Documentary Films and Programs

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Selena Gomez: My Mind and Me’ Review: An Honest Portrait of Stardom

      by

      Sincere and soul-baring, the documentary, directed by Alek Keshishian, captures Gomez’s challenges with mental illness, lupus and fame.“My Mind & Me,” a new documentary about Selena Gomez, doesn’t feel like a publicity device. Sincere and soul-baring, the film captures Gomez’s challenges with mental illness, lupus and fame. Watching it is like eavesdropping on a 95-minute therapy session with the artist.It opens with Gomez out of sorts. “I have to stop living like this,” she says, as we jump from 2019 back to 2016. Backstage at one of her concerts, she cries, yearning to shed her child-star image and stand on her own as a solo artist. She fears she’s a disappointment.The documentary doesn’t show her forgetting her past as much as confronting it. A road trip to Grand Prairie, Texas, where she reunites with old neighbors and visits her childhood home, is a turning point for Gomez. In contrast is a scene where she’s answering interviewers whose flippant questions leave her feeling, she says, like “a product.” She craves genuine connection, something fame hasn’t yet afforded her.As a subject, Gomez is in the trustworthy hands of the veteran director Alek Keshishian. In 1991, he worked the same kind of magic on Madonna for “Truth or Dare.” Capturing an artist’s fearlessness, as he does in both films, isn’t just up to him, of course; like Madonna, Gomez is boldly unguarded. But “My Mind & Me” also looks outward, framing struggle as the human condition. An honest portrait study of stardom and mental illness, the film offers a hopeful catharsis: How, when we reveal our hardest truths, we can heal together.Selena Gomez: My Mind and MeRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘God Forbid’ Review: An Affair With Political Implications

      by

      The Hulu documentary covers a high-profile affair involving a pool attendant and the prominent evangelical couple Becki Falwell and Jerry Falwell Jr.“God Forbid: The Sex Scandal That Brought Down a Dynasty,” a Hulu documentary from the director Billy Corben, concerns a sensational, high-profile affair between Giancarlo Granda, a pool attendant at a luxury hotel in Miami Beach, Fla., and Becki Falwell, the wife of the prominent Republican evangelist Jerry Falwell Jr. — whom Granda claims participated in these relations as a silent voyeur. At the time, Falwell Jr. was the president and chancellor of one of the nation’s largest Christian colleges, Liberty University, and one of the best known evangelical supporters of former President Donald J. Trump.The film describes, in graphic and sometimes vulgar detail, a seven-year sexual relationship that had surprising political ramifications involving the attorney Michael Cohen, the actor Tom Arnold, and President Trump, each of whom, as the film illustrates, became tangentially embroiled in the ensuing drama and fallout.“God Forbid” tries to rationalize its often lurid account of these events, emphasizing the Falwells’ hypocrisy and castigating them as “predators” who showed patterns of abuse — the charming husband and beloved wife are “not the good Christians they present themselves to be,” one observer concludes righteously.But while Falwell Jr. may indeed be a charlatan, ridiculing his sexual predilections seems like a pretty dubious way to prove it. (We’re meant to savor the irony that, as Granda says, Falwell is “trying to appear as the strongman” when he is in fact “the cuck in the corner of the room.”) I’m not sure what’s gained from scrutinizing so many of Becki Falwell’s candid texts and voice messages, other than making her seem foolish.The film combines archival materials, original interviews and various text messages and video and audio recordings pertaining to the case. Its smoking gun is a recording of a late-night video call in which Becki is shown drinking wine and stripping naked, reminiscing with Granda about their past dalliances. I found it incredibly depressing. What, exactly, I had to wonder, is being documented here, and what, exactly, am I meant to conclude?God ForbidNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      ‘Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues’ Review: In His Own Words

