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      How Hillsong, a Hip Megachurch, Became Entangled in Scandal

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      A new documentary series explores the history of Hillsong, known for its celebrity congregants and fashionable trappings before being struck by a series of scandals.The global megachurch Hillsong was known for its hipster trappings, celebrity congregants and wildly popular worship music in the 2010s, but in recent years it has been more closely tied to a series of scandals, including the firing of its charismatic celebrity pastor, Carl Lentz, for “moral failures.”A four-part documentary series, “The Secrets of Hillsong,” premieres on FX on Friday and delves into the turmoil. The series, which is based on a 2021 article in Vanity Fair magazine, features the first interview with Mr. Lentz since he was fired in 2020.Here’s how the trouble unfolded.Why was Hillsong so popular?Brian Houston and his wife, Bobbie, founded Hillsong in Australia in 1983 and opened its first United States branch in New York in 2010. The church was a member of the Australian branch of the Pentecostal denomination, the Assemblies of God, before it formed its own denomination in 2018.Hillsong’s expansion into the United States built on its enormous success in presenting worship music. Its services drew in young people in big cities, where services were held in concert venues, such as Irving Plaza and the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York. The congregants were fashionable and included celebrities such as Justin Bieber, Kevin Durant and Vanessa Hudgens.Mr. Lentz, the lead pastor of Hillsong’s New York branch, also became a celebrity.This hip veneer suggested that Hillsong supported a more progressive form of Evangelicalism, but the church was criticized for its position on L.G.B.T.Q. rights. In an August 2015 blog post, the church’s founder, Mr. Houston, said that gay people were welcome at Hillsong, but that it did “not affirm a gay lifestyle.”Carl Lentz: “hypepriest”Mr. Lentz mingled with celebrities including Mr. Bieber, whom he baptized in the bathtub of an N.B.A. player’s home. In 2017, GQ magazine called Mr. Lentz a “hypepriest” to reflect his trendy wardrobe, which included aviator glasses, skinny jeans and designer sneakers. He spoke frequently about racial inequality and in 2016 declared his support for the Black Lives Matter movement.It all came to a halt when he was fired from Hillsong in November 2020. The church said that his termination had followed discussions about “leadership issues and breaches of trust, plus a recent revelation of moral failures.” Mr. Lentz said on Instagram shortly afterward that he had been “unfaithful in my marriage, the most important relationship in my life.” His wife, Laura Lentz, was also a Hillsong pastor.Since then, he has stayed out of the spotlight. Last week, he said in an Instagram post that his wife and children had been his “only priority” for the past three years.“Part of the healing from that heartache led us to the decision to be a part of a documentary that we do not control, that we don’t have any say in and that we haven’t even seen yet,” he said.He now works at Transformation Church in Tulsa, Okla.Carl Lentz was once the lead pastor of the Hillsong branch in New York but was fired in 2020 after what the church called “moral failures.”Andrew White for The New York TimesWhat happened after Carl Lentz left?More turmoil. Hillsong’s founder, Mr. Houston, resigned in March 2022 after the church said that an internal investigation had found that he behaved inappropriately toward two women, breaching the church’s code of conduct.He had already stepped away from his ministry duties in January 2022 to fight a criminal charge accusing him of concealing child sexual abuse by his late father, Frank Houston. Brian Houston has denied the allegations. The case is still in the courts, The Australian Associated Press reported.In March, Mr. Houston said he had been charged with drunken driving in the United States in February 2022. Mr. Houston said that at the time “it seemed like all hell had broken loose within Hillsong church.”Mr. Houston did not respond to a request for comment. In a video posted on his social media accounts in November, he criticized Hillsong’s leadership for how it had handled the allegations of misconduct made against him.“I didn’t resign because of my mistakes,” he said. “I resigned because of the announcements and statements that had been made.”What is Hillsong like today?In March 2022, nine of the 16 Hillsong churches in the United States cut ties with the organization, abruptly shrinking the church’s American presence. Hillsong’s website says it has seven churches in the United States, as well as locations in more than two dozen other countries.The website also says that about 150,000 people worldwide attend its services weekly, but that is an estimate the church has been using since before the pandemic. Hillsong did not respond to questions about current attendance figures.The documentary premiering on Friday includes interviews with congregants and looks at the history of the church’s relationship with money, sex and God. More

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      ‘Museum of the Revolution’ Review: Sheltering in an Abandoned Utopia

