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

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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

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      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

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      ‘The Pez Outlaw’ Review: Sweet and Lowdown

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      A purveyor of candy contraband becomes a black market hero in this blithe, lighthearted documentary.Steve Glew, the subject of Amy Bandlien Storkel and Bryan Storkel’s documentary “The Pez Outlaw,” is an unapologetic weirdo with long hippie hair and a big, Santa Claus beard — a natural star in this post-“Tiger King” era of quirky nonfiction portraiture. Glew, in the words of his wife, Kathy Glew, “is a creative person whose mind wanders a lot,” a cagey but charismatic oddball obsessed with breakfast cereals, Tom Clancy novels and Pez candy dispensers, which he began collecting and selling in the 1980s. His clandestine efforts to smuggle rare European dispensers into the United States made Glew a kind of black market folk hero among serious Pez collectors — of whom there are apparently many — and also drew the ire of the former president of Pez Candy USA, Scott McWhinnie, known as the Pezident.Glew is an amusing screen presence, and his story, while unquestionably trivial, has some of the absorbing, low-stakes whimsy of a nice magazine feature. The directors approach the material blithely and with humor, staging dramatic re-enactments of the anecdotes Glew and others recount in highly stylized, almost parodic form — the running of candy contraband is depicted like the climax of a breakneck espionage thriller, a toy convention is made to look like a speakeasy in a film noir, and so forth. Glew himself, importantly, is never the target of the joke: the movie has too much affection for its subject to ridicule his eccentricities, even gently, preferring to lionize him instead. An inevitable consequence of this chummy idolatry is that the playful tone begins to feel rather cloying. Like Pez, the film is charming and colorful — and perhaps too sweet.The Pez OutlawNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi Carlile’ Review: The Evolution of a Country Star

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      A close-up of the singers’ collaboration at Sunset Sound that led to Tucker receiving two Grammys.From the beginning of her career, the country singer Tanya Tucker knew what she was about. In the early 1970s, as a teenage singing sensation in the making, she turned down the song “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.” Instead she insisted on recording the more downbeat lost-love tune “Delta Dawn.” Her instincts were right, not just artistically but commercially — the single put the then-13-year-old Tucker on the map.Tucker, now 64, had been largely inactive in music for nearly two decades when she went into the famous Los Angeles studio Sunset Sound with the singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile behind the mixing board (her co-producer was the musician Shooter Jennings) in 2019. This documentary, directed by Kathlyn Horan, is a straightforward chronicle of that collaboration, a reboot that worked out better than any of the participants had anticipated, yielding Tucker two Grammy Awards.Carlile clearly reveres Tucker and comes to her with several songs she’s keen for the singer to interpret. Tucker counters with an unfinished tune of her own — the one that winds up garnering the Grammys. Tucker is often nervous, likes a drink before she gets to the microphone and is frequently late to sessions. Carlile tells the camera that she’s learning to accept Tucker’s “crazy” nature. But compared to, say, Chuck Berry in the 1997 documentary “Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll,” Tucker is a pussycat.And while her singing has some new grit (she still smokes!), she hasn’t lost a step in terms of phrasing. The teardrop in her voice, strategically used in heartache songs, remains credible. The movie interweaves the contemporary sessions with a very selective — and, while not wholly sanitized, certainly discreet — account of her tumultuous past. Overall it’s a better-than-competent piece of fan service and a not unpersuasive bid for an auxiliary youth audience.The Return of Tanya Tucker: Featuring Brandi CarlileRated R for salty language. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power’ Review: Demystifying the Male Gaze

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      Directed by Nina Menkes, the film is a distressingly prescriptive documentary aimed at unpacking the patriarchal ways of seeing that have dominated the history of cinema.Directed by Nina Menkes, “Brainwashed” is a distressingly prescriptive documentary aimed at unpacking the patriarchal ways of seeing that have dominated the history of cinema. It employs dozens of movie clips, ripped out of context, that supposedly demonstrate the predatory gaze of the camera and the various visual techniques used to objectify women performers, with Menkes herself occasionally on-screen, lecturing to an audience, laser pointer in hand. (The documentary was developed from a public presentation and a 2017 essay Menkes wrote.)The project feels out of step with the pioneering independent filmmaker’s previous work (“Queen of Diamonds,” “The Bloody Child”), which abounds in provocation, ambiguity and women characters who resist neat interpretation.A Bernard Herrmann-esque score (by Sharon Farber) pulses conspiratorially throughout the documentary, giving the sense that Menkes’s narration is revealing secret and sinister facts about the way cinema caters to male fantasy. It uses examples from beloved and acclaimed films like “Apocalypse Now,” “Do the Right Thing” and “Phantom Thread,” and, toward the end, it presents the apparently rare films in which women do have agency, namely ones directed by Menkes.“Brainwashed” features interviews with the film theorist Laura Mulvey and directors like Julie Dash, Eliza Hittman and Catherine Hardwicke, but, for Menkes, not all women are immune to the patriarchy’s spell, citing Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” and Maïmouna Doucouré’s “Cuties” as instances of internalized misogyny. These particular illustrations suggest that Menkes may not have watched the films, both of which attempt to critique a culture that hypersexualizes girls and women.In some respects, Menkes’s assessment isn’t inaccurate — indeed, some films very much want to make women look powerless and erotic, but that’s not a problem in and of itself. The historical regularity of these depictions is another thing, and that speaks to the larger problem of the industry’s gender inequality and its normalization of sexual assault, which “Brainwashed” rightly identifies but unconvincingly ties to the cinematic language it deconstructs. Limited to a mere pointing out of which kinds of images are empowering to women and which aren’t, the documentary ultimately does a disservice to the art form, feminist or otherwise.Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-PowerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Year One: A Political Odyssey’ Review: Biden by the Numbers

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      Despite the insider access, a documentary about the president’s first year in office is short on intriguing tidbits.With the even keel of an official chronicle, the documentary “Year One: A Political Odyssey,” by the director John Maggio, sets down an account of diplomacy during President Biden’s first 365-plus days in office. The selective overview is mostly recounted by administration officials, with the New York Times correspondent David E. Sanger acting as a valuable guide throughout.Underlining Biden’s international, alliance-building outlook, the focus is on efforts to reckon responsibly with the power plays of Russia, China and Afghanistan. Key figures including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Jen Psaki, the former White House press secretary (but not Biden), sit down for sober interviews that feel like a well-sourced recap. Some crises are less frequently referenced now (the SolarWinds hack); others still loom (Russia’s war on Ukraine).We’re reminded that Biden took office in the still-shellshocked aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021, promising a vital return to normalcy and democracy after the presidency of Donald Trump. His Covid vaccination achievement was followed that summer by a one-two punch: the rise of coronavirus variants and the fall of Afghanistan. But the chaotic unfolding of events in Afghanistan yielded lessons for responding to the run-up of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.Yet the movie is quiet on domestic policy apart from the pandemic, while covering several international summits. And despite the insider access, intriguing tidbits — like how leaks kept Sanger informed about U.S. intelligence on Russia — will be few to anyone who has been reading the news. The film’s skimping on economic and social issues echoes one description of Biden’s own messaging by some pundits: low-key to the point of obscuring the full picture of his efforts.Year One: A Political OdysseyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More