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      ‘Last Night,’ ‘Take This Waltz’ and More Streaming Gems

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      A handful of pointed indie dramas are among the highlights of this month’s off-the-radar streaming picks, as well as a funny werewolf movie and a Robin Williams comedy.‘Last Night’ (2010)Stream it on HBO Max.With the “Avatar” sequels finally, finally, finally heading our way, it’s worth remembering that innocent time when it looked like Sam Worthington was going to be a movie star. There’s a compelling case to be found in Massy Tadjedin’s four-hander, which is something of a mini-“Eyes Wide Shut” — a thoughtful marital drama that candidly explores the frustrations and temptations of long-term adult relationships. Worthington nicely underplays what amounts to the Tom Cruise role, but the eye-opener here is Keira Knightley, whose scorching turn as his frustrated wife reminds us that she’s just as compelling in contemporary roles as period pieces.‘Take This Waltz’ (2012)Stream it on Hulu.Sarah Polley, the writer and director of “Take This Waltz,” narrates a scene from the film.Magnolia PicturesSarah Polley spent the 1990s turning in lively and exciting performances in indies like “The Sweet Hereafter” and “Guinevere,” and she’d easily be one of our most compelling contemporary actors had she continued down that road. Instead, she went behind the camera, crafting a series of keenly observed and emotionally overwhelming efforts. This was her sophomore effort, a domestic drama that mines similar thematic territory as “Last Night”; Michelle Williams (at her delicate but forceful best) stars as a young wife and mother who feels the irresistible tingle of a new attraction, and must decide how to grapple with it. Polley carefully eschews predictable conflicts or easy outcomes, and tells a story packed with the hard truths of real life and real love.‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ (2018)Stream it on Netflix.Netflix viewers love Shirley Jackson, as the well-received adaptation of her “The Haunting of Hill House” showed, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the streamer added this 2018 adaptation of Jackson’s 1962 novel to their library. Taissa Farmiga and Alexandra Daddario star as the Blackwood sisters, the youngest members of the family everyone in the nearby villages whispers about. All their skeletons tumble out of the closet when smooth-talking cousin Charles (Sebastian Stan) rolls into town with his eyes on the family fortune. Stan is marvelous, secreting oily charm and barely-concealed danger in every scene, while Farmiga and Daddario use their wildly divergent styles to underscore the explicit contrasts and psychological tension between the characters.‘The Angriest Man in Brooklyn’ (2014)Stream it on Hulu.This heartfelt comedy-drama feels like a movie you should have heard more about — the most recent directorial effort by Phil Alden Robinson (“Sneakers,” “Field of Dreams”), featuring one of the Robin Williams’s final performances, and a stellar supporting cast that includes Mila Kunis, Melissa Leo and a “Game of Thrones”-era Peter Dinklage. Williams is the title character, an eternal curmudgeon who discovers he has mere minutes to live, and must set right all the relationships he’s burned down in recent years. Robinson has some trouble settling on a consistent, successful tone, and the occasional vignette doesn’t land. But Williams is wonderful, conveying the character’s furious rage and endless regret with equal aplomb, and the circumstances of his own passing mere months after its release lends extra pathos to his journey.‘Killer Joe’ (2012)Stream it on Amazon.Matthew McConaughey’s unexpected comeback from a no-man’s-land of forgettable rom-coms and dumbed-down star vehicles was just getting underway when he took on the title role of this brutal, twisted, brilliant adaptation of the play by the Pulitzer and Tony winner Tracy Letts. As a ruthless murderer-for-hire plunged into the disarray of a vile, trashy family, McConaughey miraculously twists his movie-star charisma and golden-boy looks into something cold, hard and frightening. The director William Friedkin (“The French Connection,” “The Exorcist”) squeezes the trailer-home setting like a vice, creating creeping dread and pitch-black humor from the bleakest of setups.‘Hello, My Name is Doris’ (2016)Stream it on Netflix.We really, really like Sally Field, but she somehow hasn’t cultivated the late-career visibility of some of her ’70s acting icon peers — she’s working, but seldom in the kind of showcase roles that remind us of what makes her so special. This charming indie comedy-drama attempts to rectify that, casting Field in the juicy role of Doris, an office worker whose unexpected (and unapologetically lustful) crush on a handsome young colleague (“New Girl” himbo Max Greenfield) puts a new spring in her step. Field is empathetic but never panders for sympathy; you’re pulling for her happiness, no matter what circuitous route she may take to it.