, who has directed several L.G.B.T.Q.-themed films, spoke recently from his Los Angeles home about the legacy of and enduring fascination with a movie star who lived a gay life almost out in the open and who, in a true act of openness as one of the first celebrities — if not the first — to go public about his illness, changed the course of how the world responded to the AIDS epidemic. The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.What is it about Rock Hudson that drew you to do this film?This film presented itself at exactly the right time, and from a group of people I love working with who brought me a subject I was fascinated by. I didn’t know a lot about Rock Hudson, and I love being in that spot. That journey of discovery is built into my process so that I can bring my audience along with me. It was initially titled “The Accidental Activist,” which is 100 percent accurate but a little bit limiting. I thought there was a bigger story there, even though that is also an interesting element to his story: someone who doesn’t at all intend to change anything but inadvertently ends up being culturally, politically and socially a catalyst in a way that I think most people have completely forgotten about.Rock Hudson with Lee Garlington. The men dated in the 1960s but had to keep the relationship private because of the mores of the day. Martin Flaherty & The Rock Hudson Estate Collection/HBOHow did it go from being titled “The Accidental Activist” to “All That Heaven Allowed”?There were so many more people over the course of the entire AIDS crisis who were true activists, who really moved the needle with forceful, direct action. I thought “activist,” and even “accidental,” might be a bit rich. There is so much more around his story: the Hollywood closet, the manufactured personality, the double life, the way the private existed weirdly under the surface of the manicured facade. He was having this kind of great rampant, randy gay sex life right there under everyone’s noses, but seemingly living without a care. There wasn’t the kind of angsty, oh-I-wish-I-could-just-be-an-out-gay-man. It was a generation that I don’t think considered that to be an option, or even something that they would want.What do you think people who are not familiar with Rock Hudson will get from this film?He’s faded away. Who were the big marquee names from the ’50s who everybody knows? It’s Marilyn Monroe. It’s James Dean. If anything, he is probably remembered for having died of AIDS in the ’80s and that scandal of having kissed Linda Evans on “Dynasty” when he was sick. Also, the manufactured star is not a concept that is completely alien to our modern age. He is a completely classic midcentury figure, from his upbringing, his trajectory, the look, the style, the movies he made. And who doesn’t like a doppelgänger story? The hall of mirrors, the split personality, the hidden life. There’s always the question of “why would young people be interested in this?” It wasn’t that long ago when it was really hard to be gay. Publicly, your life would be ruined. You were constantly afraid of being discovered.Is there a sense of how a movie can hold something in this moment that it might not have held in the past?There are people who don’t know a subject and people who do. So how is the method of our telling going to pull them both in and give them something that they didn’t expect or have experienced before? There is a slight tweak to how we approached who we were going to interview on film. Who you see on camera is a short stack of gay men who were in his life, either lovers, playmates, a wing man, a co-star, a best pal — people who he revealed himself to. What you get is an arc of gay men that takes you from pre-Stonewall, pre-gay liberation to the other side of the AIDS crisis. It’s Rock’s life that could have been through the lens of these guys.Stephen Kijak, director of the documentary “Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed,” premiering at the Tribeca FestivalDavid ArenasWas that a specific decision?Yes, and partly it was practical. We had to be very specific on how many days we could shoot. Granted, there is a part of me that wishes that we could have been rolling on Linda Evans when she tears up, but I think the choke in her voice still works. And you’re seeing her and him in their “Dynasty” glory days.Does this movie represent more than just Rock Hudson? Does it represent the film industry still regarding that “double life” idea?Well, I’m not going to name names, but you know there’s a handful of Rock Hudsons out there right now who have to be even more careful given the fact that everyone has a little camera in their phone. Confidential magazine was one thing, but it seems so quaint now looking back.Do you think this film documents something people long to return to? The old Hollywood, maybe?When his films were great, they were so great. The Douglas Sirk films were so lush and so layered. I could watch “All That Heaven Allows” a hundred times. Oh, and “Written on the Wind” with that crazy Dorothy Malone performance! Can I make a movie about her next? More