      by

      Personal tapes and letters bring fresh insights into the jazz great as a musician and a Black man.In Louis Armstrong’s study in the Queens home he shared with his fourth wife, Lucille, bookshelves were filled with reel-to-reel recordings he made as a sort of audio diary. Those tapes and his letters — read by the rapper Nas — lay the foundation for the director Sacha Jenkins’s documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues.”By foregrounding the gravel, grace and salty frankness of Armstrong’s voice, and mining an archival mother lode of audio and video interviews and clips, Jenkins delivers a bountiful portrait of one of the 20th century’s superstars — on Armstrong’s own terms.As welcome as this is, the documentary’s most affecting attribute may be a reckoning by several Black male artists with what Armstrong means to them. After all, his broad smile, his cameo roles in Hollywood films, his seeming muteness on racial issues had some critics, many of them younger, discounting him for his complicity, his “Uncle Tomming,” as fellow New Orleanian Wynton Marsalis put it early in the film, confessing to how he once felt about Armstrong. With the aid of Marsalis, Miles Davis, the poet Amiri Baraka (via audio clips) and the actor Ossie Davis, Jenkins recontextualizes the man.In a tribute from the “With Ossie & Ruby” television show, Davis shares an epiphany he had when he and Armstrong were on set for ‌the 1966 movie “A Man Called Adam.” During a break, he happened on Armstrong lost in a moment of somber repose, one that quickly gave way to his trademark grin. In that swing, Davis discovered a new kinship: “What I saw in that look shook me. It was my father, my uncle, myself down through the generations.”There is no paucity of expert witnesses who never had doubts about Armstrong’s depth, starting with Lucille Armstrong (whose story about their first house is a keeper). They also include the jazz historian Dan Morgenstern, who wrote the introduction to the centennial edition of Armstrong’s memoir “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans,” and the composer Leonard Bernstein, who describes the melodies Armstrong plied as “looking for a lost note.” The poetry in that phrase seems to underscore Armstrong’s lineage as a descendant of the African Diaspora.Among the film’s ample pleasures is the only known footage of Armstrong in the recording studio. His head tilted back while scatting, he holds a handkerchief to mop his forehead. The film is a trove of Armstrong’s love of music and his labor. And because so many of those who lend their insights are now departed, it has the feel of a mausoleum worthy of a humble yet celebratory “Saints Go Marching In” second line.Louis Armstrong’s Black & BluesRated R for Satchmo’s salty language. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available on Apple TV+. More

    • 163 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Lenny Lipton, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’ Lyricist and 3-D Film Pioneer, 82, Dies