‘The Wolf of Snow Hollow’ (2020)Stream it on Amazon.In his 2018 breakthrough film “Thunder Road,” the writer-director-actor Jim Cummings created a specific and memorable comic type: an emotionally vulnerable, psychologically wobbly small-town cop whose tenuous grasp on his work and life becomes a sly commentary on toxic masculinity. This follow-up follows the formula — it’s basically “Thunder Road” with werewolves — and that’s fine; the character is so rich and well-defined that it becomes something like W.C. Fields’s huckster or Mae West’s vamp, a carefully-configured persona that eventually generates laughs merely by landing in incongruent situations. And, bonus, “Snow Hollow” features the great Robert Forster in one of his final roles, exhibiting the offhand charm and flinty warmth that made him such a special character actor.‘Whoopi Goldberg Presents Moms Mabley’ (2013)Stream it on HBO Max.A scene from Goldberg’s film.Getty Images, courtesy HBOGoldberg has always been open about her debt to Mabley, one of the first Black women to make a name, and a living, as what we now think of as a stand-up comic. In tribute, Goldberg helms this documentary account of Mabley’s long, strange journey from the so-called Chitlin Circuit to the televisions of Middle America, with contributing commentary from a who’s who of American comedians. Their analysis and admiration is welcome, but the real draw here is the wealth of archival clips, a sharp reminder of Mabley’s inimitable delivery, screwball timing and quietly subversive style. More

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      in Movies

      The All-Female Band Fanny Made History. A New Doc Illuminates It.

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      The group put out five albums in the ’70s and counted David Bowie and Bonnie Raitt as fans. The filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart, dismayed its story hadn’t been told, took action.In spring 2015, the documentary filmmaker Bobbi Jo Hart was clicking around the Taylor Guitars website, looking for a new instrument for her 10-year-old daughter, when she came across a short profile of June Millington, the singer and lead guitarist for the pioneering 1970s all-female rock group Fanny.Hart, now 56 and living in Montreal, grew up in a hippie household in California “with piles of LPs all over the place”: David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, and on and on. But she had never even heard of Fanny, despite the fact that it was the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label.Fanny put out a total of five albums between 1970 and 1974, one of which was produced by Todd Rundgren. The band scored two Top 40 hits — the swinging, soulful “Charity Ball” and the doo-wop-flavored “Butter Boy” — and played in the United States and abroad with Slade, Jethro Tull, Humble Pie, the Kinks and Chicago. The group backed Barbra Streisand in the studio and performed on “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” and “American Bandstand.”In 1999, Bowie hailed Fanny as one of the finest rock bands of its time in Rolling Stone. He also lamented that “nobody’s ever mentioned them.”Kathy Valentine, the bassist of the Go-Go’s, a later all-female band, wished more people had spread the word about Fanny. “If their visibility had been higher,” she said in an interview, “we would have seen a lot more women in the rock landscape.” Valentine didn’t hear about Fanny until 1982, she said, by which time the Go-Go’s were making their second album.When Hart, the filmmaker, first learned about Fanny online, she had a visceral reaction. “It really pissed me off,” she said. “It was just another example of amazing women that we don’t know about.” Hart reached out to former band members about the possibility of a documentary, but determined that at the time, the Fanny story didn’t have the “forward-momentum narrative” she was looking for.Then, in January 2017, Hart attended the Women’s March in Washington. She was watching Madonna speak on the Jumbotron when she spotted a woman with “flaming gray hair” onstage, filming the proceedings on her iPhone. It was June Millington. The sighting spurred Hart to call Millington, who had some news: Three members of Fanny — Millington, her younger sister, the bassist and singer Jean (Millington) Adamian, and the drummer and singer Brie Darling, a fellow Filipina-American — were about to make a new album on an indie label. The moment for a film had arrived.The resulting documentary, “Fanny: The Right to Rock,” opens in New York on Friday before hitting other major markets and, on Aug. 2, video on demand. (It will come to PBS in 2023.) The movie documents the making of that album, recorded under the name Fanny Walked the Earth and released in 2018, and features interviews with five members from the original group’s frequently shifting lineup. (The reclusive keyboardist Nickey Barclay, who has said she hated her time in the