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      This quiet documentary observes three unhoused women from different generations who live among the remains of an unfinished museum in Belgrade.Srdan Keca’s quiet observational documentary “Museum of the Revolution” is set in the purlieus of a onetime utopian building project: a monument to Yugoslavia that was meant to serve as a socialist gathering space. The structure was abandoned in the late 1970s, and today its unfinished basement level has become the dwelling place for a small community of unhoused people.The film opens with archival footage of a midcentury construction site, but soon pivots to showcase a series of haunting images of the museum as it currently stands: dark, dank and littered with debris. Successive scenes focus on three inhabitants of the space: an older woman named Mara, a boisterous child named Milica and Milica’s weary mother, Vera, who earns money scrubbing the windshields of cars stopped at motorway red lights.A lot of the film unfolds without speaking. Minutes pass as Mara and Milica amuse themselves together or enjoy time alone. The dialogue we receive offers snippets of the women’s life stories: we learn that Mara is estranged from her daughter, that Vera’s husband is incarcerated and that child welfare services tried to take custody of Milica at least once before.Keca often captures the women during spells of waiting, and builds a mood of transience by depicting them across seasons, spaces and hours of the day. This is an engrossing documentary, and one that raises questions about the ethics of intervening (or not) in the lives of people struggling to get by. That these queries hover unresolved may leave viewers uneasy, but it also positions us alongside the subjects, waiting for a solution that’s yet to arrive.Museum of the RevolutionNot rated. In Serbo-Croatian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Taking’ Review: This Land Is Not Your Land

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      Monument Valley embodies the Old West. But the fantasies presented in Westerns obscure its darker history and the lives of the Navajo people who inhabit it.Whether it’s John Wayne films or Chevrolet ads, Monument Valley has been immortalized in the American imagination as a symbol of this nation’s vast potential. “The Taking,” a new documentary directed by Alexandre O. Philippe, examines the site’s complicated position as a representation of the Old West despite being located on Navajo land.In the film, images and clips of movies, TV shows and advertising campaigns that have traditionally featured Monument Valley are accompanied by voice-overs that explain how white cowboys have been viewed as heroes and Native Americans as aggressors, obscuring a history of genocide and oppression.The film argues that perhaps no one has been more central to this effort than the director John Ford, who used the region as the backdrop for his western movies, with the dramatic landscape evoking and perpetuating ideals of freedom and liberation central to his stories of rugged cowboys and villainous “Indians.”Obscured in this myth making is the reality of the Navajo people, many of whom still live in the region without running water or access to stable incomes. “The Taking” is successful in demonstrating the way in which Monument Valley has become a canvas onto which the public can superimpose their own ideas and myths. But had it included more current images of the region and the realities of the Navajo people, it may have been more effective in replacing these myths, going beyond film analysis to altering imagination.The TakingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me’ Review: Mistreated

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      The tumultuous life and death of the model, actress and tabloid superstar is related with little insight in this facile Netflix documentary.“Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me,” a new documentary about the model, actress and ’90s tabloid sensation, follows a trend established by other nonfiction portraits of démodé stars released in recent years, such as “Britney vs Spears” and “Pamela, a Love Story.” Half biography, half supercilious media studies essay, these films are intended to be sort of pop-cultural correctives, ones which deconstruct the popular image of celebrity by demonstrating (not unfairly) that their subjects were vilified and callously misjudged in their times.This movie’s director, Ursula Macfarlane, tries to show the real Smith — who was born Vickie Lynn Hogan and raised in Texas — through a combination of cruel archival news clips (The National Enquirer calls her “dumb,” Howard Stern mocks her weight); moody, true-crime-esque B-roll; and interviews with Smith’s uncle, her brother and her former bodyguard, plus a number of tabloid journalists, reality-TV producers and members of the paparazzi.The interviews are short on insights. We hear both that Smith “craved attention” and “always liked being the center of attention.” We learn that she sometimes acquired that attention in savvy ways, willing herself to superstardom through a public image she meticulously styled, and later attracted attention despite efforts to escape it, at great cost to her privacy and mental health. But the solemn excavation of Smith’s life and death — she died at 39 of a drug overdose, in 2007 — ultimately brings the movie, despite Macfarlane’s well-meaning efforts, squarely into the territory of what it’s attempting to condemn: lurid voyeurism. Smith’s contentious inheritance case, the disputed paternity of her daughter, the tragic death of her son: The movie cannot help but sensationalize these events, even though it relates them in a self-consciously plaintive register rather than a gawking one. Smith deserved better than how she was treated. And she deserves better than this.Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know MeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Making a Michael J. Fox Movie With Michael J. Fox’s Movies