      by

      He used the royalties earned from the hit folk song, based on a poem he wrote in college, to fund decades of research into stereoscopic projection.Lenny Lipton, who as a college freshman wrote the lyrics to the classic folk tune “Puff the Magic Dragon,” and then used the song’s bountiful royalties to fund years of pioneering research in 3-D filmmaking, died on Oct. 5 in Los Angeles. He was 82.His wife, Julia Lipton, said the cause was brain cancer.Few people leave much of a mark on popular culture; Mr. Lipton was among the few who got to leave two, and in such wildly divergent corners as folk music and cinema technology.He was a 19-year-old student at Cornell when he sat down at the typewriter of his friend and fellow physics major Peter Yarrow. He had just read a 1936 poem by Ogden Nash titled “The Tale of Custard the Dragon” and felt inspired to write his own.Some time later, Mr. Yarrow found the poem, still in his typewriter, and felt a similar inspiration. He put the poem to music, and in 1963 he and his folk trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, released it as “Puff the Magic Dragon.” It begins: “Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea / And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.”Mr. Yarrow tracked down Mr. Lipton, who was working as a journalist in Manhattan, and gave him credit as a co-writer. (As Mr. Lipton told reporters repeatedly, despite persistent rumors, “Puff” had nothing to do with marijuana.)The song was such an immediate and lasting hit — Mr. Lipton called it his “MacArthur ‘genius’ grant” — that it allowed him to leave his job and move to California. In the Bay Area, he fell in with a circle of independent filmmakers and made several short films of his own.He received even more royalty income from his book “Independent Filmmaking” (1972), which became a niche but durable success, giving him enough of a financial cushion to explore yet another abiding interest: stereoscopy, the technical name for 3-D technology.Mr. Lipton had fallen for it as a boy in early 1950s Brooklyn when the first wave of 3-D films arrived in theaters. He saw them all: “House of Wax,” “Bwana Devil,” “The Maze.” And while the craze passed — the technology was crude, the projectors were hard to synchronize, the cheap eyeglasses that had to be worn to see images in 3-D were clunky — his belief that 3-D was the future of film did not, and in California he began tinkering with ideas to make that belief a reality.“‘Puff’ gave me a lot of freedom,” he said in a 2021 interview with Moving Images, a YouTube channel. “I didn’t have to get a job. I spent years in my little lab in Point Richmond developing my stereoscopic inventions.”Mr. Lipton accumulated some 70 patents related to 3-D technology, among them a screen that switches rapidly between left- and right-eye images, and a companion pair of eyeglasses fitted with shutters that open and close in sync with the screen.He developed that technology, which he called CrystalEyes, in the early 1980s. It soon found applications far beyond the movie theater: Versions were used by the military for aerial mapping, by scientists for molecular modeling, and by NASA for driving Mars rovers.CrystalEyes equipment developed by Mr. Lipton. He had some 70 patents related to 3-D technology.CrystalEyes and other advances devised by Mr. Lipton seeded the emergence of a new generation of stereoscopic filmmaking, used in 3-D versions of movies like “Avatar,” “Chicken Little” and “Coraline.” Today, some 30,000 movie screens across the United States use 3-D techniques that evolved from his innovations.Mr. Lipton “changed the paradigm of the audience’s experience in cinema culture entirely,” Sujin Kim, assistant professor of 3-D animation at Arizona State University, said in an email.Leonard Lipschitz was born on May 18, 1940, in Brooklyn. His father, Samuel, owned a soda shop and died when Leonard was 12. His mother, Carrie (Hibel), a teletype operator, later changed their surname to Lipton.His mother inspired his love for film by taking him to some of Brooklyn’s many grand old movie palaces, like the Ambassador and the Paramount, while his father inspired his love for filmmaking by bringing home a toy film projector. Leonard soon assembled his own, using aluminum foil, a toilet-paper roll and a magnifying glass.He entered Cornell intending to study electrical engineering but quickly switched to physics, where he felt more freedom to experiment.After graduating in 1962, he got a job at Time magazine in New York, then became an editor at Popular Photography. After work he would head to a small theater in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, where he and some friends presented the latest movies to emerge from the city’s underground film scene.He did much the same in California, though without the need for a day job. He wrote a weekly film column for The Berkeley Barb, an alternative newspaper, and made several short documentaries shot on 16 mm film, including “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom,” about the clashes surrounding People’s Park in Berkeley, and “Children of the Golden West,” a rambling, touching portrait of his countercultural friends.In addition to “Independent Filmmaking,” Mr. Lipton wrote several other books, among them “The Super 8 Book” (1975), “Lipton on Filmmaking” (1979) and, in 2021, “Cinema in Flux: The Evolution of Motion Picture Technology from the Magic Lantern to the Digital Era,” an 800-page opus on the history of movie making.Along with his wife, he is survived by his children, Noah, Jonah and Anna. He lived in Los Angeles and died in a hospital there.Mr. Lipton had an idealistic certainty about the coming dominance of 3-D films, but he was also critical of the way Hollywood had limited its use to cartoons and action movies.“I had hoped that stereoscopic cinema would be about actors and acting and involve people in stories about the human condition, but that’s not what happened,” he told Moving Images. “What happened is, it’s a cinema of spectacle.”Still, he held out hope for something different around the corner.“As soon as someone has success, financial success, a stereoscopic documentary or a stereoscopic buddy comedy, then the studios will copy it,” he said. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Descendant’ Review: The Fates of a Ship and its Captives