band, notably did not participate. She also declined to speak for this article.) Valentine, Bonnie Raitt and the Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott are among the talking heads.From left: Jean Millington, Nickey Barclay, Brie Darling, Alice de Buhr and June Millington practice in the basement of their band’s famed home, Fanny Hill.Linda WolfThe documentary lovingly recounts the history of Fanny, beginning with the sisters June and Jean Millington, who were born in the Philippines to a white American naval officer father and a Filipina socialite mother. In 1961, the Millington family moved overseas to Sacramento, Calif., where the sisters, as early adolescents, had a difficult time fitting in. Racism was a constant part of life. (In the film, Jean recalls the father of a boyfriend of hers telling his son, “I’ll buy you a Mustang if you stop seeing that half-breed girl.” The boyfriend opted for the car.)The sisters found solace in music, forming an all-girl band in high school called the Svelts, which played the radio hits of the day. The Svelts morphed into Wild Honey, a Motown cover group that decamped to Los Angeles in 1969 to make it big. Wild Honey signed with Warner Bros. Records’s Reprise label later that year. Not long after, the band, looking for a new name with a female identity, chose Fanny, which in the United States is slang for bottom.“We thought it was a double entendre that would work,” said June Millington, 74. It wasn’t until the band members toured overseas that they discovered that in Britain, fanny is slang for female genitals.Early on, the band lived in Fanny Hill, a house in West Hollywood that Millington, in the film, calls “a sorority with electrical guitars.” Joe Cocker and the lead singer of the Band, Rick Danko, hung out there, and the group Little Feat would come over and jam; Raitt was a houseguest for a time. A libertine, clothing-optional spirit prevailed. “It was a wonderful, creative environment,” said Darling, who is 72 and lives in Los Angeles. “It wasn’t people just getting high” and having sex.The film highlights the fact that two of Fanny’s members — June Millington and the drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians, something that the band never dared speak about publicly in those days. “People would ask us, ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’” recalled de Buhr, now 72 and residing in Tucson, Ariz. “And I’d say, ‘I’m taken.’ I hated not being able to say, ‘Well, I’m in love with a woman.’”Predictably, Fanny was subjected to a great deal of sexism, often being treated as a novelty act. “Most of society didn’t see girls with a guitar between their legs,” said Patti Quatro, 74, who replaced Millington as lead guitarist in 1974. (Quatro, of Austin, Texas, is an older sister of Suzi Quatro.)Millington said that the “condescension and sneering” that would greet Fanny at concert appearances was “so palpable it was almost physical.”Both Millington and her sister recalled, however, that Fanny would ultimately win over the crowd. “I felt like it took at least 10 minutes for everyone to realize there was not a boy band playing behind us,” said Jean (Millington) Adamian, 73, who lives in Davis, Calif. “They were waiting for us to fall down. And once we proved it was really us playing and singing, it was generally a big, uplifting experience.”Rock critics weren’t always swayed though. “We were battered by the reviews,” Millington said. “Every once in a while, they’d say, ‘Oh, they’re good.’” She cited a generally positive 1971 concert review in this newspaper headlined “Fanny, a Four-Girl Rock Group, Poses a Challenge to Male Ego.” “‘What will it do to the male ego?’ Well, who cares?” she said. “Why don’t you guys just deal with it and dig us?”“The fact is that Fanny is a flame that ignites people,” June Millington said.Linda WolfJUNE MILLINGTON EXITED Fanny in late 1973 in part because of a near “nervous breakdown,” she said in a video interview. “I’m glad I left, because I knew that my life was on the line on some major level.” She was sitting in front of a crackling fire at her home on the campus of the Institute for the Musical Arts, a nonprofit recording and retreat facility she co-founded with her longtime partner, Ann Hackler, in Goshen, Mass. On the mantel were various Buddhist objects — Millington is a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism — and a framed photo of Jimi Hendrix.“The straw that broke the camel’s back,” Millington said, was the record company’s insistence that Fanny, whose members favored ’70s California chic, dress up in glammy, more revealing outfits onstage. (“My top was $45 worth of American coins, looped together, that just pinched my nipples,” de Buhr said.) Millington saw it as a sign that Reprise had lost faith in the band. “I took it as an insult,” she said.A new version of Fanny — featuring Adamian, Barclay, Darling and Quatro — signed with Casablanca Records and released a final album, “Rock and Roll Survivors,” in 1974. That record featured the single “Butter Boy,” which Adamian said was inspired by — but not about, as has been widely reported — her then-boyfriend, Bowie, and his gender-bending ways.