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      ‘Imagining the Indian’ Review: Fighting Offensive Imagery

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      This documentary, subtitled “The Fight Against Native American Mascoting,” argues that Native-themed sports team branding fits into a history of systemic racism.In July 2020, the National Football League team in Washington announced that it would shed a name that was long considered a slur against Indigenous people. The decision was a victory in the campaign by Native American activists to eliminate disparaging sports team names and iconography.“Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting,” a straightforward and often repetitive documentary, spotlights this movement by arguing a handful of key points: Native-themed mascots and branding are offensive. They fit into a national history of systemic racism. And the sustained use of stereotypical images has material consequences for Native people.To deconstruct these tenets, the directors Aviva Kempner and Ben West call on a raft of experts, historians and Native activists, including Suzan Shown Harjo, a trailblazer for the cause. The sources share their personal grievances and act as guides through the annals of racist American imagery, from “The Lone Ranger” and Bugs Bunny cartoons to footage of sports fans in headdresses. The effect is a frenzied slide show of sorts, set to galvanizing music that echoes the passion of the speakers.The marriage of talking heads and troubling material from the archives is a familiar documentary format, and “Imagining the Indian” rarely breaks free from the generic quality of its structure. The speakers introduce a few fresh ideas, such as the notion that football, in which teams use violence to compete for territory, mimics white land-grabbing. But in tuning the project to the key of advocacy, the directors have created a film to nod along with, not one that unpacks complexity.Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American MascotingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis’ Review: Serene Demeanor, Bracing Message

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      The Pontiff travels well. Gianfranco Rosi’s new documentary chronicles his visits to Catholic communities the world over, and he never seems to tire.There’s a sense of quietude one may slip into while viewing this documentary made by Gianfranco Rosi. Perhaps it has to do with the serene demeanor of its subject, Pope Francis, the leader and international voice of the Roman Catholic Church. In most documentaries depicting what musicians and entertainers call road work, the person putting in the hours can get irritable. In his first nine years as Pope (he was elected in 2013), Francis made 37 trips from the Vatican, and visited almost 60 countries. “In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis,” assembled from footage shot over those years, never betrays a jet-lagged pontiff.Rosi made his name with the urgent 2016 documentary “Fire at Sea,” about Italy’s — and Europe’s — migrant crisis. Some dire imagery and sound reminiscent of that picture turns up here: radio antennas spinning as audio of S.O.S. messages play on the soundtrack, shots of overturned passenger boats. After one mass drowning, Pope Francis spoke on the island of Lampedusa, where he bemoaned “the globalization of indifference.” The speech, which Rosi shot, is moving, its message bracing even as the Pope avoids a strident tone.But as the movie goes on, without narration or any talking-head interviews, a pattern emerges. The Pope suits up, shows up, says the right thing, and the world just keeps getting worse. There is one instance where he doesn’t say the right thing: Speaking offhand to his followers in Chile, he appears dismissive of abuse charges against a bishop there, one who subsequently resigned. The tact with which Francis walks back his words is impressive. So, too, is the way he manages to appear well-informed on the variety of injustices he speaks against as he tries to build bridges in places like the United Arab Emirates. But beyond that, a repetitious feel begins to take over. For some viewers, quietude may yield to boredom.In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope FrancisNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘I’m an Electric Lampshade’ Review: My Accountant, the Pop Star

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      A 60-year-old retiree travels to the Philippines to follow his dreams of stardom in this documentary.The documentary “I’m an Electric Lampshade” follows an unlikely subject: Doug McCorkle, who has spent nearly 20 years working as a corporate accountant in New York state. He’s a person of unassuming appearance — an older gentleman in glasses who is balding and not trying to hide it. His colleagues speak fondly of him in interviews, and McCorkle is happily married to his wife, Gina. They have no children, and they are economically comfortable enough to retire early.But despite his commonplace appearance, McCorkle’s retirement is an event that few are likely to forget. With Gina’s encouragement, McCorkle has decided to reinvent himself as a pop star, and his retirement party serves as a launch party for his first music video, an electronic track referencing drugs and sex.The director John Clayton Doyle follows McCorkle on his transformation, and the documentary changes as McCorkle’s project grows. What begins as a mixture of vérité footage and interviews morphs into a surreal travel documentary when McCorkle joins a training center for drag queens and aspiring actors in the Philippines. The film ends as a concert documentary for its 60-year-old star, who performs scantily clad and in glam-rock makeup.The film’s most direct critiques of McCorkle’s project pass by briefly in interludes during his trip to the Philippines. He is confronted by a fellow trainee, a Filipino drag queen named Fandango, who reminds McCorkle that he is essentially a tourist. But the film doesn’t linger on political critique, and it largely avoids asking the practical questions that might add dramatic weight to McCorkle’s dreams. The documentary hides the financial costs, physical tolls and even artistic philosophy, leaving only an exercise in ego.I’m an Electric LampshadeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on most major streaming platforms. More