      by

      This documentary recounts the salvaging of the Clotilda, the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans to America, and tracks down their progeny.If you’ve ever wondered what “holding space” looks like in practice, the director Margaret Brown’s deeply attentive documentary “Descendant” provides moving examples. The film tells the entwined stories of the search for and salvaging of the Clotilda, the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States, and the experiences of those people’s descendants, many of whom live in Africatown, Ala., an enclave north of Mobile.And so, holding space looks like: the way Kamau Sadiki, a scuba diver with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Slave Wrecks Project, holds a small shell as part of his ritual of listening to “ancestral voices.” Or the way the folklorist Dr. Kern Jackson gazes with affection at a videotaped interview with the descendant Martha West-Davis, as she recounts how Africatown got its name. Or the sight of Emmett Lewis walking with his young children to the tombstone marker of Cudjoe Kazoola Lewis, who had been the last living captive and Emmett’s direct relative. Or the way the film threads the stirring motif of residents reading “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’” by Zora Neale Hurston who interviewed Lewis in 1927 and recounted his story in his own loamy parlance. An anthropologist, folklorist and filmmaker, Hurston wrote the book in 1931; it was published in 2018.According to the descendants, the Clotilda came to lie at the bottom of the Mobile River because the human trafficker Timothy Meaher had made a bet that he could bring enslaved people into the country after transports had been outlawed. He did in 1860 and then tried to destroy the evidence.Indeed, a river of exploitation and mendacity runs through “Descendant,” which draws connections between slavery, post-Reconstruction land grabs and Africatown’s pollution from nearby industries. And the film is rife with sympathetic and insightful subjects: Ramsey Sprague, a Native environmental organizer, sits in front of a computer screen pointing to parcels of land surrounding Africatown that were zoned for heavy industry and are owned by the Meahers. (Family members did not respond to the director’s requests but did issue a statement in 2021.) Veda Tunstall, a descendant and one-time real estate agent, wonders what new version of exploitation will arise out of the ship’s discovery. Joycelyn Davis, a cancer survivor, and another of Lewis’s descendants, initially admits to her disinterest in the search for the wreck; she’s focused on the local polluters.Brown’s critically acclaimed 2008 documentary “The Order of Myths” told the stories of Mobile’s segregated Mardi Gras celebrations. Here, Brown, who was born and raised in Mobile and is white, prioritizes the stories not only of the Black people who live in Africatown but also other stewards of a fuller American history that is still being brought to light, like the Smithsonian’s Sadiki and the curator Mary Elliott. She gently reminds a couple of descendants that even with the physical evidence of the schooner, the community must keep passing along their stories, must keep making an oral history.DescendantRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Animal Lovers, Rejoice: The NY Cat and Dog Film Festivals Return