“‘He was hard as a rock, but I was ready to roll, what a shock to find out I was in control of the situation,’” Adamian said, reciting the song’s opening lines. “I mean, those kinds of lyrics were very tongue-in-cheek and intended to be provocative.” “Butter Boy” became Fanny’s biggest hit, reaching No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 in April 1975. But by that time, the band had split up for reasons both artistic and personal.Fanny has technically never reunited. But in 2016, Millington, Adamian and Darling played together at a concert in Northampton, Mass., a collaboration that led to the self-titled album “Fanny Walked the Earth.” That LP includes appearances by de Buhr and Quatro, plus Valentine of the Go-Go’s and members of fellow all-female groups the Runaways and the Bangles.A tentative plan to tour behind the Fanny Walked the Earth album was scuttled when, two months before the record’s March 2018 release, Adamian suffered a stroke that affected the right side of her body. Today, she uses a wheelchair to get around. “I cannot play bass,” she said. “I keep looking at my two fingers, going, ‘If just one of you would move, that would be good.’ It’s absolutely frustrating.”Fanny Walked the Earth’s Jean Adamian, Darling and June Millington.Marita MadeloniMillington has experienced health issues of her own. Her snow-white hair was noticeably shorter than it had been during the Fanny Walked the Earth era, the result of chemotherapy she received last year to treat breast cancer that is now in remission.“I knew I was going to live because my work is not done,” she said. “So anything can happen.” She didn’t discount the idea of some version of Fanny recording or touring again. As for the latter scenario, she said it would take a lot of money to do so properly, given the medical situations she and her sister faced. (Adamian has sung live with Fanny Walked the Earth since her stroke; her son, Lee Madeloni, filled in on bass.)In the meantime, Millington said, she was looking forward to the release of “Fanny: The Right to Rock.” Hart, the director, expressed the wish that the documentary would lead to far wider appreciation for the band. “A not-so-secret dream that I have is if they would get that recognition to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” Hart said.Millington isn’t waiting for a call from the Rock Hall. “Is it ever going to happen? I don’t know,” she said. “And at this point, I don’t care.” She said she was comfortable resting on her laurels. “I’m fine with it, because I never imagined anyone would mention Fanny ever again,” she said. “For 30, 40 years, we couldn’t get arrested.”The internet, she said, is exposing new audiences to the band. “Fanny is a flame that ignites people,” Millington continued. “It is igniting people all over the world of different ages and different sexes. It’s like the Olympic torch, and that is really something to be proud of.” More

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      in Television

      The Pitfalls of Oven-Ready TV

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      Prestige shows like “Winning Time” love to dramatize the real people at the heart of recent-ish events. It doesn’t always go well.It’s May 1980 at the Forum in Los Angeles, and the crowd is in a frenzy as the rookie Magic Johnson and the legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar lead the Lakers to their first N.B.A. championship in eight years. This is the setting for the recently completed first season of HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty,” which dives into its subject matter with brio. Helmed by the ubiquitous Adam McKay — director of “The Big Short,” “Don’t Look Up” and a parade of successful film comedies — “Winning Time” is an antic chronicle of the Lakers’ highly eventful 1979-80 season, with main characters that include not just Johnson and Abdul-Jabbar but other Lakers titans like the coach Pat Riley and the owner Jerry Buss. Its 10-episode arc is fast and fun, full of on-court magnetism and off-court machismo, and it all actually happened. Sort of.Many of the people depicted in the show will be familiar to basketball-loving viewers, and that’s part of the appeal: There is a giddy thrill in watching the origin stories of icons still in the public consciousness. And for those who lived through this total blast of a Lakers season, it has to be unbelievably fun reliving it on HBO. But while the acknowledged source material for “Winning Time” is the longtime reporter Jeff Pearlman’s 2014 book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s,” the process of adapting it seems to have been as freewheeling as the team’s run-and-gun offense. This is most apparent in the show’s treatment of the Hall of Fame guard turned coach turned legendary league executive Jerry West.West’s