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      How KIRAC Trailed Michel Houellebecq From the Bedroom to the Courtroom

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      The art collective KIRAC was embroiled in court battles over a film about the author’s sex life. Is the dispute a performance? A marketing stunt? Or a genuine cultural feud?On Saturday night, an eclectic art crowd was gathering outside an industrial garage in Amsterdam East, where Michel Houellebecq, the celebrated French author, was set to speak.Houellebecq had on May 24 released “A Few Months of My Life,” a new book describing a tumultuous period from October 2022 to March 2023 when he collaborated with a Dutch art collective called KIRAC. Together, they worked on a film, shooting scenes that show the married 67-year-old author making out with young women.Although Houellebecq had consented to making the film, he later changed his mind and tried to back out. Beginning in February, he brought court cases in France and the Netherlands to stop the movie from being shown. Last month, an Amsterdam judge upheld Houellebecq’s complaint and granted him the right to see a final cut of any re-edited film four weeks before release, giving him a chance to file another action if he doesn’t like what he sees.In “A Few Months of My Life,” a 94-page autobiographical work, Houellebecq digs deep into his hatred for KIRAC. He names the group’s leader, Stefan Ruitenbeek, only once, describing him as a “pseudo-artist” and “a cockroach with a human face.” Female KIRAC members are referred to as “the sow” and “the turkey.”According to the organizer of Saturday’s event, Tarik Sadouma, Houellebecq had not come to Amsterdam to promote his new book, but to talk about his work generally. As a condition of his participation, Houellebecq asked Sadouma to bar Ruitenbeek and his cohorts from the event.Yet just as the audience took its seats inside, Ruitenbeek burst through the door, dressed as a giant brown cockroach, with bobbing antennae and a furry cape. He was trailed by KIRAC members, one wearing a false pig snout, another filming the whole thing.“I’m here!” cried Ruitenbeek, taking the stage, to a mixture of jeering and cheers. “I’m the cockroach!”A woman taking tickets tried to wrangle the camera from the cameraman and Sadouma shouted for the intruders to leave. Eventually, Ruitenbeek — pleading, “No violence!” — left with his entourage.Michel Houellebecq released a 94-page autobiographical book, “A Few Months of My Life,” about his experiences with KIRAC.Philippe Matsas/FlammarionThis was the latest episode in an ongoing, surrealistic conflict between KIRAC, a fringe art group that posts its films on YouTube, and Houellebecq, one of the world’s most famous authors.Was it a performance? A marketing stunt? Or part of a genuine cultural feud? Who could really tell?KIRAC, an acronym for Keeping It Real Art Critics, is often described as an art collective, but its creative center is Ruitenbeek and Kate Sinha, a writer who is also Ruitenbeek’s life partner. They make films that at first appear to be documentaries, or possibly mockumentaries, typically set in the art world. In them, the boundaries between reality and fiction are often blurred, narratives sometimes conflict and onscreen characters can appear to be playing a game with the truth.It is also often difficult to discern KIRAC’s political views. In one of its films, the Dutch architect and curator Rem Koolhaas is criticized as “macho” and “patriarchal.” In another, KIRAC seems to decry diversity efforts, arguing that the artist Zanele Muholi was given a retrospective at the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam, “only because she is from South Africa, Black and lesbian.” (Muholi now uses they/them pronouns and identifies as nonbinary.)Seen as provocateurs or pranksters, and sometimes art world trolls, KIRAC’s members often deliver critical monologues directly to the camera, usually in the form of articulate academic analysis from Sinha, or mocking insults from Ruitenbeek.“In the broadest sense, we’re just trying to make great films, intellectual entertainment,” Sinha said. “I think we are primarily artists, interested in the object we make, which is always the film.”Sinha in “Time’s Up, Old Man,” a KIRAC film in which she criticizes the Dutch curator and architect Rem Koolhaas.KIRACIn a joint interview, Ruitenbeek and Sinha said they developed the concept for the Houellebecq film with the author and shot 600 hours of footage of him, with his contractual consent. Houellebecq only objected when they put together a two-minute trailer for the work in progress, according to Ruitenbeek and Sinha.In that clip, Ruitenbeek explains that a “honey trip,” or sex holiday, that Houellebecq had planned in Morocco had been canceled because the author feared being kidnapped by Muslim extremists. (Houellebecq has a long history of making critical statements about Islam, and some readers have found Islamophobic sentiments in his books.)