      by

      The programs feature many surprises, including a cat that plays Wordle and a lone man’s odyssey to feed Turkish strays.Tracie Hotchner still doesn’t offer tissues.During her early years as the director and founder of two animal film festivals, audience members would occasionally confront her and say, “‘Why don’t you give Kleenex?’” Hotchner recalled. While her programs have never included “Old Yeller”-style tear-jerkers, she acknowledges that her first festivals were too long and emotional. Even a steady string of uplifting tales could cause sentimental overload.But when Hotchner’s seventh annual NY Dog Film Festival and fifth annual NY Cat Film Festival arrive on Sunday at the Village East by Angelika Theater in Manhattan — before a monthslong tour of the United States and Canada — they will be as sleek and compact as a prizewinning Abyssinian or a champion greyhound. Featuring international short films, each festival now runs under two hours and intersperses serious works with the purely comic. (The 16-film cat festival screens at 11 a.m., the 17-film dog festival at 2 p.m.)This year, moviegoers can witness the challenging lives of feral cats in Malta and abandoned dogs in Mexico. Yet they can also see a feline parody of “America’s Got Talent,” fancifully animated dog and cat crime capers and a documentary about golden retrievers that served as the legitimately elected mayors of Idyllwild, Calif.With each festival, “I’ve tried to make it more balanced and something that is a magic carpet ride,” said Hotchner, an author and radio host in Bennington, Vt., whose Radio Pet Lady Network features online talk shows. During a telephone interview, she added, “There’s lots of short films, but you don’t have several in a row that slam you emotionally.”The programs have transformed in other ways, too. The 2022 editions are the most global, including films from Chile, France, Ireland, China, India, Israel and Sweden. Hotchner is also extending the projects’ reach: A film distributor is booking both festivals in other cities well into 2023. And for the first time, she is hosting a 20-minute question-and-answer session with a few filmmakers after each festival’s Manhattan screening.“I’ve never had a theater that would let me do that before,” Hotchner said. “It costs them money.” She explained that the Village East was donating the time, a gesture that is very much in the spirit of her feel-good, do-good mission: Ten percent of the $20 ticket price for each festival goes to a local animal charity in every city hosting the programs. On Sunday, the beneficiary is NYC Second Chance Rescue, whose co-founder, Lisa Blanco, will help greet audiences.But what may distinguish this year’s festivals most is the element of surprise. “Many of the films were not like anything I’d seen before,” Hotchner said.Consider “Kopecki” (“The Dog God”), Hayrettin Alan’s 11-minute documentary about a lone man feeding homeless dogs near Van, Turkey. Lacking narration or dialogue, the film simply follows this self-appointed savior, as packs of startlingly beautiful dogs greet him with unanticipated affection.Clockwise from top left: Scenes from “Jade & Trubs,” “Kopecki,” “Duet” and “Please Rescue Me.”Clockwise from top left: Mutual Rescue; Hayrettin Alan; Yadid Hirschtritt Licht; Kim BestHotchner also found a live-action fictional work among her entries — these are rare, as they tend to have high budgets. This selection, “Adam,” by Hope Elizabeth Martinez, focuses on a teenage girl whose sole companion is an ailing 14-year-old dog.Among the animated submissions, Hotchner discovered an unusual variety of styles and unexpectedly serious themes. In Yadid Hirschtritt Licht’s lyrical “Duet,” for example, a cat’s loving legacy continues after its original owner dies.But the humorous films offer surprises, too. Ever see a cat play Wordle? Kim Best, a filmmaker in Durham, N.C., created “Cat of Letters” with her own pet, Nube. (Pronounced NOO-bay, the word is Spanish for “cloud.”) Although a cat lover, Best admits that her stars don’t take direction.“They’re very insubordinate and churlish,” she said in a phone interview.Nube was churlish enough to reject the fingerlike extensions Best tried to attach to his claws, so she used a stuffed animal’s paw affixed to a stylus to portray the cat tapping letters on an iPad. (It’s convincing.) But she also gave herself a challenge: Nube, whose thoughts are conveyed via subtitles, chooses only cat- or dog-related words for his opening Wordle efforts, so Best had to use those to solve the puzzles in real time. There was “no cheating,” she said.A director who has contributed to every NY Cat Film Festival so far, Best also has a documentary spotlighting a more typical feline talent: getting stuck in trees. “Please Rescue Me” follows Patrick Brandt, a kindly North Carolina biochemist and arborist who has volunteered his skills and equipment to extract some 250 trapped cats — and one pet coatimundi.As he says in the film, “I’m not so much rescuing the cat as I’m rescuing the person.”Animals, of course, frequently save the people who save them. Mutual Rescue, a global nonprofit initiative that creates documentaries about these relationships to encourage pet adoption, delivered “Kimo & Jazz.” This film concerns a young gay man from a conservative religious background who finally felt able to come out to his parents after adopting a shelter dog. The pet, Jazz, then helped sustain him as his father was dying.Another Mutual Rescue documentary, “Jade & Trubs,” chronicles how Double Trouble — a toothless, sickly and thoroughly unsociable feline shelter resident — uncharacteristically responded to Jade, a little girl with autism visiting the organization. Jade had sensitivities that turned every bedtime into long bouts of tears and screams. But once the family adopted the animal, nicknamed Trubs, both child and cat blossomed in unexpected ways.Perhaps the most surprising interplay of rescuer and rescued, however, takes place in “Underdogs,” an independent project by Alex Astrella. His documentary unfolds at the California Men’s Colony, a prison in San Luis Obispo where the inmates train service dogs for veterans and emergency workers with post-traumatic stress disorder. The prisoners’ dark histories — several on camera are convicted murderers — contrast starkly with their tender devotion to the dogs and their purpose.“I took a life,” one says. “Now I want to save a life.”Astrella said in a phone interview that he intended to illustrate the program’s effects on the men and “the change it’ll hopefully enact on their lives going forward.” The film, he added, is a testament to the “spiritual power that dogs have on humans.”Such connections are the thread that runs through the festivals. As Hotchner said, their mission is “to celebrate that human-animal bond, however and wherever it occurs.”So prepare to celebrate. And maybe pack a few tissues.NY Cat Film Festival and NY Dog Film FestivalOct. 23; the Village East by Angelika Theater, Manhattan; catfilmfestival.com, dogfilmfestival.com. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘All That Breathes’ Review: Hope Is the Thing With Feathers

