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      ‘Nocturnes’ Review: They Come at Night

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      In the forests of northeast India, an ecologist tracking moths creates a tiny oasis of light in the darkness.Early in the enlightened nature documentary “Nocturnes,” a simple cut captures the mix of micro and macro that its directors, Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan, explore.Mansi Mungee, a quantitative ecologist, is counting moths in the forests of northeast India by hanging a lamp-lit sheet of fabric for the insects to land on. One such setup becomes a tiny oasis of light in the woods, and then, suddenly, we see the moon. Through this visual play with scale, moths and humans are placed in perspective as fellow creatures on the same level in the cosmos.“Nocturnes” is about Mungee’s hard work as a scientist, scouting and watching, and it’s also about the land itself. This lush and gorgeous stretch of Arunachal Pradesh, its misty landscapes drizzled with rain, has its own life apart from the scientific observers who come to the area. Mungee is measuring the sizes of hawk moths at different elevations and the effects of changing temperatures, but the filmmakers allow our gaze to dwell on the arabesques of wings on the hanging sheets, or, by day, the ethereal tree cover.This isn’t nature as an orderly picture book. Mungee and her team at one point must smash fallen rocks to clear a road, and they patiently endure cold and damp weather. In the award-winning film’s sound design, the din of animals — rustling and fluttering, plus calls of all sorts — becomes a raucous narration of its own.The moths remain a puzzle of data that awaits analysis. Dutta and Srinivasan’s understated approach shows research and nature in action without pretending to make a forest give up its secrets.NocturnesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Christopher Reeve and 6 Takeaways From the Documentary ‘Super/Man’

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      The new film chronicles the life of the paralyzed star, covering his friendship with Robin Williams and gut-wrenching details about his care and family.The documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” traces the life of the Juilliard-trained actor who found megastardom in the 1970s and ’80s playing Superman, and in 1995 as a different kind of hero, after an accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. It features never-before-seen footage of Reeve, who died in 2004 at 52, chronicling his early days; his pivotal friendship with his Juilliard roommate, Robin Williams; and his transformation, in a wheelchair and on a ventilator, into a leading disability and research advocate. Friends like Glenn Close, Susan Sarandon, Whoopi Goldberg and John Kerry offer their observations; disability rights activists do, too. It’s a thought-provoking tear-jerker.It also doubles as a family movie, showing Reeve in his role as a father to his three children — Matthew Reeve and Alexandra Reeve Givens from an early relationship that he fled at the height of his fame, and Will Reeve, his son with his wife, Dana Reeve. With unwavering support, she largely gave up her career as a singer and actress to care for her husband. She died of cancer in 2006, just 18 months after him, leaving behind their son, then 13.The compounded tragedy is leavened by the hope that Reeve embodied, especially with the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, which has invested $140 million in the search for a cure for spinal cord paralysis. The film — which arrived in theaters 20 years after Christopher Reeve’s death, almost to the day — chronicles their determination, and doesn’t flinch from the darkest moments, including money worries and the relentlessness of day-to-day caregiving.Reeve, left, and his wife, Dana, with the comedian and actor Robin Williams after Reeve’s appearance at the Academy Awards ceremony in March 1996.Vince Bucci/AFP, via Getty ImagesThe unvarnished approach — and the timing, with Reeve’s children having reached solid footing as adults — led the siblings to agree to the project after years of turning down other offers, said Will Reeve, 32, a correspondent for ABC News and a look-alike to his father. They hoped their home movies and archival material “would provide a deeper meaning and greater texture to his story,” he said, “and remind folks of the fullness of life that one can have, despite whatever catastrophic injury they may suffer, whatever disability they may have.”In a video interview from London, where they’re based, the filmmakers Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui discussed their rationale for not putting Reeve “on a pedestal,” as Ettedgui described it. “It was really important to show how someone who you might think of as being somehow perfect — the ideal hero — how they experience the same insecurities, the same family issues that the rest of us might,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Lego’s First Documentary, ‘Piece by Piece,’ Tells Pharrell Williams’ Story