“His wife had spent an entire month arranging prostitutes from Paris, and now everything was falling apart,” Ruitenbeek says in the trailer, in voice-over. He then suggests that there are plenty of young Dutch women in Amsterdam who would have “sex with a famous writer out of curiosity,” and invites the author to visit.In a French court, Houellebecq argued that the trailer violated his privacy and damaged his image. He asked the court to make KIRAC pull the trailer from all online platforms, remove any mention of his wife arranging prostitutes and pay her damages. The court rejected Houellebecq’s case.Later, in the Dutch court, Houellebecq argued that KIRAC had violated contract law, and misled him so that he ended up “in a different film than the one originally intended,” according to his Dutch lawyer, Jacqueline Schaap. An appeal judge in that case found for Houellebecq.The film is still unfinished and continues to evolve, Ruitenbeek said. After Houellebecq left the project, KIRAC filmed in and around the court proceedings, as well as shooting other moments, such as Saturday night’s cockroach show.Ruitenbeek said he was now rethinking the material, and a final cut may not come for months.“We started off this project in an open-minded attitude toward each other; we took each other as artists,” Sinha said of the collaboration with Houellebecq. “It feels like he backpedaled and put on a different coat.”Houellebecq last week agreed to an interview for this article, but pulled out after learning that he would not be shown his quotes before publication. (At the event in Amsterdam, he again declined to comment, claiming that he did not speak English, although he speaks it in the KIRAC film.)Ruitenbeek’s over-the-top voice-overs and willingness to play a goofball suggest that KIRAC is going for humor. But, often, the subjects of its films don’t find them funny.“They point fingers at others, but carve out a safe space for themselves’,” said the artist Renzo Martens, who was the focus of an unflattering movie. “From this safe space they are brave enough to cut into other people’s flesh.”Three Dutch institutions that KIRAC has lambasted — the Stedelijk Museum, the Van Abbe Museum and the Kunstmuseum, in The Hague — declined to comment for this article.Salima El Musalima in KIRAC’s film “Honeypot.” More than 1,000 people signed a petition calling the film “a glorification of sexual violence.”KIRACThijs Lijster, a senior lecturer on the philosophy of art and culture at the University of Groningen, said that there is “something threatening in their ways of going about their work. They have a style of filming, and approaching and talking to people, which is, in a way, rather hostile.”It is not just KIRAC’s targeting of artists and institutions that has been controversial. Over time, its films have evolved to enter the realm of social commentary, drawing ire from across the political spectrum.Some viewers saw the group’s 19-minute film “Who’s Afraid of Harvey Weinstein?,” in which Sinha speaks about sexual power dynamics between the American film producer and his rape victims, as dismissive of the #MeToo movement.A leading art school in Amsterdam, the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, canceled a KIRAC screening after dozens of complaints from students, former students and teachers about statements in the group’s films that they found sexist and racist. The Weinstein movie was championed on a right-wing populist Dutch blog, Geen Stijl. Suddenly, KIRAC became a magnet for conservative followers.Although Ruitenbeek and Sinha said their personal politics are progressive, KIRAC didn’t disavow the attention, and instead produced a film called “Honeypot.” For that, the group convinced a conservative Dutch philosopher and activist, Sid Lukkassen, to have sex on camera with a left-wing student. The idea was to see if the intimate act would somehow bridge a political gap.More backlash ensued. When an Amsterdam arts center called De Balie screened “Honeypot,” a feminist collective submitted a petition with more than 1,000 signatures that called the film “a glorification of sexual violence.” The petition’s signers also included the right-wing Dutch politician Paul Cliteur and some of his followers.Ruitenbeek and Sinha both said their clash with Houellebecq was no stunt. They maintained that they don’t want to be in court with the author, whom they both described as “a genius.”Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times“It was interesting that these two sides teamed up against the film for opposite reasons,” said Yoeri Albrecht, De Balie’s director, who did not cancel the event. “I’ve never seen that happen in the more than a decade that I’ve been organizing events here.”The ambiguity around the group’s motivations only feeds the interest in KIRAC’s work. Many who have been following the Houellebecq affair are unsure whether it’s real or a postmodern KIRAC fiction.“Everyone is wondering, are they playing a game together?” said Simon Delobel, a curator who teaches at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Ghent, Belgium, where he was introduced to the group’s work by his students. KIRAC and Houellebecq were surely “well aware that it can be interpreted as a stunt,” he added.Yet Ruitenbeek and Sinha both said their clash with the author was no stunt. They don’t want to be in court with Houellebecq, whom they both described as “a genius.” They just want to be in conversation with him, Sinha said.Ruitenbeek added that when he showed up at Houellebecq’s talk on Saturday, he thought there was a small chance that everyone would laugh and give each other hugs. He was “very happy the day he went to get the cockroach suit,” Sinha said. “After all these intimidating court cases,” she added, “we were back on our own territory again: making art.”Léontine Gallois More