character on “Winning Time” is a doozy. As played by the Australian actor Jason Clarke, he is a basketball savant with serious rage issues, prone to throwing trophies, breaking golf clubs and drinking to excess. It’s a humorous and not completely unsympathetic portrait. At one point in the show, just after Buss, the new team owner, has given his staff a motivational speech, West makes a grandiose public display of quitting his job as head coach, completely souring the vibe. Eventually West returns to the office without much explanation. Reinstalled as a sort of omniscient consultant on a highly informal basis, he remains a profane, hair-trigger wild card through the rest of the season.There is a giddy thrill in watching the origin stories of icons still in the public consciousness.But the West in “Winning Time” doesn’t square with the real Jerry West’s recollections, or with the recollections of many others who were part of the Lakers organization at the time. When West recently asked HBO for a retraction and an apology, several figures from the show, including Abdul-Jabbar (who also objected to his own portrayal) and the former Forum executive Claire Rothman, were quick to take his side. They maintain that West was not a yeller and not erratic in his work and that they never saw him drinking in his office. And while it’s always possible that time and friendship have softened everyone’s memories, it’s notable that West’s more outrageous moments on the show aren’t in Pearlman’s book. In response to West’s criticism, HBO released a statement saying that “Winning Time” is “based on extensive factual research and reliable sourcing,” but that it is “not a documentary.”You could say the same for a lot of shows these days. From the latest iteration of “The Staircase,” dramatizing a mysterious death in North Carolina that was chronicled in a 2004 documentary, to “WeCrashed,” about the failed start-up WeWork, to “Pam & Tommy,” which reimagines Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s marriage and sex tape, contemporary television is awash in semi-fictionalized accounts of recent-ish events. These shows elide the logistical and cost concerns associated with telling a new story from scratch by falling back on a prefabricated narrative. The reason for this boomlet — call it Oven-Ready TV — is the same reason Hollywood churns out superhero movies: It’s seen as a safe form of intellectual property to invest in. “Everything’s expensive to make, and everyone wants to keep their job,” the journalist turned true-crime TV writer Bruce Bennett told me. “If you walk in the door pitching something that’s been done in some other medium or arena, there’s a built-in sense of safety and familiarity for the development and production people who have to pay for the thing.”The most prominent recent example of this phenomenon is “The Dropout,” Hulu’s arch dramatization of the rise and fall of the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, which followed the 2018 book “Bad Blood,” a raft of overlapping podcasts and an HBO documentary by Alex Gibney called “The Inventor.” Watching the dramatization back-to-back with Gibney’s film, it’s striking how much stranger Holmes seems in real life when compared with Amanda Seyfried’s excellent, humanizing portrayal. Where “Winning Time” uses West’s character to amp up the drama, “The Dropout” seems to tone Holmes down for its own purposes — making her more likable, more sympathetic. It’s an understandable narrative decision, but also a curious one, given how easy it is to observe the real Holmes in so many venues and notice the glaring difference. (Another recent example, “Inventing Anna,” made many journalists’ eyes roll for its inauthentic portrayal of the reporting process and life at New York magazine.)‘If you walk in the door pitching something that’s been done in some other medium or arena, there’s a built-in sense of safety and familiarity.’But what do any of these shows owe to the people they are depicting, and to the viewer who spends many, many hours with characters they might reasonably expect to be something like the real thing? West, a victim of child poverty and domestic violence, has been painfully candid about the adverse circumstances that shaped him and his desperate bouts with anxiety and depression. He wrote about this in his 2011 autobiography, “West By West: My Charmed, Tormented Life,” and a beautiful Sports Illustrated feature that same year went even further in chronicling West’s struggles with self-loathing and suicidal thoughts.The producers of “Winning Time” are clearly familiar with this part of West’s story — at one point in the show, he lies catatonic in a dark room for days — which makes the decision to render him a fool even stranger. Perhaps McKay’s taste for clownish characterization explains it. The director made his bones with gloriously absurd fare like “Talladega Nights” and “Anchorman,” but even his more topical films are full of outsize satirical portrayals. As one critic wrote about