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      The toymaker has found success in fictional films. But with “Piece by Piece,” about the life of Mr. Williams, it has gotten into a new genre.In Lego, anything is possible — within limits. Just ask the documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville.Mr. Neville, an Oscar winner, spent the past five years turning the life story of Pharrell Williams into an animated documentary created entirely from Legos. And those Danish-designed building blocks allowed him to create things that would typically fall outside the genre’s constraints.He illustrated Mr. Williams’s experience of synesthesia, which allows him to see color when he hears sounds, through translucent Lego pieces. They gave Mr. Neville the tools to turn the signature beats of the multi-hyphenate — rapper, producer and fashion designer are among Mr. Williams’s titles — into colorful bricks that he could take out of storage and transform into a hit song. And it ushered in some fantastical scenes that show Mr. Williams lost in outer space or trapped inside a whirlpool.“One thing I realized right away was that it wasn’t just about translating a documentary into animation,” said Mr. Neville, who on Friday will debut “Piece by Piece,” a $16 million musical documentary via Focus Features. “It was about using what animation could do that documentary couldn’t do, which is take you into the fantasy world. I found it so liberating, all the things you can communicate visually that you don’t have to say.”The film is also a stretch for Lego, which defied odds back in 2014 when it released “The Lego Movie” to both commercial and critical acclaim. (That movie grossed $471 million worldwide, and its signature song, “Everything Is Awesome,” landed an Oscar nomination.) The toy company made three more films in partnership with Warner Bros. before moving to Universal Pictures in 2020. That arrangement, while four years old, has yet to produce a movie. “Piece by Piece” is not part of that deal, though it was made by a subsidiary of Universal.Mr. Williams’s experience of synesthesia, which allows him to see color when he hears music, is illustrated in the film through translucent Lego pieces.NBC Universal“We really always want to be doing something that is inspiring people, that’s fitting with the brand and what we stand for, but that is also unexpected,” Jill Wilfert, a senior vice president of global entertainment at the Lego Group, said in an interview. “We were looking to come back onto the big screen, and this felt like a nice way to do something that was definitely going to defy people’s expectations.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In ‘The Last of the Sea Women,’ Divers Face a Vanishing Way of Life

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      The film captures the arduous work of South Korean haenyeo, who harvest seafood without diving gear, and whose traditions may be ending.In the South Korean province of Jeju lives a group of women who may, at first, sound as if they’re mythical creatures. The haenyeo (“sea women”) dive and swim in the depths of the ocean without any breathing gear, harvesting seafood like conch, urchin and octopus, which they sell to support their families. Often, haenyeo are the main earners in their households. They’ve done this for centuries.That is remarkable enough on its own. Free diving — without breathing apparatus other than your own lungs — is incredibly physically demanding and dangerous. Jellyfish and sharks lurk, and bad weather can pose a hazard, too. Some of the haenyeo dive for two full minutes without coming up for air, all while gathering marine life.But what’s more extraordinary — and what’s explored in “The Last of the Sea Women” (on Apple TV+), directed by Sue Kim — is this astonishing fact: Most of the haenyeo are in their 60s, 70s and 80s. For them, it’s both a point of pride that they’re still doing the work — “men can’t handle this job,” Soon Deok Jang, 72, notes with a grin — and a grave concern.That is because they have been at this a long time. Yet in recent decades, their numbers have dwindled from tens of thousands to about 4,000. Few young women join the community anymore, and the divers worry that their way of life is disappearing. “I feel like the haenyeo culture is melting away,” one says, referring not only their work, but also their camaraderie and empowerment.Kim takes a lightly ethnographic approach, melding an observational eye with conversations with the women. She follows the haenyeo into the sea, hangs out with them as they wait at the crack of dawn for transportation to the water and attends meetings where they discuss how to preserve haenyeo culture.And, as the film shows, there are a few encouraging signs. There’s a school for new haenyeo, though the grueling demands of yearlong training and the work itself mean only about 5 percent of graduates continue on. The film also focuses on Sohee Jin and Jeongmin Woo, who are in their 30s and the youngest by far among the haenyeo. They initially connected over that fact, and now they post videos to YouTube and Instagram to draw attention to their work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Separated’ Review: Interrogating a Policy