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      Hipgnosis, the Album Artists Who Made Pink Floyd’s Pig Fly

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      The filmmaker Anton Corbijn’s documentary “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)” tells the tale of the London design company devoted to crafting the perfect LP sleeve.In early 1980, Aubrey Powell, the then-33-year-old co-founder of the pioneering British design company Hipgnosis, flew to Hawaii to photograph the cover for the British rock band 10cc’s “Look Hear?” album.The shoot involved a specific sheep (only one was available on Oahu, at a university farm) seated on an old-timey psychiatrist’s couch (which had to be constructed by a Honolulu props company) on the island’s North Shore. The sheep, out of its element and skittish from the crashing waves, ruined the first day of the session, so a veterinarian was called in to tranquilize the animal for day two. Success.The final cost of the sleeve design, including airfare and a sheep wrangler, came to £5,043 — about $26,000 in today’s money and a big sum for the time. (But then again, as Powell, known as Po, said in an interview, back then the music industry “was awash with money.”) In the end, at the behest of Hipgnosis’ other co-founder, Storm Thorgerson, the U.K. version of the LP jacket was dominated by the words “Are You Normal” in large capital letters. The photo of the sheep on the chaise longue was shrunk to about the size of a postage stamp.A scene from the documentary shows the 1980 shoot for 10cc’s “Look Hear?” album artwork, which involved a sheep.Aubrey Powell/Hipgnosis LtdIn an interview, the 10cc singer and bassist Graham Gouldman admitted that though he’d had the album art explained to him in the past, he couldn’t recall what it meant. “But I know it’s a brilliant picture,” he said. As for all that pricey effort for such a tiny image? “It doesn’t matter, does it?” Gouldman said. “It’s art. So it’s got to be done.” He added, “And in Hipgnosis’ case, if you can get the record company to spend the money, then good for them.”The Dutch filmmaker Anton Corbijn, the director of “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis),” a documentary on the design firm that opens in New York on June 7, had a slightly different take. “It’s just not normal to fly all the way to Hawaii to do that picture,” he said. “But it makes for a good story.”“Squaring the Circle” is full of this and other good stories about the oft-absurd lengths the London-based Hipgnosis traveled in pursuit of the perfect LP sleeve in the era before Photoshop. Among the 415 album covers Hipgnosis made between 1968 and 1983 was Pink Floyd’s “Animals” (1977), for which a 40-foot inflatable pig was photographed floating between the chimneys of London’s Battersea Power Station. Unfortunately, the single cable affixed to the pig snapped, and up the balloon went — into the flight zone for Heathrow Airport.“That was all very exciting, and rather alarming,” recalled the Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, whose bandmate Roger Waters came up with the idea for the shoot, “because it was obvious that you could have a major disaster for an airline that happened to fly into the escaping pig.” No planes were harmed in the making of the LP cover, but in the end, Hipgnosis had to resort to a photo collage to achieve the desired effect.The documentary — shot largely in high-contrast black and white by Corbijn, himself a rock photographer and video director known for his work with U2 and Depeche Mode — features new interviews with Powell, plus a number of high-profile former Hipgnosis clients, including all three surviving members of Pink Floyd (David Gilmour, Mason and Waters) and Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Jimmy Page. Paul McCartney, Peter Gabriel and Gouldman are also among the talking heads. Noel Gallagher, a fan, provides some modern-day context and comic relief.HipgnosisA selection of Pink Floyd album covers designed by Hipgnosis, clockwise from top left: “Atom Heart Mother,” “Wish You Were Here,” “The Dark Side of the Moon” and “Animals.”HipgnosisMuch of the film focuses on the close working relationship between Powell and Thorgerson, who came up together in the Cambridge, England, art scene of the 1960s, where they were friends with young members of Pink Floyd. (Peter Christopherson, a founding member of the British industrial band Throbbing Gristle who died in 2010, became a full partner in Hipgnosis in 1978.) The design studio would end up doing nearly all of Pink Floyd’s album covers, including “Atom Heart Mother” (1970), which was simply a photograph of a cow in a field, and, most famously, “The Dark Side of the Moon” (1973), with its iconic image of a triangular prism refracting light into a rainbow pattern. (Hipgnosis’ second-best-known cover also came out in 1973: Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy,” which features a group of naked children scaling basalt columns.)The “Atom Heart Mother” jacket in particular represented a major departure from the style of the time, which Mason described as putting “a picture of the lovable moptops on the front.”