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      ‘Reggie’ Review: Reggie Jackson on Himself, Racism and, Yes, Baseball

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      Jackson, a.k.a. Mr. October, was called a lot of things during his storied career with the Yankees. A new documentary goes beyond the nicknames.In 1997, Reggie Jackson hit three home runs in a single World Series game. He was a star on the field, and now he’s a star in the documentary “Reggie.”Prime VideoStar athletes in America are often expected to have brash personalities. This delights or alienates fans to different degrees, and for different reasons. A star athlete with a brash personality who also happens to be Black is apt to infuriate a large and vociferous corner of fandom.The baseball great, Reggie Jackson, who distinguished himself on several teams but was especially critical to the success of the New York’s Yankees in the late 1970s, was certainly a case in point. In 1976, George Steinbrenner, the Yankees owner at the time, paid $3.5 million — back in the day, that was a lot of money — to acquire Jackson. The right fielder, because of his frankness, immediately made himself unpopular. “The reason you’re uncomfortable with me is because I’m the truth,” Jackson says in a contemporary interview conducted for this documentary, directed with measured assurance by Alexandria Stapleton. While that’s a statement some would take issue with, this movie is about Jackson’s truth, which, as it happens, is about a lot more than himself.Hence “Reggie,” taking its cue from Jackson himself, considers the famed athlete’s career in a manner more reflective than splashy. Yes, there is a bit at the beginning when Jackson shows off his fleet of well-kept vintage cars in a bright shiny row of garages at his home in Monterey. But soon Jackson gets real in a more meaningful way.He himself interviews several key figures in his life. The first is the home run legend, Hank Aaron, who died in 2021. The pair talk about racism, the civil rights movement and the way baseball fans took umbrage when a Black player caught up with the stats established by a white player in the past. “I never in my life thought about Babe Ruth,” Aaron, a quiet man, says, raising his voice ever so slightly.Later, talking about a stereotypical perception of Black athletes, Jackson says, “They’re not angry. They’re hurt. They’re disappointed. They’re searching for dignity.”And while the viewer might expect the film’s tone, and Jackson’s demeanor, to quieten as the narrative winds down into the present day, it does not. As a young player, Jackson stood on the field of the 1972 World Series and heard Jackie Robinson, who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, say, “I am extremely proud and pleased to be here this afternoon, but must admit that I am going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third-base coaching line one day and see a Black face managing in baseball.” Once he stopped playing, Jackson fervently tried to make Robinson’s vision a reality, attempting to buy first the Oakland As, then the Dodgers. His bids did not succeed. “I wasn’t a good fit,” he says indignantly, almost spitting out the words.Even as this movie goes deep on still vital topics, it doesn’t skimp on baseball dish. Jackson recalls that his laudatory nickname, Mr. October, was actually coined contemptuously by his teammate, the beloved Yankee captain Thurman Munson, with whom Jackson had an uneasy relationship. And the detailed accounts of his greatest hits — like when he hit three home runs in a single game in the 1977 World Series — are exhilarating.ReggieRated PG-13 for strong language including racial slurs. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV’ Review: Art Onscreen

