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      ‘This Much I Know to Be True’ Review: Nick Cave Prepares for the Stage

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      A new music documentary by Andrew Dominik explores the collaboration of Cave and Warren Ellis.The singer-songwriter (and novelist and screenwriter) Nick Cave is a longtime chronicler of dread, erotic obsession, morality and mortality. The director Andrew Dominik, not exactly a screwball comedy guy himself (“Killing Them Softly”), proved an apt collaborator with Cave on the 2016 documentary “One More Time With Feeling.”That film was a tricky proposition, undertaken in the wake of the 2015 death of Cave’s teenage son Arthur. It documented the making of “Skeleton Tree,” one of Cave and his band the Bad Seeds’ most moving records.The new “This Much I Know to Be True,” shot in spring 2021 before a tour, and largely devoted to presenting songs from the recent albums “Ghosteen” and “Carnage,” is a lighter affair. It opens with Cave speaking about how he handled the pandemic: “I took the government’s advice,” he says, pausing to chuckle, “and retrained as a ceramicist.” He then shows off sculptures depicting a history of the devil.Cave’s partner in music, the multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis, is the other main presence here. (Marianne Faithfull, a stalwart friend of Cave’s, pops in for a memorable scene.) Cave waxes droll on their collaboration: “He took a subordinate role of embellishing what was going on,” he says of Ellis, adding, “And slowly, one by one, taking out each member of the Bad Seeds. I know I’m the next to go.” More seriously, he talks about the Red Hand Files, his newsletter, a sort of metaphysical advice column, in which he exercises a compassion that he admits “doesn’t come naturally.”Dominik shows off his own inventive playfulness here. He shifts aspect ratios from shot to shot. He lays bare cinematic contrivances by showing dolly tracks in a shot, only then to fake out the viewer with a lighting trick. A rather fun Nick Cave movie might not have been on your 2022 bingo card, but here we are.This Much I Know to Be TrueNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel’ Review: Bohemia’s Holdouts

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      This documentary offers an immersion in the lives of residents who keep the building’s spirit as a home for artists alive through a protracted renovation.Early in “Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel,” a construction worker says that the famed building has “a lot of ghosts.”A home for untold authors, artists and musicians since it opened in the Gilded Age — and probably the only dwelling anywhere that housed, at different times, Mark Twain and superstars from Andy Warhol’s Factory — the Chelsea Hotel, as seen in this documentary from Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, appears haunted even by its current residents, who wander halls that have been filled with plastic sheeting.Shot beginning in 2019, while the hotel ground through a contentious and protracted renovation, the film offers an evocative, melancholy immersion in the lives of a handful of holdouts who have maintained the building’s bohemian spirit even as their apartments have been cut up, almost as if they themselves were part of the architecture. The occupant of Janis Joplin’s former suite displays the soap dish he kept from a gutted bathroom. (“She probably didn’t use the soap, from what I know about Janis Joplin,” he says.)A wire sculptor, a dancer and the head of the tenants’ association (who yearns for construction to finally finish, though other residents disagree) are among the eccentric figures who catch the directors’ eyes. The artist Bettina Grossman, who died in November at 94, says she’s the oldest person in the building and that, unlike her neighbors, she was never offered money to leave.The film avoids providing too much context, a choice that contributes to the spectral atmosphere. The directors aren’t after a news piece; they’re just listening to voices that continue to echo in the corridors.Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea HotelNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      They Loved Volcanoes and Each Other