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      How the documentary “Still” uses footage from its subject’s films and TV shows to tell its story.When Davis Guggenheim approached Michael J. Fox three years ago in the hopes of making a film about his life, the director had a few things going for him, besides his previous success with documentaries about other luminaries including Al Gore (the Oscar-winning “An Inconvenient Truth”) and the Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai (“He Named Me Malala”). Guggenheim’s wife, the actress Elisabeth Shue, had worked with Fox before, starring as his girlfriend in the second and third installments of the “Back to the Future” series. And Guggenheim had directed “It Might Get Loud,” a documentary about Jimmy Page, Jack White and The Edge, a fact that endeared him to Fox, a longtime electric guitar player.Even so, Fox initially balked at the idea of a movie, particularly one centered on tales he had already written about in four best-selling memoirs. “I told him, my story’s pretty self-explanatory,” Fox recalled. “I don’t know how many times you can tell it.”But Guggenheim persevered. He didn’t want to do a film version of Fox’s own memoirs, which detail the actor’s life and career and struggles with Parkinson’s, as good as he thought they were. And he didn’t want to make your standard documentary, the sort with talking heads and somber narration. Guggenheim wanted to make a movie with as much life and humor as its subject, a fun, fast-paced effort not unlike, say, a movie starring Michael J. Fox.“I wanted to take the audience on a wild ride,” Guggenheim said.In the end, Fox relented, albeit with one request: no violins. “No maudlin treatment of a guy with a terrible diagnosis,” Guggenheim said.“Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie” (streaming on Apple TV+) interweaves scripted re-enactments, archival behind-the-scenes footage, interviews with Fox, and copious clips from Fox’s four-decade-long career, including his breakthrough roles in “Back to the Future” and on “Family Ties,” which established Fox as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars.The result is a genre-defying hybrid that uses Fox’s own film and TV work to creatively illustrate key moments of his life (more on that later), and even reveal long-held secrets — for example, how Fox managed to hide his Parkinson’s for years, even while starring on the ABC comedy series “Spin City.”The film explores Fox’s career from its earliest beginnings, when the actor was 16, but playing 12, in the Canadian sitcom “Leo and Me.” In a video interview from his office in New York, Fox criticized his work in those early gigs. “I eventually figured out how to act,” he said, “but early on, I had no clue.”Davis Guggenheim, right, directing on the set of “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie.”Apple TVInitially, Guggenheim wanted to tell Fox’s story largely through re-enactments, with actors playing Fox at various stages of his life. The film’s editor, Michael Harte (“Three Identical Strangers”), was against the idea. “The problem is, you can’t show the actor’s face,” he said. “What’s brilliant about Michael is he’s so engaging, he’s got this superstar quality.” Using a double of someone as immediately recognizable as Fox, he thought, “would push the audience out of the movie.”Instead, Harte thought they could use movie and TV clips of the actor to tell Fox’s story, which set up a “battle” (Guggenheim’s word) of creative wills between the director and the editor.One day, on a whim, Harte combined a scene from “Bright Lights, Big City,” in which Fox flips through an article he’s been assigned to fact-check, with an audio clip of Fox describing the first time he read the script for “Back to the Future.” Guggenheim loved the mash-up, and encouraged Harte to find more. It wasn’t difficult. As Guggenheim noted, there were a lot of movies and episodes to pull from.In the end, the two settled on an imaginative compromise, mixing scripted shots of Fox’s double, shot from behind so his face couldn’t be seen, and shots of the real Fox, either from the actor’s films and shows, or in behind-the-scenes clips culled from 92 VHS cassettes of “Family Ties” footage.To find all those scenes, Harte spent eight weeks watching every film and TV show Fox had ever been in. “The TV shows were the Everest,” Harte said. He painstakingly flagged every scene he thought might be useful: Michael drinks coffee. Michael walks down a hallway.It helped that Harte has been a mad Fox fan from childhood. The first movie he saw in a theater as a young boy growing up in Ireland was “Back to the Future Part II” (“a game changer”); his all-time favorite film, even now, is “Back to the Future.”Guggenheim, on the other hand, wasn’t as huge a fan of Fox or his films growing up.“I don’t think Davis had seen the ‘Back to the Future’ films before this,” Harte said, “and his wife is in them.”“I was watching different things,” Guggenheim said.The filmmakers also pored through hours of “Spin City” episodes to find footage of how Fox had kept his Parkinson’s hidden from the show’s cast, crew and audience, a fact Fox wrote about in his first memoir, “Lucky Man.” In one montage, we see Fox twiddling pens, holding phones, checking his watch, rolling up his sleeves, anything to mask the shaking in his left hand. “We were taking stuff that was scripted and using it as archive,” Guggenheim said.As Harte was sifting through the thousands of clips for material, Guggenheim set about casting actors for the re-enactments, which included stand-ins for Woody Harrelson, a longtime friend and one-time co-star; Fox’s no-nonsense but ultimately supportive dad; and, of course, Fox himself. To find someone who could match Fox’s lithe physicality, the creators had actors jump up and slide across a car hood — or try to. The one actor who could do it, Danny Irizarry, got the job. “I loved the actors that played me,” Fox said.When the first rough cut was complete, the filmmakers screened it for Fox. “It was utterly terrifying,” Harte said. “Here’s someone I grew up watching and adoring, and the first time I meet him, we’re not having a few drinks in a bar, I’m presenting what I see is 90 minutes of his life. Here’s what I think is relevant, and here’s what I think isn’t relevant, so I cut that out.”Fox was pleased with the finished project. “I think they did a beautiful job,” he said.Fox with his wife, Tracy Pollan.Apple TV+Not that moments from his life story weren’t painful to watch, particularly many moments about Tracy Pollan, Fox’s wife of 35 years, whom he first met on the set of “Family Ties.” “I married this girl who had a nascent career, doing well, and then she married me and was like this single mother,” he said. “I was off doing movies and she was home with a baby, and I made jokes about it on talk shows.” Using colorful language, Fox bemoaned the horrible thing he did to her.“And she came through for me when she could have slipped out,” he continued. “She could have said, ‘Parkinson’s, that’s not for me.’ But she didn’t, she stuck around. Getting to see that in the film was such a privilege.” More