“We started making demands — which Pink Floyd totally backed us on — saying ‘No title, no name of the band on the cover,’” said Powell, now 76. “This was unheard-of in the world of marketing and record companies.” He described presenting the “Atom Heart Mother” artwork to the suits: “When you walked in there with long hair and earrings, showing them a picture of a cover of a cow, they would go apoplectic.”It tended to be Thorgerson, by all accounts a stubborn genius, driving the record executives to apoplexy. “The greatest line about Storm was that ‘He’s a man who wouldn’t take yes for an answer,’” Mason said. “It was almost inevitable that whatever was done, particularly by the record company, would involve Storm having to shout at them.”Thorgerson and Powell took different approaches to communicating with artists and labels.Hipgnosis LtdThorgerson, who died in 2013, could be confrontational with the musicians as well. “He didn’t care if it was Paul McCartney or Roger Waters, he would express himself quite vehemently,” Powell said. “And often I would have to go around fighting the fires to maintain some kind of credibility. At the end of the day, it kind of worked because I managed to persuade the artists that it was the idea that was important. Forget about Storm’s personality.”Corbijn said that, ultimately, the documentary was a “story of love and loss.” Hipgnosis came to an end at the dawn of a new era, in which music videos ruled and compact discs, with their significantly smaller artistic canvases, became the dominant mode of distribution. (Of course, today most people see album art in miniature on their phones.) Thorgerson and Powell, who were moving over to filmmaking, had a falling out over money and didn’t speak for 12 years after that. “It was like the end of a marriage,” Powell said. The two reunited after Thorgerson fell ill; he died of cancer at the age of 69.In more recent years, Powell said, he’s been heartened to see that Hipgnosis’ album covers have broken “that barrier to be taken seriously as fine art.” He added, “A lot of thought went into those pictures. We didn’t take photographs of the band and slap it on the front with their names big and the title in big white letters. This was work that was taken extremely seriously. And I hope that comes over in the film.”Powell pointed to Hipgnosis’ cover of Led Zeppelin’s final studio album, “In Through the Out Door” from 1979, which involved lovingly recreating an actual New Orleans juke joint in a studio in London. He indicated that making the album’s visuals (which, after all that work, came wrapped in a brown paper bag) likely cost more than it did for the band to record the music itself.“You know,” Powell said with a laugh, “that sums up the period of time.” More

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      ‘After Sherman’ Review: A Gullah Geechee Reckoning

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      A New York-based filmmaker wades into the deep waters of his Gullah Geechee heritage and South Carolina roots.In the elegiac documentary “After Sherman,” cameras glide along waterways, soar above marshes, contemplate churches and travel down Southern roads lined by trees, the moss hanging like braids. Under the director Jon-Sesrie Goff’s gaze, these places are sacred, even as they remain haunted by a nation’s grievous racial history.“I’m Gullah, born in exile,” says Goff, who is based in New York, describing his place among the Gullah Geechee people of South Carolina.The film focuses on Goff’s father, the Rev. Dr. Norvel Goff Sr., a descendant of formerly enslaved people who purchased land in South Carolina after emancipation. Reverend Goff, who owns property in the Lowcountry, was also the interim pastor at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, after a self-identified white supremacist killed nine Black parishioners gathered for Bible study one evening in June 2015.While shucking oysters, son and father discuss what it means to forgive. There is nuance in Goff Sr.’s understanding of why some victims’ families extended forgiveness to the killer. There is also reasonable ire from a Charleston resident and tour guide, Alphonso Brown, who shares that although he’s a Christian, he won’t do the same.Goff Sr. is central to “After Sherman,” but the director also choreographs a poignant tango between his personal journey with his formidable father and the lives of a people and a region. Braiding interviews, animation (by Kelly Gallagher) and home movies, and using intertitles made nearly incantatory by being whispered, the film is expressionistic but never at a cost to its subjects and archival material.A quietly plaintive score by the composer Tamar-kali provides rooted resonance to this investigative and intimate work of belonging. A work that speaks to, as the director says, “a history of knowing who we are and whose we are.”After ShermanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘White Balls on Walls’ Review: Time With the Gatekeepers