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      In “Fire of Love,” the voice-over quotes Maurice and Katia Krafft’s feelings about the risks in their line of work: exploring and filming volcanoes. “I prefer an intense and short life to a monotonous, long one,” Maurice wrote. Katia acknowledged the danger but said that in the moment, she didn’t care at all.The Kraffts, married French volcanologists, were killed on June 3, 1991, observing an eruption of Mount Unzen in Japan. But the stunning 16-millimeter footage they shot throughout their careers — full of gushing lava, flying rocks and giant clouds of smoke — lives on in the new “Fire of Love,” an all-archival documentary compiled from roughly 200 hours of their material along with 50 hours of TV appearances and other clips.“I have so many questions that I wish I could have asked them personally, and one of them is what reels didn’t make it,” Sara Dosa, the documentary’s director, said during an interview in Tribeca last month. After all, visiting volcanoes is fraught with hazards. The film tells of Maurice scalding his leg in boiling mud and shows him playfully testing Katia’s helmet by throwing a rock at her head. Dosa said they didn’t use “a fun shot we had of Maurice taking his melted boot and throwing it into a lava flow.” It’s safe to assume that not all of the couple’s film equipment survived, either.The Kraffs’ relationship is also the subject of the new documentary.Image’EstBut “Fire of Love” is not just about the Kraffts’ time in the field; it’s also about their lives and their marriage. Dosa, who learned about the couple while doing research for a previous documentary, has described her film as a love triangle involving Maurice, Katia and the volcanoes.The movie tries to stay true to them — “we always wanted to start with Katia and Maurice, first and foremost,” Dosa said — while maintaining some critical distance. A voice-over from Miranda July expands on and at times complicates the Kraffts’ descriptions, countering Maurice’s claim, for instance, that he was “not a filmmaker,” but merely “a wandering volcanologist forced to make films in order to wander.” The couple — short-haired, bespectacled Katia; bushy-maned, garrulous Maurice — toured the world giving lectures and holding screenings. Even today, in part thanks to their many books and TV appearances, they enjoy a measure of global fame.“We wanted to kind of explore how they were crafting their own image as well,” Dosa said. “They seemed to understand that their public image helped them to continue to live the lives that they wanted to lead. They performed versions of themselves, not in a way that was inauthentic at all — it seemed to be almost this higher truth of who Katia and Maurice were.”Bertrand Krafft, Maurice’s older brother, now 82, maintained the footage after the couple’s deaths. “My parents didn’t know anything about photography and cinema, and Katia’s parents didn’t either,” he said, speaking by phone through an interpreter. “Somebody had to take charge to manage the assets that Maurice and Katia left behind, and I was the only person who was available to do that.”Katia Krafft said that she was mindful of the dangers of her work but that in the moment, she didn’t care at all.Image’EstThe grey gas and smoke of a pyroclastic flow, the kind that killed the Kraffts.Image’EstBertrand has granted permission for Maurice and Katia’s images to be used in other documentaries. Indeed, another feature that makes use of the Kraffts’ material, “The Fire Within: Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft,” directed by Werner Herzog, had its premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest in Britain on June 26. But Bertrand said that the film he participated in the most over the years has been Dosa’s. “Her ideas, her approach to the project seemed excellent to me,” he said. “That’s why I did anything I could to be able to help her.”Inside the World of Werner HerzogIn his decades-long career, the filmmaker has come to seem more and more like one of the existentially inclined dreamers who populate his work.First Novel: Werner Herzog made a late-career foray into fiction with his new book, “The Twilight World.” He feels he has finally found his medium.Review: The book vividly reconstructs the personal war of Hiroo Onoda, a Japanese intelligence officer who stayed in the Philippine jungle for years after World War II ended.In the Family: The filmmaker narrated “Last Exit: Space,” a documentary on the feasibility of off-world colonization by his son Rudolph.Interview: At the start of the pandemic, Herzog spoke of apocalyptic themes in his work, the universe’s indifference and the meaning of life.The footage included fully finished movies and working materials both edited and not, according to Mathieu Rousseau of Image’Est, the French archive that had been storing the Krafft collection of 800 reels of film and 300,000 slides. (Bertrand Krafft sold the material to a Geneva-based company, Titan Film, after the documentary was underway.)