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      A new documentary follows the ceaseless innovations of a man who made art out of television sets and found inspiration in disruption.Nam June Paik died in 2006, one year before the first iPhone was released. Now that hand-held glowing screens have become as dominant as television once was, one misses that influential artist’s subversive spirit. But it’s on ample display in Amanda Kim’s new film “Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV,” which shows how Paik forged novel avenues of expression and communication in the televisual era.Born into privilege in Korea in 1932, during the Japanese occupation, Paik studied unhappily to be a composer in Germany until he was electrified by a bold and divisive John Cage performance in 1957. Over the next 10 years, he was off like a rocket: staging outré musical performances with the cellist Charlotte Moorman, joining the raucous Fluxus avant-garde collective in New York, building a robot and pioneering the use of TV sets in gallery art.Paik found many ways to mess with the banal monitors, which were stacked, worn, and, famously, plunked opposite a contemplating Buddha. But an art documentary like Kim’s also questions first principles generally, to underline the beauty and power built into objects around us. Beyond eliciting truly lovely halos of eerie color from video, Paik sought to democratize technology through innovations in video production and live global broadcast. (Paik’s aphoristic writings are read in voice-over by the actor Steven Yeun.)Despite the interviews with graying contemporaries that bubble up in the stew of imagery, the film’s sense of art history is somewhat blinkered by lack of context. But Paik is undeniable, creating despite lean times (and slowing after a 1996 stroke). His dragging of a violin on a string — shown in a recurring performance — evokes an almost mystical dedication to disruption.Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TVNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Ithaka’ Review: In Julian Assange They Trust

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      A frustrating new advocacy documentary about the WikiLeaks founder, with appearances by his father and wife, loses its footing on weak assertions and reporting.Julian Assange’s legal travails began in 2010, when Swedish prosecutors ordered his detention on suspicion of rape and sexual coercion. To avoid being extradited to Stockholm, Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, jumped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London; today he’s in London’s Belmarsh Prison, fighting extradition to the United States on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. Yet “Ithaka,” a frustrating advocacy documentary directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton, argues that Assange’s most crucial trial is in the court of public opinion.The documentary insists that the computer hacker, who’s accused of publishing classified government documents, is the victim of a smear campaign. What exactly those smears are, the film declines to specify or debunk. On your own, you may recall that viral stories about Assange have ranged from criminal to embarrassing — like when Ecuador said its increasingly unwelcome guest needed to tidy up after his cat.Free speech advocates looking to hear a strong argument defending Assange against those espionage charges will not find one here — only vague calls to protect the First Amendment. We’re told the case is unjust but never told why, or even what exactly the case is. Instead, the documentary repeats three monotonous points: Journalists lie. Regardless, Assange is a journalist who deserves protection. Also, his family misses him a heck of a lot.The film’s weak assertions hurt more than they help. Even those inclined to support Assange — like those who agree that releasing footage of a U.S. helicopter attack on unarmed Iraqi civilians is a moral good — will probably come to the documentary knowing enough to be rankled when it seeks to combat news media deception with evasions, half-truths and speculative accusations (the very weapons with which it suggests that Assange has been attacked).A sampler platter of its flimsy reporting: While Stella Moris, Assange’s wife and a member of his legal team, maintains that her husband was never charged with sexual assault, both she and Lawrence neglect to add that the statute of limitations on such a charge had expired during his seven-year embassy stay. Moris also shows the faces of several men in a parked van and declares them government assassins. Lawrence accepts this with no follow-up questions. By the time “Ithaka” makes the claim that WikiLeaks published only redacted versions of sensitive documents — yes, but only after earlier unredacted postings were met with significant outrage — the continual thumbing of its nose to the facts may make you want to issue a few unredacted words of your own.The doc is on stronger footing when it tracks the efforts of Moris and her father-in-law, John Shipton, to get their loved one home. With Assange unavailable, Shipton takes center stage as his onscreen avatar. (Father and son, Moris tells us, are “very similar.”) Bashful and soft-spoken when the film begins, Shipton strikes later as stubborn, secretive and messianic, likening his son to everything from Prometheus to a pod of hunted whales. Shipton is the kind of complex and contradictory figure who would have been fascinating under the lens of a filmmaker actually interested in unbiased journalism — one willing to press him on why he’s re-emerged in his son’s life after several decades of absence. Here, however, Shipton waves off any personal questions about their relationship as “an invasion of privacy.”IthakaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?’ Review: What Goes Up