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      The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam becomes a somewhat flimsy case study for fine-art diversity and inclusion conversations in this documentary.From its tub-like exterior to its gallery walls and vast conference room, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is awash in white. But the Dutch documentary “White Balls on Walls” concerns a different whiteness (and maleness) endemic in one of the Netherland’s cultural institutions. The movie’s cheeky title comes from a protest that the arts-activist collective the Guerrilla Girls (or an offshoot) staged outside the museum in 1995.The filmmaker Sarah Vos began following the museum’s director, Rein Wolfs, and his staff in 2019 as they set out to address diversity and inclusion. The museum’s slogan, “Meet the icons of modern art,” had been met with scrutiny of the who-decides-what-is-iconic variety. Vos tracks those efforts through the height of the pandemic and the social justice demands wrought by the killing of George Floyd. There will be some awkward social distancing and a doubling down on Wolfs’s sense that the museum must include a richer array of artists, welcome a more diverse demographic and, while it’s at it, hire more people of color.With access to behind-the-scenes processes, the documentary can be instructive about the work of changing legacy institutions, but also wincingly cautionary as Wolfs, his administrators and curators get tangled up in numbers and nomenclature. (“‘Gender balance,’ that sounds nicely diverse,” a woman says in an early meeting.) Their internal conversations — about colonialism, gender and Dutch identity — become more nuanced when people of color arrive. Charl Landvreugd, the museum’s head of research and curatorial practice, and the curators Vincent van Velsen and Yvette Mutumba, offer that nuance and give context to the museum’s quandaries. But even they don’t always pierce the hermetically sealed feel of the documentary.White Balls on WallsNot rated. In English and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Being Mary Tyler Moore’ Review: A Tip of the Hat to the Tossed Hat

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      This charming documentary aims to peek under the smile of a groundbreaking television star.No one was harder on Mary Tyler Moore than Mary Tyler Moore. “I was brought up to be a perfect person, or to look like a perfect person,” she admitted in her first memoir, “After All” (1995). Her sitcoms convinced audiences she was the best girl in the world — and the pressure to measure up to her characters kept her grinning.“Being Mary Tyler Moore,” a charming documentary directed by James Adolphus, aims to peek under the smile. We catch a glimpse of her sorrows and frustrations, of disappointments and deaths (and, yes, of that stinker where she played a nun who swoons for Elvis). But the film itself is so smitten by Moore that it skips over the worst of her self-inflected wounds. Like, for instance, Moore’s discussion in her book of when she’d get drunk and play Russian roulette with her car before eventually embracing sobriety, and, with it, the relief of confessing her flaws.Fair enough. There’s plenty to talk about simply touring Moore’s career, although plaudits from Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Reese Witherspoon are merely quick hits of celebrity glitz. The film is structured by archival footage of two television interviews with Moore. The first, from 1966, is sexist and condescending. The second, conducted 15 years later, is empathetic and probing. Between them, Moore had reshaped how women were treated on the small screen.She’d be quicker to call herself a realist than a feminist. Yet, we’re struck by how little of her TV persona was real. America’s favorite singleton hadn’t been single since high school — and its favorite plucky careerist had, in truth, lost jobs for being pregnant or requesting a raise. The irony is that Moore’s perfect image advanced the culture even as it hobbled her own joy.Being Mary Tyler MooreNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      ‘Victim/Suspect’ Review: When the Accuser Becomes the Accused