“What was complicated in the beginning, and also when we had to digitize everything to be able to allow Sara to be able to make her movie, was that we needed to figure out what Maurice had done,” Rousseau said through an interpreter during a video call. Maurice, he noted, “did the editing himself. He had his own logic.”Maurice Krafft on top of an active and hardening lava flow. “I prefer an intense and short life to a monotonous, long one,” he wrote. Image’EstDosa and her editors also had to make sense of the hundreds of hours of footage. Jocelyne Chaput, one of the editors of “Fire of Love,” said that on some reels, “I got the impression that someone had swept the cutting-room floor of Maurice’s house and then respliced it all together, and that was that reel.” Erin Casper, the other editor, said that making sure they were staying accurate — with footage that was loosely arranged geographically but not necessarily chronologically — was difficult as well.Furthermore, none of the Kraffts’ 16-millimeter footage had sound; all the audio of churning lava, for example, had to be added. The finished version of “Fire of Love” draws on a mix of Foley effects and a library of field recordings that the sound designer, Patrice LeBlanc, said had been accumulated over 30 years. Using sound wouldn’t have been alien to Katia or Maurice, Chaput and Casper suggested: Some of the Kraffts’ films used sound effects or voice-over, or would run while Maurice was lecturing over them.Ken Hon, the scientist in charge at the United States Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, knew the Kraffts beginning in the late 1980s, and remembers that filming volcanoes then was unusual.“There wasn’t a lot of footage of volcanic eruptions at that time, and certainly not stuff that was up close,” he said. “You had to be a volcanologist to film like they did because you had to be able to point the camera at the correct thing to understand the process that’s going on.” Today, such footage is much more common thanks to lighter and cheaper equipment. Maurice, he said, “would be so in love with drones right now.”When the Kraffts traveled through Hawaii, Hon recalled, he sometimes accompanied them into closed areas, like the town of Kalapana when it was overrun by lava in 1990.Filming “was just like second nature to them,” he said. “They’re setting up cameras and continuing to chat,” never pausing to say, “Stop, I have to focus, I have to concentrate.” Hon had some appreciation for the challenges the Kraffts faced: He helped his wife and fellow volcanologist, Cheryl Gansecki, make videos for about 20 years.Lava flowing at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, as seen in “Fire of Love.”Image’EstKatia and Maurice Krafft in aluminized suits at the edge of the Kilauea crater in Hawaii.Image’Est“High temperatures, it’s usually wet and there’s the acidic gas coming out of the volcanoes, right?” he said. “The combination of those things are exactly what they tell you not to immerse your electronic item into.”Steven Brantley, a volcanologist who retired after 37 years with the Geological Survey but has returned part-time, said that even when the Kraffts’ footage might make it appear that they were in harm’s way, they positioned the camera “in such a way that they could walk in front of it and live to tell the tale, over and over and over,” he said. “So in that sense I think they were very careful, even though it may not look like they were.”Hon also didn’t think of the Kraffts as incautious. “The kind of eruption that got them at Unzen, the dome-forming eruptions with collapses and small explosions and things, those are the most dangerous kinds of eruptions because they’re so unpredictable,” he said.The New York Times reported at the time that the couple and another volcanologist, Harry Glicken, who died with them, “had no chance to escape when the pyroclastic flow from the main crater, two miles away, plunged down the slope at a speed estimated at 100 to 125 m.p.h.”Brantley never worked with the Kraffts in the field but did collaborate with Maurice on a video about volcanic hazards that was nearly complete when Maurice died. Sections of it were screened in time to warn Philippine residents of the eruptions at Mount Pinatubo that occurred less than two weeks later. Brantley emphasized that educating the public about volcanoes was as much a part of the Kraffts’s legacy as their striking footage.Herzog, through a representative, said shortly before the premiere of his own Krafft film that he had not yet seen “Fire of Love” but that he hoped to “in a theater within the next weeks.”The potential confluence of two Krafft movies reminded Hon of the overlapping releases of “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano” in 1997. This must just be the way it is with volcano movies, he suggested. “We don’t do them at once,” he said. “We always do a pair.” More

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      ‘Fire of Love’ Review: A Volcanic Romance