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      ‘It Ain’t Over’ Review: When Yogi Berra Saw a Strike, He Hit It

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      The baseball player, known for his quirky malapropisms, was perpetually underestimated. But a new documentary proves he was a phenomenal talent.The main brief of “It Ain’t Over,” a lively, engaging and moving documentary is more or less stated upfront by a friendly but mildly indignant Lindsay Berra, the granddaughter of its subject, the baseball player Yogi Berra.She recollects watching the 2015 All Star Game with her granddad. That day at the Great American Ballpark in Cincinnati were four special guests deemed the greatest living players: Hank Aaron, Johnny Bench, Sandy Koufax and Willie Mays. All legends, to be sure. But Berra, in crucial respects a humble man, felt snubbed, as did Lindsay. Because the movie makes a very credible case that Berra was as great a player as any of them.The reason he didn’t make this cut, Lindsay believes, is that Yogi’s boyish, generous personality had come to overshadow his prodigious skill. As Sean Mullin’s documentary points out: As a catcher for the New York Yankees, Berra was awarded Most Valuable Player three times during that team’s remarkable dominance of the game in the 1950s. He was an All-Star for 15 consecutive seasons, and he collected 10 World Series rings.But Berra cut a different figure from baseball heroes of the day. He had an easy grin and read comic books in the locker room. Only five foot seven, he wasn’t big and strapping like Joe DiMaggio. “Everything about him was round,” Roger Angell, one of several sportswriters interviewed here, says of Berra. (Plenty of players chime in, including Derek Jeter, who reflects on Berra’s deceptively simple advice: “When you see a strike, hit it.”)And for all that, he was a phenomenal player. While he didn’t become a catcher until he joined the Yankees, his mental acuity, discipline and intense training from the coach Bill Dickey, plus his own relatively low center of gravity, made him ideal in the position. Yes, you read “mental acuity” correctly. A good catcher has to carry the whole equation of the game in his head. The movie’s account of Game 5 of the 1956 World Series, in which Berra caught the pitcher Don Larsen’s perfect game — the only no-hitter in World Series history until last year, and the more recent accomplishment took three different pitchers — is a thrilling demonstration of Berra’s baseball genius.He was also a devoted family man, married for 65 years to Carmen Berra; his extravagantly affectionate and charmingly repetitive love letters to her are read aloud here. And he was a war hero — he was on a rocket boat off Normandy on D-Day in World War II, and while he was wounded, he didn’t apply for a Purple Heart because he didn’t want to worry his mother.Berra’s exemplary life is animated by the inevitable trotting out of his folksy malapropisms known as Yogi-isms. The movie’s title comes from one, “It ain’t over ’til it’s over,” which nobody, apparently, is sure Berra ever uttered. But the best of them, when you really turn them over, are as profound as Zen koans: “If you can’t imitate him, don’t copy him.” Only an original like Berra could come up with that.It Ain’t OverRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie’ Review: Hiding in Plain Sight