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      A reporter investigates cases in which sexual assault survivors were arrested on charges of false reporting in this cogent documentary.Considered against the expanding subgenre of trope-laden streaming documentaries about troubling true crime, “Victim/Suspect” seems, at first glance, to conform to type — particularly during its opening waterfall of lurid video and audio clips. But the film, which examines cases in which sexual assault survivors are charged with false reporting, is the rare entry whose revelations feel cogent, earned and memorable.“Victim/Suspect” (on Netflix) takes the form of a real-time investigation, tracing the efforts of a young reporter at the Center for Investigative Reporting named Rachel de Leon. Over the course of several years, she unearths a matrix of rape survivors who turned to the criminal justice system for help only to be doubted by officers and then manipulated into recanting their accounts.The director, Nancy Schwartzman, zeros in on a small handful of de Leon’s subjects and lets them tell their side of the story, some for the first time. By centering on de Leon’s journalism rather than the individual experiences, Schwartzman is able to extrapolate from these cases a broader pattern of sexism and police intimidation.The film’s biggest weakness ends up being its lack of access to the attending officers, who decline to participate. In their stead, de Leon interviews a former detective who explains that law enforcement diverts rape cases into false reporting charges because the latter are less work. Alongside the documentary’s deluge of nightmarish interrogation room footage — minute after minute of police bullying women until they crumble — the absence of a better explanation is infuriating, but perhaps that’s the point.Victim/SuspectRated R. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Scenes From Cannes: Vigilant Steve McQueen, Misguided Maïwenn

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      “Occupied City,” a documentary from the “12 Years a Slave” filmmaker, proves ambitious. “Jeanne du Barry,” with Johnny Depp, was an unfortunate kickoff.If you are ever at a festival that’s showing a new movie from the British director Steve McQueen and he happens to be in the theater and you’re tempted to look at your phone, don’t. There’s a chance that McQueen will get out of his seat, cross the aisle and persuade you to redirect your attention to the big screen, which is exactly what he did Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival when a mystery offender (not me!) fired up a bright little screen during the premiere of his documentary, “Occupied City.”I wanted all my attention on McQueen’s movie, which is being presented out of the main competition. The documentary is heroic in scope and ambition, with a nearly four-and-a-half-hour run time, intermission included. With formal rigor and adamant focus, it maps — street by street, address by address — the catastrophe that befell Amsterdam’s Jewish population in World War II. Narrated with implacable calm by a British actress, Melanie Hyams, it was written by McQueen’s wife, Bianca Stigter, and inspired by her book “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945.” (Stigter, who’s Dutch, also directed the 2022 documentary “Three Minutes: A Lengthening.”)The last time McQueen, who’s best known for directing “12 Years a Slave,” would have had new work at Cannes was 2020, when the festival was canceled. The pandemic plays a notable role in “Occupied City,” which consists entirely of material of present-day Amsterdam, including images of anti-lockdown protests. The juxtaposition of the voice-over and these protests — with their marching cops and running crowds — initially feels like a provocation, almost as if McQueen were equating the Holocaust with lockdowns. As the movie’s grim accounting continues, though, the juxtaposition only underscores how blissfully privileged these protesters are to be able to gather, love, pray and simply live.The stars and the red carpet dominate the world’s attention during Cannes, but it’s the festival’s unwavering, serious commitment to film art that remains its greatest strength. There are always questionable and seemingly mercenary programming choices, as at any festival, and the halls of the event’s headquarters invariably hum with rumors about back-room deals and quotas. It’s unclear why the organizers — led by the festival’s director, Thierry Frémaux — decided to kick off this year’s event with “Jeanne du Barry,” a particularly unfortunate choice for a festival with a history of bad openers.Johnny Depp and Maïwenn star in “Jeanne du Barry,” a tedious look at the title courtesan.Stephanie Branchu/Why Not ProductionsPresumably Johnny Depp, a heat-seeking target for the armies of paparazzi amassed here, helps explain the movie’s presence. Whatever the case, on Tuesday, some 3,000 festivalgoers — and audiences who saw it simultaneously in cinemas across France — trooped into theaters to watch this bore. Directed by Maïwenn, who also stars, the movie tracks its title character from her pastoral rural childhood to her cosseted, apparently fabulous adulthood as a celebrated Parisian courtesan, fame that eventually led her directly into the bespoke bed of Louis XV.The king is played by a powdered and bewigged Depp, who looks suitably indolent, though perhaps because he’s underused. It isn’t much of a part. The king is mainly there to look gaga at Jeanne, which he