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      Sara Dosa’s new documentary chronicles the lives and deaths of the French scientists Katia and Maurice Krafft.The subjects of Sara Dosa’s new documentary “Fire of Love” are Maurice and Katia Krafft, married French scientists who devoted their lives to the study of volcanoes. Really, though, it might be more accurate to describe the couple, who died in a volcanic eruption in 1991, as co-directors, since they were the ones who captured the most arresting images in this curious and haunting film.Those images, still and moving, record the before, during and after of volcanic eruptions on several continents. Some of these are terrifying, as molten rock shoots skyward and clouds of ash roll down the sides of mountains. Others are eerie, capturing the glow of an active crater or the otherworldly contours of newly formed rock. The sheer existence of these photos is mind-boggling when you think about how close the people with the cameras must have been to the lava and the smoke.The Kraffts, who grew up in Alsace, France, and met at the University of Strasbourg, were devoted to each other and smitten with Etna, Stromboli, Nyiragongo and other volatile spots. As the film tells it — and archival interviews and broadcast appearances confirm — their shared interest wasn’t just a professional matter. It was an all-consuming and ultimately fatal passion.Maurice was a geologist and Katia a geochemist, and the difference between those disciplines is an occasional source of nerdy humor. A geologist, Maurice suggests, is someone who paddles an inflatable canoe into a lake of sulfuric acid, while a geochemist has the good sense to stay on shore taking measurements and collecting samples.The narration, read by Miranda July, underlines temperamental contrasts between the scientists that are seemingly confirmed by the pictures. Katia, birdlike and ironical, kept track of the data and took the still photographs, while Maurice, who resembles a curly-headed lion cub, gave public lectures and wielded the movie camera.Out in the field, tiptoeing across lava streams or trudging through ash and mud, they wore matching red wool caps and silver insulated jumpsuits and, sometimes, metal helmets that extend over their shoulders to protect them from molten debris. “Fire of Love,” which also includes animated sequences, has some of the willful enchantment of a children’s book. Even Maurice’s flights of philosophical rhetoric — he and Katia were French intellectuals, after all — have a naïve charm, expressing a sense of inexhaustible, starry-eyed wonder.The objects of that fascination are lethally destructive and scarily unpredictable, but, for the Kraffts, the danger was part of the allure. “Fire of Love” is a romance shadowed by tragedy. The fact of the couple’s death is established early on, and by the time the details are filled in at the end of the movie, you more or less know what’s coming. What might look like recklessness is part of a devotion that takes on a moral — even spiritual — dimension.There’s a reason that volcanoes have, throughout human history, been worshiped and placated like gods. Maurice and Katia Krafft represent a secular, scientific variation on that old-time religion. They craved sublimity, but they also wanted to be helpful. “Fire of Love” makes much of the distinction between relatively predictable “red” volcanoes and their more deadly “gray” counterparts — “the ones that kill,” as Maurice puts it.In their last years, the Kraffts spent most of their time studying the killers, hoping to discover patterns that would enable people living in the path of destruction to escape. They risked their lives to do this, and the movie argues that their sacrifice wasn’t in vain. More than that, it preserves their work and their idiosyncratic, unforgettable human presence.Fire of LoveRated PG. Geological violence. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Trying to Capture the Life and Lyrics of That Wry Sage Leonard Cohen

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      The makers of a documentary on the singer-songwriter took a deep dive into his “writing and rewriting and erasing” to better understand the man.The documentary “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” illuminates the unpredictable paths taken by a singer-songwriter and his music. The directors, Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine (“Ballets Russes”), trace Cohen’s career from his early days in Montreal to his 21st-century renaissance, exploring his creative process, his spiritual search and how his perhaps best-known song, “Hallelujah,” took on a life of its own.Of the musician’s sagelike appeal, A.O. Scott wrote in a Critic’s Pick review, “His gift as a songwriter and performer was rather to provide commentary and companionship amid the gloom, offering a wry, openhearted perspective on the puzzles of the human condition.”I spoke with Geller and Goldfine about their insights into Cohen’s life and lyrical artistry, and his enduring mysteries.What did you learn about Leonard Cohen that surprised you most?DAN GELLER He was clearly struggling to find his sense of place in his life, his universe and his love