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      The latest documentary from Errol Morris looks at the Trump administration’s practice of taking children from their parents at the southern border.When the great documentarian Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line”) has taken on overtly political subjects, he has rarely approached them from a position of express advocacy. His perspective tends to be more philosophical, even cosmic.“American Dharma” (2019) sought to understand what made the former Trump White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon tick. “Standard Operating Procedure” (2008) revolved around the photographs of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and how acts that might look so obviously like torture were in certain cases rationalized as routine. The director’s portraits of former defense secretaries — Robert S. McNamara in “The Fog of War” (2003) and Donald H. Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known” (2014) — centered on figures who were well out of office, even if, in 2003, McNamara’s reflections on the Vietnam War held up a clear mirror to Rumsfeld and his then-current approach to Iraq.Morris’s “Separated,” on the Trump administration’s practice of taking children from their parents at the southern border, comes closer to a direct intervention. The filmmaker has been open about his desire to have it released before the presidential election, and although it is now playing in theaters, it isn’t set to air on MSNBC until Dec. 7, when its relevance will be reduced. “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election?” Morris wrote on X. “It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”If “Separated” is likely too straightforward — too much of a conventional issue documentary — to be remembered as one of Morris’s richest films, it is not as if the director has abandoned his sense of profound absurdity. In the film, Jonathan White, who worked for the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services when family separations began, speaks of a period in 2017 when those actions flew under the public’s radar. “It happened for months before there was any policy to do it,” he says, “and it was going on while my own leadership maintained it wasn’t.”At the Venice Film Festival, Morris highlighted the contradiction: “If the purpose was deterrence, why do it covertly?” he said in August. (There is a hint of Peter Sellers’s Dr. Strangelove in that idea: “The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret.”) But White says that “harm to children was part of the point.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Piece by Piece’ Review: Pharrell Williams’s Life, in Legos

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      The producer and musician gets the biographical documentary treatment — with an unexpected twist.Credit where it’s due: In a sea of formulaic biographical documentaries about musicians, “Piece by Piece,” about the life of the hitmaker and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams, stands out boldly. Not because it doesn’t follow the usual narrative formula. It absolutely does: humble beginnings, rocket toward stardom, crash and then, inevitably, resurrection. That’s all so standard to the genre that it’s practically calcified.No, “Piece by Piece” pops because everyone — including Williams and the film’s director, Morgan Neville — is played by animated Legos.This choice, which was Williams’s idea, comes off less gimmicky than it sounds. Legos have proven to be remarkably versatile utility players in the past decade. They’ve performed as Ninjas and Batman and themselves ever since “The Lego Movie” (2014) opened and became both a staggering commercial hit and an instant classic. The movie was clever and inventive, but the choice of toy worked, too: Legos are recognizable, beloved and, most important, endlessly open to reinterpretation. There’s no reason not to mingle your Lego Hogwarts set with your Lego Star Wars set in the shadow of your Lego Eiffel Tower alongside your little cousin’s Duplo trucks, and that’s the fun of them — the potential for chaos and imagination.For “Piece by Piece,” the Legos are taking on a new challenge: playing real people. Animated feature-length documentaries have become more common in recent years — “Waltz With Bashir” (2008) and “Flee” (2021) are two significant examples — but here the animation is aggressively nonrealistic, on purpose. The subjects, which include Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Daft Punk, show up rendered as cylinder-headed, block-bodied minifigures, Lego parlance for the people-shaped pieces. Minifigure Williams and Minifigure Neville sit across from each other, chatting about the movie and Williams’s life. The voices are real — Neville interviewed the plethora of collaborators and artists that Williams has worked for and with — but we only ever see their Lego versions, with some distinguishing facial hair or outfit.The playfulness fits Williams’s aesthetic, which ranges from producing beats and albums for that dizzying array of artists to recording his own megahit “Happy” to collaborating on lines of streetwear, fragrances, eyeglasses, sneakers and skin care. He’s clearly bursting with ideas all the time, and that’s the narrative of the film: This is a man who never stops dreaming of ways to remix the world. It’s his playground, his sandbox. Legos fit right in.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Daytime Revolution’ Review: Coffee and Counterculture