does a great deal, though it’s a tough call whether Louis lavishes as much attention on Jeanne as Maïwenn does. Among all the close-ups of Jeanne giggling, Maïwenn folds in some palace intrigue and the briefest nod at the terror to come. Yet while Maïwenn draws attention to her lover’s grandson, the future, ill-fated Louis XVI, his main role is to serve as an ally to Jeanne in the viperous Versailles court.That most of the vipers are women is an index of the movie’s narrow horizons and parochial attitudes. It seeks to celebrate Jeanne, portraying her as a joyously emancipated woman, never mind that her liberation is entirely contingent on pleasuring men. She wears pants, she loves sex, she’s kind to the Black child Louis gives her as a gift! Yet while most everyone at court frowns upon Jeanne, Maïwenn primarily focuses on the torments that the court ladies visit on her, suggesting that the big problem at Versailles in the 18th century was the bitter jealousy of spoiled and uptight women.“Jeanne du Barry” ends before the guillotine makes an appearance, unfortunately. It was an exasperating way to start this year’s festival given how hard women have fought to be taken seriously here. There’s some comfort that “Jeanne” isn’t contending for the Palme d’Or, which would be an embarrassment, but is being presented out of competition. Other titles out of the running include two of the hottest tickets here: Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” directed by James Mangold. (I’ll have more to say about both after their premieres.)Both the Scorsese and “Indiana Jones” will jolt the festival, which has been fairly sleepy since Depp and company came and went. I liked two competition titles that screened early, “Le Retour,” from the French filmmaker Catherine Corsini, and “Monster,” from the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Both are moving family dramas, with “Le Retour” centered on three Black Frenchwomen during a fraught interlude in Corsica. Like Kore-eda — whose movie is a characteristically poignant drama about an anguished fifth grader — Corsini uses family to reflect on larger issues without losing sight of the characters’ intimate struggles. Both movies appeal to your intellect while drawing tears.“Monster” is a moving family drama from Hirokazu Kore-eda. via Cannes Film FestivalCorsini is one of the seven women with a movie in the 21-title main lineup, which is a very good number. Cannes has always been happy to have young, beautiful women in gowns and high heels ornamenting its red carpet, but it has been far less welcoming to women who also make movies. The Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, one of the giants of contemporary cinema, had three movies in the official program while she was alive (she died in 2015), none in the main competition. Another titan of the art, Agnès Varda, had nearly a dozen movies at Cannes, but only one was chosen for the main competition: her 1962 film “Cléo From 5 to 7.” At least the festival named one of its theaters after her.Some of the seven women are competing for the first time; a few, like the French director Catherine Breillat — here with “Last Summer” — are returning. Breillat was at Cannes in 2007 with “The Last Mistress,” a raw, exuberant, impolite period piece about women and desire starring Asia Argento. A few years later, in 2018, Argento shook up the festival when, onstage during the closing ceremony, she announced that she had been raped by Harvey Weinstein at the 1997 event. “This festival was his hunting ground,” Argento said, bringing the #MeToo movement to Cannes with a fury. (Argento was later accused of sexually assaulting an underage male actor, which she denied.)Cannes organizers tend to wave off criticism, but whatever their public position toward the complaints lobbed their way, including from many women over many frustrating decades, they clearly pay attention, as suggested by the record number of women in the main competition. This record matters because Cannes does. The festival doesn’t simply command the world’s attention each year; it makes careers, revives reputations, confers status, makes the next deal (or two) possible and serves as a crucial run-up to the Academy Awards. More important, Cannes publicly and very prominently bequeaths rarefied status on filmmakers, a status that has historically been granted to men.This isn’t simply because women like Akerman and Varda have had far fewer opportunities to direct than men. Neither artist needed Cannes’s benediction; they were brilliant filmmakers without its regular love. It’s difficult to quantify how (if) their careers would have been different if they had been in regular contention. But it’s also hard not to think that their careers would have been easier and the money would have flowed more generously in their direction if they’d been routinely programmed alongside the festival’s many beloved male auteurs. Certainly Varda and Akerman would have done right as the head of the jury, a position enjoyed this year by Ruben Ostlund, who’s won the Palme twice. I hope that his choices are better than his movies. More