life — and in his spiritual life. He was seeking so deeply over decades, and when that went away, as he said, “The search itself dissolved,” and a lightness entered his being. He couldn’t even explain why. And he didn’t want to examine it too much because he was afraid that by examining it, it might go away again.DAYNA GOLDFINE I had thought that the only reason he had gone back out on the road in his mid-70s, after a 14-or-15-year hiatus, was because he had had all his money ripped off, and it was a financial compulsion. But just as important was that Leonard felt as if he had never truly reached the same level as a performer as he thought he might have reached as a singer-songwriter. You really saw him then reaching this pinnacle that made a Leonard Cohen concert so deep and so spiritual.He’s amazing in archival interviews because he essentially speaks in lyrics. What is that wonderful phrase he casually drops, “the foothills of old age”?GOLDFINE Yes! “70 is indisputably not youth. It’s not extreme old age, but it’s the foothills of old age.” Isn’t that gorgeous? I found Leonard’s wit both immensely gratifying and also surprising. Especially in the first couple decades of his career, he was painted as this monster of gloom. But if you really hang with him and listen to what he’s saying, he’s one of the funniest guys ever. It’s a very droll, dry wit.Whenever possible, we tried to come up with something fresh so that even the most devout Leonard Cohen head would find something new in our film, or if we were going to use a piece of archival material that had been used in the past, we would try to reframe it. Rabbi [Mordecai] Finley, for instance, reframes some of the material in a really interesting way that gives you a fresh perspective.What were the biggest revelations about “Hallelujah” and Cohen’s writing process?GOLDFINE I hadn’t realized the sheer number of verses that Leonard was writing and rewriting and erasing and reconfiguring throughout the five or so years that it took him to write that song. And then the number of times that he reconfigured the song in performing it. I love in the film where he takes it from the King David Old Testament version of the song and moves it into a secular realm.GELLER There’s also the way that other people have responded to the song — listening to John Cale or Brandi Carlile or Eric Church, to hear why they resonated with the song. It’s given me a window into the souls of these other singer-songwriters.His notebooks are fascinating because there are versions of lines that have different resonances but are also super powerful. “When David played, his fingers bled, he wept for every word he said” — that’s an incredible line there, too! He could have stopped anywhere along the way and had maybe an equally powerful song.GOLDFINE You also see the very first incarnation of “Anthem,” one of his most famous songs, and the first time he ever wrote that line: “There’s a crack in everything.” That almost brought tears to my eyes when I saw it — the first infant steps of “Anthem.” Also in those notebooks you see his datebook, and the first time he met Dominique Issermann, the woman he considered the first great love of his life.Although you couldn’t interview Cohen, did you hear anything from him while making the film?GELLER The Dominique [interview] was interesting because she was staying with Leonard at the time when we were going to film her. She said that he asked her, “Look, if they start asking questions like, ‘Was it your kitchen chair that he was tied to when he wrote the song?’ don’t let them go down that path.” This is the only direct, or close to direct, feedback we ever got from Leonard. Of course, we would never ask that! But I thought, That’s good, because what he was really saying is: Don’t concretize the song and its lyrics. Leave it open to interpretation, and a mystery. Don’t make it specific to Leonard himself.What’s your favorite version of “Hallelujah”?GOLDFINE When I was embroiled in shaping the John Cale section, I just couldn’t get enough of the John Cale version. And Jeff Buckley was the first “Hallelujah” that I ever heard, and it blew me away. But at the end of the day, it’s Leonard Cohen singing it in those last five years’ worth of concerts and, night after night, getting down on his knees to start that song.GELLER Buckley’s haunting guitar arpeggios are so beautiful and exquisite. I love those and his gorgeous voice. But Leonard performing it live — we saw him do it twice at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. Just watching someone truly stand in the center of his song, a song that’s filled with the complications of yearning, of brokenness, of hopefulness, of love, of sex — all of it! More

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      ‘Accepted’ Review: Reaching for the Stars, Seeing Them Dissolve