McKay’s version of Dick Cheney in “Vice,” “McKay seems to think we can’t be trusted to grasp what he sees as Cheney’s Machiavellian villainy unless he spells it out in cartoon language.”The West in “Winning Time” is certainly a cartoon. Now that the series has been greenlit for a second season, it will be interesting to see whether the showrunners take West’s pushback and deep love for the Lakers into account as they develop his character and lay out his coming achievements. These include five championships in the 1980s and the signing of Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant, setting off another Lakers dynasty in the ’90s. Perhaps in future episodes a more nuanced West will emerge. Or maybe, just as in the Showtime era that “Winning Time” reanimates, the mandate to entertain will always prevail.Source photographs: Warrick Page/HBOElizabeth Nelson is a journalist and singer-songwriter based in Washington. Her band, the Paranoid Style, will release its new LP, “For Executive Meeting,” in August on the Bar/None Records label. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Since I Been Down’ Review: Crime and Punishment

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      The inmates in this documentary offer reasons for rethinking the harsh sentencing of young people in Washington State.On a May night in 1997, in Tacoma, Wash., Kimonti Carter strafed a car he believed was carrying rival gang members. It wasn’t — not that that should matter. One of the car’s five passengers, a college student, Corey Pittman, 19, was killed. Carter, who had recently turned 18, was sentenced to life in prison.In the director Gilda Sheppard’s sympathetic documentary “Since I Been Down,” the punishment is also a crime.Rife with archival visuals of Tacoma in the late 1980s and ’90s, when crack cocaine and gang violence were claiming lives, the documentary’s greatest strength is as a listening tour, with Carter as its chief guide.Because Carter shot from a car, he was charged with aggravated first-degree murder, which carried an automatic mandatory life sentence. (His resentencing hearing is scheduled for July 8.) He is not the only subject of harsh prison time. Washington State’s three-strikes sentencing (it abolished parole in 1984) can land especially hard on young offenders.Over the decades, Carter has expressed remorse, but it is his role as a beneficiary of and leader in the inmate-led initiatives the Black Prisoners’ Collective and T.E.A.C.H., or Taking Education and Changing History, that suggests transformation.Other inmates here share insights, as do two former detectives, some ex-gang members, and the mothers of victims and perpetrators. One former inmate, Tonya Wilson, who served 17 years, is especially astute about the personal as well as societal forces that led to her incarceration.Another inmate says, “We say a lot of the answers that people in society are seeking will be found in prison.”“We’ve caused pain,” that inmate says, “primarily ’cause we were in pain.”Far from seeming like an excuse, in “Since I Been Down,” this observation sounds like a way toward reckoning and change.Since I Been DownNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Cyber Hell’ Review: When Chat Rooms Become Sites of Exploitation

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      This true-crime documentary, subtitled “Exposing an Internet Horror,” recounts a South Korean case in which chat room operators blackmailed young women into sending explicit videos.A true-crime yarn replete with staged re-enactments, “Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror” joins a growing subgenre of streaming documentaries depicting nightmares of the digital realm. Only this time, the central offense is not cryptocurrency fraud or a dating hoax but a series of sex crimes, including the trade of child sexual abuse imagery.The movie (on Netflix) zeroes in on a South Korean case in which online chat room operators coerced young women, including minors, into making and sending sexually explicit videos. Over several years beginning around 2018, the scheme occurred on the encrypted messaging service Telegram, where a ring of users lured women with phishing links or the promise of jobs before blackmailing them into supplying pornographic and dehumanizing images.Through interviews with journalists and police, the documentary details the search for two core perpetrators of the scheme who used the aliases “Baksa” and “GodGod.” The men, who exploited dozens of young women and shared the footage with paying customers, often referred to their victims as “slaves.”It’s a harrowing case of violence against women and the way technology facilitates heinous crime. But like many other documentaries of this sort, little attention is paid to the digital networks that served as avenues for the exploitation. Instead, the director Choi Jin-seong dedicates the movie’s overlong run time to dogging the men’s movements. What could have been an urgent inquiry into the systems enabling sex criminals becomes something more pedestrian — a stylized replay of a game of cat and mouse.Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet HorrorNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      in Music