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      The rise and fall of a classic-rock band is chronicled (shakily) in this documentary.What happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears, judging by this spurious, somewhat cranky documentary by John Scheinfeld, is that the band faced the unforeseen consequences of its own bad decisions.In 1970, Blood, Sweat & Tears, the enormously popular nine-piece jazz-rock group, undertook a tour of Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland under the aegis of the U.S. State Department, inadvertently outraging the progressive, college-age fans whose enthusiasm had made the group such a stratospheric counterculture success. To make matters worse, upon their return, the members of the band — who had headlined Woodstock and spoken out against the war in Vietnam — now decried communism as “scary,” professing gratitude for freedoms they’d previously taken for granted — quite the about-face. As David Felton wrote acidly in a 1970 issue of Rolling Stone, it sure sounded like “the State Department got its money’s worth.”The backlash was swift and, the documentary argues, effectively career-ending. “I felt canceled,” Steve Katz, the band’s guitarist, confesses dolefully, and indeed the movie is a pharisaical effort to paint the musicians as victims of what we now call cancel culture: misunderstood, unreasonably maligned and never afforded a chance to explain themselves, until now. But like many laments of the self-identified canceled, what’s being complained about is really just a form of accountability — of having to stand by and answer for actions they evidently didn’t think much about. (“We were just musicians, man,” is the lead singer David Clayton-Thomas’s lame justification.) The film frames them as having been somehow embroiled in a political situation, rather than actively, knowingly engaged in it — and its attempts to remain apolitical and focus on the music are as naïve as the band’s.What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Kubrick by Kubrick’ Review: Stanley Plays Himself

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      A primer on the filmmaker’s career and interests won’t offer much that will surprise even mild obsessives, but it does pierce some of the mystique.The director Stanley Kubrick gave so few interviews that hearing his voice is always a little jarring. It’s less deep than you might imagine from late-career photographs, which make him look like a woolly elder statesman of the cinema, or from seeing his movies, which raise dark questions about human nature. Kubrick’s accent contains traces of his Bronx upbringing, even though he lived in Britain for more than 30 years. And his conversational manner is much more casual, more affable, than his reputation as a hermetic perfectionist would suggest.What that voice has to say, and how it says it, is the main point of interest in “Kubrick by Kubrick,” a primer on the filmmaker’s career and interests built around interviews that he gave over many years to the critic Michel Ciment, who is credited as an artistic adviser on the documentary. The director, Gregory Monro, interweaves excerpts from the men’s conversations with scenes from Kubrick’s movies and archival commentary from actors and critics.Monro also riffs on Kubrick’s own imagery, making it appear that an old clip of Ciment on a talk show, for instance, is showing on the plugless TV from “The Shining,” and that the TV set is sitting in the bedroom from the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Most of Kubrick’s 13 features have been analyzed exhaustively already, and “Kubrick by Kubrick” doesn’t offer much that will surprise even mild obsessives. Still, it is interesting to hear Kubrick express ideas that run counter to conventional wisdom. He doesn’t sound all that terrified of a computer like HAL 9000. “I can’t think of any reason why it’s a frightening prospect, because intelligence seems to me to be something which is good,” Kubrick is heard saying in the documentary. “And so I can’t see how your ultra-intelligent machine is going to be any worse than a man.”Other choice tidbits include Kubrick’s comparison of the work of a film director to the precision Napoleon applied to military strategy. (Kubrick had famously labored to make a Napoleon biopic, and elements of his preparation found their way into “Barry Lyndon.”) According to Kubrick, the great cinematographer Russell Metty, with whom he worked on “Spartacus,” could not understand why Kubrick, who started as a photographer for Look magazine, spent so much time composing shots, as opposed to leaving that task to the cameraman.Some of Kubrick’s insights echo differently today, as when he says, apropos of “Full Metal Jacket” and the Vietnam War, “I don’t think you’re going to get Americans to fight a war again unless they think it really means something to them.” (The director died in 1999.) Leonard Rosenman, who conducted the music on “Barry Lyndon,” remembers how demanding Kubrick could be, and wanting “to throw him through the window” for making him do 105 takes at one point even though “take two was perfect.”While no great contribution to the vast library of Kubrickiana, this documentary pierces some of the mystique behind the man. For fans, that will be enough.Kubrick by KubrickNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More