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      After a scandal unravels at their private school in western Louisiana, four seniors pick up the pieces.In “Accepted” the director Dan Chen takes us inside the world of T.M. Landry, a Louisiana private school whose videos of African American students collecting Ivy League college acceptances once went viral. But nine months after the filmmakers’ first visit to the school, The New York Times published reports of physical abuse, falsified transcripts and “cultish” behavior on the part of its founders, Mike and Tracey Landry. Viewers of “Accepted” get a front-row seat to the life-altering impact of the school’s unraveling through the stories of four promising high school seniors: Adia, Alicia, Cathy and Issac.As we witness both the documentary’s subjects — and its director — navigate a shocking development in real time, a quietly probing film emerges that pierces the myth of American meritocracy.Chen makes the choice to plod along at the same measured pace throughout — even after the T.M Landry scandal comes to light — and forgo the cryptic scoring we’re used to hearing when the jig is up. Similarly, the cinematography by Chen and Daphne Qin Wu moves seamlessly between intimate hand-held shots and aerial views of western Louisiana landscapes that reflect the eventual loss of access to the Landrys and the school.In the end, it is the resilience of the film’s teenage subjects that lifts “Accepted” to new heights. As they sit for close-ups in front of a swirly blue backdrop, gone are the Georgetown and Stanford sweatshirts, and the hopes they once represented. But in their place sits a clear understanding of the misguided pressures placed upon individual minority students to succeed in a society that systemically disadvantages them and a surprisingly powerful tale about making peace with imperfection.AcceptedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Hallelujah’ Review: From Leonard Cohen to Cale to Buckley to Shrek

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      A new documentary tells the entwined stories of a songwriter and his best-known composition.Leonard Cohen’s final album, released in October 2016, is called “You Want It Darker.” He died on Nov. 7, the day before the U.S. presidential election, and in the years since, things have grown very dark indeed.Cohen wasn’t one to offer comfort. His gift as a songwriter and performer was rather to provide commentary and companionship amid the gloom, offering a wry, openhearted perspective on the puzzles of the human condition. “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” is, accordingly, not a movie designed to make you feel better about anything, except perhaps Cohen himself. But this generous documentary is nonetheless likely to be a source of illumination for both die-hard and casual fans, and even to people who love Cohen’s most famous song without being aware that he wrote it.That’s “Hallelujah,” of course, which you can hear at weddings and funerals, on singing-competition reality television shows and in too many movies to count. The directors, Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine, wrap a circumspect biography of the singer — loaded with archival footage and interviews with sundry friends and admirers, including a rabbi and a Canadian government official — around the story of the song.It’s quite a story. “Hallelujah” took something like seven years to finish — Cohen’s own estimates varied. Larry Sloman, a music journalist who knew Cohen well and interviewed him often, surmises that there may be as many as 180 verses, starting with the one everybody knows. By now, we’ve all heard about the secret chord that David played, and it pleased the Lord.But “Hallelujah” did not please the executives at Columbia Records, who refused to release “Various Positions,” an album recorded in 1983 that also included the future classic “Dance Me to the End of Love.” John Lissauer, who produced the LP and who had worked on and off with Cohen since the early ’70s, recalls the label’s decision with dismay and surprisingly good humor, given the damage done to his professional prospects. (“Various Positions” was eventually released on a small American label.)At the time, Cohen had been recording for nearly 20 years, though he was also something of a musical late bloomer. He was past 30 when he turned to songwriting, having established himself as a poet and figure on the Canadian literary scene. The filmmakers sketch his early life and career, noting his privileged upbringing in the Westmount section of Montreal, his interest in Jewish and Zen Buddhist religious teachings and his reputation as a Casanova. (His fifth studio album is called “Death of a Ladies’ Man.”)Personal matters stay mostly in the background. Suzanne Elrod, his partner in the mid-70s, is briefly mentioned — we’re reminded that she was not the inspiration for the song “Suzanne” — and their children are glimpsed but not named. Dominique Issermann, the photographer with whom Cohen lived on the Greek island of Hydra, reminisces fondly about their time together. But “Hallelujah” is interested in Cohen’s private life mainly insofar as it suggests themes for his work.These could be divided up — spiritual, sexual, existential, emotional — but he specialized in tracing the entanglement of those categories of experience. Sloman, citing an unidentified critic, says that Cohen was most interested in “holiness and horniness.”