      Bob Neuwirth, Colorful Figure in Dylan’s Circle, Dies at 82

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      He was a recording artist and songwriter himself, but he also played pivotal roles in the careers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin.Bob Neuwirth, who had credentials as a painter, recording artist, songwriter and filmmaker, but who also had an impact as a member of Bob Dylan’s inner circle and as a conduit for two of Janis Joplin’s best-known songs, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 82.His partner, Paula Batson, said the cause was heart failure.Mr. Neuwirth had a modest, eclectic string of albums to his credit, including his debut, simply titled “Bob Neuwirth,” in 1974, as well as a 1994 collaboration with John Cale called “Last Day on Earth” and a 2000 collaboration with the Cuban composer and pianist José María Vitier, “Havana Midnight.” But he was perhaps better known for the roles he played in the careers of others, beginning with Mr. Dylan.Mr. Neuwirth said that he first encountered Mr. Dylan at the Indian Neck Folk Festival in Connecticut in 1961. Mr. Dylan was still largely unknown but, Mr. Neuwirth said years later, the singer caught his eye “because he was the only other guy with a harmonica holder around his neck.”The two hit it off, and Mr. Neuwirth became a central figure in the circle that coalesced around Mr. Dylan as his fame grew. When Mr. Dylan held court at the Kettle of Fish bar in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, Mr. Neuwirth was there. When Mr. Dylan toured England in 1965, Mr. Neuwirth went along. A decade later, when Mr. Dylan embarked on his Rolling Thunder Revue tour, Mr. Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the band together.Mr. Dylan’s contemporaries and biographers have described Mr. Neuwirth’s role in various ways.“Neuwirth was the eye of the storm, the center, the catalyst, the instigator,” Eric Von Schmidt, another folk singer active at the time, once said. “Wherever something important was happening, he was there, or he was on his way to it, or rumored to have been nearby enough to have had an effect on whatever it was that was in the works.”From left, Bob Dylan, Mick Ronson and Mr. Neuwirth performing in Toronto in 1975 as part of Mr. Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour, for which Mr. Neuwirth was instrumental in putting the band together.Frank Lennon/Toronto Star via Getty ImagesIt has often been suggested that as Mr. Dylan assembled his distinctive persona while climbing to international fame, he borrowed some of it, including a certain attitude and a caustic streak, from Mr. Neuwirth.“The whole hipster shuck and jive — that was pure Neuwirth,” Bob Spitz wrote in “Dylan: A Biography” (1989). “So were the deadly put-downs, the wipeout grins and innuendos. Neuwirth had mastered those little twists long before Bob Dylan made them famous and conveyed them to his best friend with altruistic grace.”Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. Spitz suggested, could have ridden those same qualities to Dylanesque fame.“Bobby Neuwirth was the Bob Most Likely to Succeed,” he wrote, “a wellspring of enormous potential. He possessed all the elements, except for one — nerve.”Mr. Dylan, in his book “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), had his own description of Mr. Neuwirth.“Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth,” he wrote. “He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.”Ms. Joplin, too, benefited from Mr. Neuwirth’s influence. Holly George-Warren, whose books include “Janis: Her Life and Music” (2019), said that Mr. Neuwirth and Ms. Joplin met in 1963 and became fast friends.Mr. Neuwirth performing in Brooklyn in 1999. Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images“In 1969, he taught her Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ after he heard Gordon Lightfoot play the then-unknown song at manager Albert Grossman’s office,” Ms. George-Warren said by email. “He quickly learned it and took it to Janis at the Chelsea Hotel.”Her recording of the song hit No. 1 in 1971, but Ms. Joplin was not around to enjoy the success; she had died of a drug overdose the previous year.Mr. Neuwirth was also involved in “Mercedes Benz,” another well-known Joplin song that, like “Bobby McGee,” appeared on her 1971 album, “Pearl.” He was at a bar with her before a show she was doing at the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, N.Y., in August 1970 when Ms. Joplin began riffing on a ditty that the poet Michael McClure would sing at gatherings with friends. Mr. Neuwirth began writing the lyrics the two of them came up with on a napkin.She sang the song at the show that night, and she later recorded it a cappella. She, Mr. McClure and Mr. Neuwirth are jointly credited as the writers of the song, which on the album is less than two minutes long.Ms. George-Warren said that this anecdote was revelatory: Mr. Neuwirth nudged along the careers of artists he admired, including Patti Smith, in whatever ways came to mind.