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      The “Back to the Future” star time-travels through his career in this documentary, charting his experiences learning to live with Parkinson’s disease.With apologies to Dr. Emmett Brown, you don’t need a flux capacitor to build a time machine. All you need to do is make a film. “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” a new biographical documentary from Davis Guggenheim (“An Inconvenient Truth”), zips through the “Back to the Future” actor’s career with humor and style; it gives the impression that its subject is willing to answer any question. Fox appears, head-on, in contemporary interviews with an off-camera Guggenheim. None of the charisma and charm that made him a star have diminished.But much of what distinguishes “Still” — as it’s simply titled onscreen, sans marketing hook — is how cleverly it has been edited. While this documentary draws on a standard tool kit of re-enactments and archival material, its best device is to use clips of Fox’s own movies as a counterpoint to his words, as if Fox weren’t playing fictional characters, but himself.In a way, he was. “Still” charts his experiences learning to live with Parkinson’s disease, a diagnosis he kept private for years before going public in 1998. One montage — tackily but irresistibly set to INXS’s “New Sensation” — illustrates how he managed to hide his illness in plain sight. Movies like “For Love or Money” (1993) and “Life With Mikey” (1993) reveal his practice of putting an object in his left hand to mask its trembling. What looked like nimble character work was, even then, documentary evidence.Guggenheim presents this sequence as if it were depicting an illicit drug binge, in part because Fox discusses his habit of popping Sinemet pills to keep up his level of dopamine, which is deficient in Parkinson’s patients. The segment ends by cutting to the present-day Fox, who says he needs more pills and asks Guggenheim for a couple of minutes so that the meds can kick in, to make him less “mumble-mouthed.”“Still” certainly doesn’t sugarcoat Fox’s life with Parkinson’s. An early scene shows him taking a spill across the street from Central Park. At another point, a makeup artist gives him a touch-up because a fall has broken bones in his face. But such moments are reminders of just how much any movie would necessarily leave unseen.The film establishes a brisk, appealing pace early on, as Fox, the only formal talking head (although we see him with his family), recalls how he came to acting. The title comes from one of Guggenheim’s queries: “Before Parkinson’s, what would it mean to be still?” Fox answers, “I wouldn’t know.”After moving from his native Canada to Hollywood, he says, he lived in an apartment so cramped that he washed his hair with Palmolive and his dishes with Head & Shoulders. Marty McFly emerges as an almost autobiographical creation, because the making of “Back to the Future” (1985) required Fox to engage in a bit of temporal dislocation himself. To fulfill his obligations to the sitcom “Family Ties” while making the movie, he had to shuttle between sets, with little sleep in between. In another toe-tapping montage — this time scored to Alan Silvestri’s “Back to the Future” theme — “Still” conveys the sheer whirlwind of what Fox’s life was like as drivers chauffeured him from one place to another and he could barely keep straight which role he was playing.Fox’s wife, Tracy Pollan, who appeared with him as a love interest in “Family Ties” and as a possible salvation for the cocaine-addled magazine employee he played in “Bright Lights, Big City” (1988), is held up as a rare person who could stand up to his arrogance during his peak period of stardom. “Still” becomes something of a love story, of how Pollan stayed with Fox not just through his sickness but during long gig-related absences and what he characterizes as a period of alcoholism.But the documentary is, perhaps improbably, not a downer in the least. It isn’t oriented primarily around illness, even as it shows Fox working with doctors and aides throughout. It’s a character study in which Fox reflects on his life with quick wit and self-deprecation. “If I’m here 20 years from now, I’ll either be cured or like a pickle,” he says. The real-life Marty McFly may not have a time machine. But he now has this crowd-pleaser of a movie.Still: A Michael J. Fox MovieRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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

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