      by

      Shaunak Sen’s poetic documentary chronicles the efforts of three New Delhi men to help the city’s birds of prey.The first shot of “All That Breathes” explores a vacant lot at night, tracking rats and feral dogs through puddles and piles of refuse. Your instinct might be to recoil from a tableau of urban squalor, but there is a quiet, rapt attention in the images that suggests a different response. Even in the clogged thoroughfares and crowded neighborhoods of big cities like New Delhi, where this remarkable documentary unfolds, we are closer to the wildness of the natural world than we might suppose.The three principal human characters in Shaunak Sen’s film have devoted their lives to caring for black kites, birds of prey almost as unloved in Delhi as scavenging rodents and canines. Wounded kites and other raptors, excluded from a local avian hospital because of their nonvegetarian ways, find their way to Wildlife Rescue, a small clinic that doubles as a workshop for the assembly of soap dispensers. There, Nadeem Shehzad and Mohammad Saud, the brothers who founded Wildlife Rescue, work with their associate Salik Rehman to rehabilitate the birds until they can return to the skies.Their efforts on behalf of the kites were the subject of an article in The New York Times in 2020. The methods of “All That Breathes,” which mentions that piece, are more impressionistic than reportorial. There is something inherently mysterious about birds and their interactions with people, and also something unmistakably spiritual about Wildlife Rescue’s devotion to their well-being.Not that there is anything gauzy or mawkish about the film. Sen finds intimations of deeper meaning by focusing on the day-to-day practicalities of rescuing kites. In one riveting scene, the men save a wounded kite from a riverbank, swearing and complaining as they navigate a tricky, absurd and potentially dangerous situation. Mostly, the birds arrive in cardboard boxes hauled across the city by Salik or one of the brothers. As the kites recover, they move to cages on the rooftop.Wildlife Rescue has applied for a grant to expand and modernize its operation, and “All That Breathes” in part tells a hopeful story of patience and persistence in the face of obstacles that include bureaucratic red tape, family tensions and city traffic. But then a wave of murderous sectarian violence sweeps through New Delhi. The causes of the upheaval and its aftermath — and the conflict between India’s Hindu nationalist government and the country’s large Muslim population — become part of the film’s atmosphere, like the smog and the noise.Neither a nature documentary nor a political lecture, “All That Breathes” is a subtle, haunting reflection on the meaning of humanity — on the breathtaking kindness and heartbreaking cruelty that define our wounded, intrepid, predatory species.All That BreathesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Fire that Took Her’ Review: An Unflinching Portrait of Pain

      by

      This documentary charts the case of Judy Malinowski, a young mother who suffered debilitating burns after being set on fire by a man she had dated.The experiences of Judy Malinowski, an Ohio woman who testified in her own murder trial, could have been cooked up by the novelist Jodi Picoult in an alarming courtroom melodrama. Instead, this true story’s themes of domestic violence, traumatic injury and addiction are unpacked in the straightforward documentary “The Fire That Took Her.”Anchored by interviews with Judy’s family members, particularly her mother, Bonnie, the film recounts how Judy, a young mother of two daughters, began a volatile relationship with a man named Michael Slager. According to Bonnie, Michael manipulated their family and enabled Judy’s drug addiction, casting himself as her savior while supplying her with heroin. Then, amid an altercation in 2015, Michael doused Judy in gasoline and set her on fire.Miraculously, Judy survived for nearly two years after the attack, and the documentary frequently includes footage from the hospital room where Judy resided and received care. In interviews, the director Patricia E. Gillespie has said that while pitching the film, people often asked whether she could cover or blur Judy’s face to shield audiences from her burns. Gillespie refused, and her resolve to train her camera on Judy gives the film an unflinching quality.Testimonies from the detectives and attorneys on the case beget a host of true-crime clichés. Far more startling and heartbreaking, though, are the scenes of Bonnie at home with Judy’s daughters. Seated around the kitchen table, Bonnie gently debriefs them on their mother’s medical and legislative battles. To watch these girls strive to comprehend the incomprehensible is a singular kind of agony.The Fire that Took HerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More