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      John Lennon and Yoko Ono invade middle-American living rooms in this cute but shallow documentary.For one largely forgotten week in 1972, John Lennon and Yoko Ono transformed the most popular show on daytime television into a forum for ideas that its unsuspecting audience rarely encountered. Joining as the co-hosts of “The Mike Douglas Show,” they repurposed entertainment as a Trojan horse for activist agendas (antiwar, pro-civil rights), briefly bridging the yawning chasm between mainstream America and a counterculture that the Nixon Administration was actively engaged in repressing.That chasm is the real story of “Daytime Revolution,” one that Erik Nelson’s charmingly relaxed, almost cozy chronicle of that week strains to elucidate. Given the flammable reputations of some of the show’s guests, like Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale, the most shocking takeaway from the movie is how tame it feels. The mood is overwhelmingly congenial and playful, with Ono’s dippier contributions drawing titters from the audience and occasional bafflement from her perpetually gum-chewing husband.Everyone, in fact — even a subdued, impossibly handsome Ralph Nader — seems on their best behavior, if slightly on edge, as though expecting an F.B.I. raid at any second. (They probably knew that Lennon was already on Nixon’s naughty list.) Musical segments featuring a vivacious Chuck Berry and the magnificent Broadway performer Vivian Reed keep things grooving and lighten the earnestness, as do engaging present-day interviews with Reed and other surviving guests.But for “Daytime Revolution” to live up to its name and become more than a curious cultural artifact would require a richer historical context, an explanation of why these people mattered and why their views were so feared by the White House.“I did not want to make a film about the thing — I wanted the film to be the thing,” Nelson states in the press notes. As a result, the movie’s quiet star is Douglas himself. Whether gently asking a tense Rubin about his upbringing, or helping Ono with her “box of smiles,” Douglas’s kindness and intellectual curiosity are more compelling than any political argument.Daytime RevolutionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Quick-Witted, Self-Lacerating James Blunt Would Like a Word

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      Twenty years after his hit “You’re Beautiful” turned him into an overnight star, the British singer and songwriter takes his music — and his haters — to task.Twenty years ago this month, James Blunt was an unknown singer releasing his first album. The song that rapidly elevated him out of obscurity was “You’re Beautiful,” a lovelorn rhapsody about falling for a stranger on the subway while high on drugs, which hit No. 1 in 15 countries, including the United States. The smash helped turn his 2004 LP “Back to Bedlam” into a triple-platinum success.As Blunt moved from unknown to highly known, there was a surprise reveal: The slight, diminutive man who wrote “You’re Beautiful” had been a captain in the British army, and served in Kosovo. Interviewers soon learned he also had an acid tongue and a quick wit. And in recent years, with evident zest, he’s turned it on people who troll him on social media; his retorts make him sound like a skilled standup comic who specializes in crowd work. (When someone posted on X, “My mom hates James Blunt,” he retorted, “Because I won’t pay the child support?” At this point, only masochists post @ Blunt.)Blunt has released seven studio albums; the most recent, “Who We Used to Be,” arrived in 2023. Later this year, he’s touring Australia, Asia and Europe, with a return to the United States planned for June 2025. An irreverent documentary about him, “One Brit Wonder,” premiered on Netflix UK in June, with distribution in the U.S. still pending.In a recent video interview, he reflected on the 20th anniversary of “Back to Bedlam” from a tiny office in the London pub he owns, the Fox & Pheasant. (The tavern plays his music five minutes before closing, he joked, so people will leave as quickly as possible.) These are edited excerpts from the conversation.In the documentary, there are lots of instances of people insulting you. Your tour manager calls you “a narcissistic psychopath.” Your mother describes you as “politely ruthless.” And you are likened to Marmite.I like Marmite.You’re aware that most people don’t?It’s a highly lucrative company, so they must be doing something right.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More