“Hallelujah” is his great anthem of religious ecstasy and sexual longing. Some versions emphasize the sacred, while others dwell on what another poet called “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” “All I’ve ever learned from love/Is how to shoot at someone who outdrew you”: Some singers omit that line (and the one about being tied to a kitchen chair), but even when transcendence seems to prevail over cynicism, the tension between sacred desire and profane disappointment remains.The documentary’s account of the song’s fate, indebted to Alan Light’s book “The Holy or the Broken,” is a fascinating study in the mechanics and metaphysics of pop-culture memory. Bob Dylan, who admired Cohen, added “Hallelujah” to some of his set lists in the late ’80s. John Cale’s cover, recorded for a 1991 tribute album, brought the song to wider attention.“From Cale to Buckley to Shrek” is Sloman’s synopsis. Jeff Buckley’s full-throated rendition injected “Hallelujah” into the ’90s pop mainstream. “Shrek,” the DreamWorks animated blockbuster about a lovelorn green ogre, repurposed Cale’s glum version. The soundtrack album, which sold millions of copies, included another one, more in the melodramatic Buckley mode, by Rufus Wainwright. The floodgates were open.“It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth.” By the hundredth time, you might think the magic would be gone, but “Hallelujah” is one of those rare songs that survives its banalization with at least some of its sublimity intact.Cohen lived to see its triumph, and the last third of the documentary is devoted to his comeback, including generous clips from his later concerts. He is, throughout, a vivid, complicated presence — witty, melancholy, well-dressed and soft-spoken. By the end, he radiates wisdom, gratitude, and the kind of fulfillment whose elusiveness had always been his great subject.Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a SongRated PG-13: She tied you to a kitchen chair. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Art of Making It’ Review: Seeking a Bigger Canvas

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      Despite its haphazard approach, this documentary about the contemporary art world serves as a decent explainer for the industry’s fraught dynamics.It’s no wonder that the art world, especially in recent years, has inspired a number of scathing dark comedies — think “Velvet Buzzsaw” or the Palme d’Or winner “The Square,” films that mock the industry’s elitism and its entanglement with capitalism.“The Art of Making It,” a documentary by Kelcey Edwards, doesn’t entirely depart from those pessimistic fictional portraits. It does, however, offer a more pragmatic, occasionally hopeful, perspective on the visual arts ecosystem and the collectors, gallery owners, curators, critics and artists that play by its rules — or, for better or worse, try to make their own.“Making It” boasts a number of first-rate talking heads — there’s the famed New York Magazine critic Jerry Saltz; the notorious art dealer Stefan Simchowitz; the critic and media influencer known for her art-world memes, Hilde Lynn Helphenstein (a.k.a. Jerry Gogosian). As Edwards jumps to and from these insiders, she traces the careers of several artists, like Jenna Gribbon, a figurative painter whose social media savvy helped launch her career; and Chris Watts, a multimedia artist who was kicked out his M.F.A. program at Yale for not conforming to that institution’s standards of marketability. (Annoyingly, only Gribbon’s work is explored in detail.)
      For those unfamiliar with the industry, “Making It” is a decent explainer of its fraught dynamics: the M.F.A.-to-gallery representation pipeline; the desire for more commercial artwork; the mercenary practices of certain buyers and collectors.But Edwards’s generic approach — heavy on talking heads and explanatory title cards — often yields fuzzy results, with a haphazard rush of information overwhelming the rare moments the documentary settles into a more defined and compelling point of view. And as much as Edwards attempts to cover multiple bases, she’s also looking at the art world through the narrowest peephole — more like the art world establishment, featuring a handful of black sheep.The Art of Making ItNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More