“Though Bob was renowned for his acerbic wit — from his days as aide-de-camp to Dylan and Janis — when I met him 25 years ago, he epitomized kindness, mentorship and curiosity,” she said. “That is the unsung story of Bob Neuwirth.”Robert John Neuwirth was born on June 20, 1939, in Akron, Ohio. His father, also named Robert, was an engineer, and his mother, Clara Irene (Fischer) Neuwirth, was a design engineer.He studied art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and dabbled in painting over the decades; in 2011 the Track 16 gallery in Santa Monica presented “Overs & Unders: Paintings by Bob Neuwirth, 1964-2009.”After two years at art school, he spent time in Paris before returning to the Boston area, where he began performing in coffee houses, singing and playing banjo and guitar.He appeared in D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dylan documentary, “Dont Look Back,” as well as in “Eat the Document” (1972), a documentary of a later tour that was shot by Mr. Pennebaker and later edited by Mr. Dylan, who is credited as the director, and Mr. Dylan’s “Renaldo & Clara” (1978), most of which was filmed during the Rolling Thunder tour. He also appeared in “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story,” the 2019 Martin Scorsese film.Mr. Neuwirth was a producer of “Down From the Mountain” (2000), a documentary, directed in part by Mr. Pennebaker, about a concert featuring the musical artists heard in the Coen Brothers’ movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”“It’s all about the same to me,” he said, “whether it’s writing a song or making a painting or doing a film. It’s all just storytelling.”Mr. Neuwirth, who lived in Santa Monica, is survived by Ms. Batson.Mr. Neuwirth could be self-deprecating about his own musical efforts. He called his collaboration with Mr. Vitier, the Cuban pianist, “Cubilly music.” But his music was often serious. The Cale collaboration was a sort of song cycle that, as Jon Pareles wrote in The New York Times when the two performed selections in concert in 1990, “added up to a shrug of the shoulders in the face of impending doom.”“Instead of breast-beating or simply wisecracking,” Mr. Pareles wrote of the work, “it found an emotional territory somewhere between fatalism and denial — still uneasy but not quite resigned.” More

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      ‘Hold Your Fire’ Review: Ending a Siege

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      A new documentary directed by Stefan Forbes centers on a 1973 hostage negotiation led by a police officer known for his pioneering techniques.“Hold Your Fire,” a new documentary directed by Stefan Forbes, centers on Harvey Schlossberg, a police officer whose pioneering negotiation techniques helped end one of the longest hostage sieges in the history of the New York City Police Department.In January 1973, an attempted robbery at a sporting goods store in Brooklyn quickly escalated, and the film suggests that Schlossberg’s intervention may have saved the lives of the four young Black men at the center of the conflict.Led by Shu’aib Raheem, the four young men planned to steal guns to arm themselves against attacks from Nation of Islam members, who had been targeting Sunni Muslims. The police assumed them to be part of the Black Liberation Army and surrounded the store, starting a 47-hour confrontation. Tensions increased after a shootout led to the death of an officer, leaving his colleagues eager for retribution.In the film, Schlossberg is presented as a savior who, with the support of Patrick Murphy, the police commissioner, turns the officers away from violence. But through interviews with lawyers, police officers, hostages and the men involved in the robbery, what emerges is a kaleidoscopic narrative that lays bare the disconnect between the officers and the communities they serve.Only after Black community members rise up in protest, in response to officers threatening to drive a tank into the store, are Schlossberg’s de-escalation tactics implemented. The film’s intention may have been to highlight the negotiator’s achievement, but it appears that it was public pressure, as much as his influence, that prevented more bloodshed.Hold Your FireNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 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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      ‘Cane Fire’ Review: Here Am I, Your Plundered Island

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      Burning resentment at colonial exploitation on Kauai, seen through the veil of history’s smoke.The documentary “Cane Fire” begins with a reference to a lost silent film of the same name, made by the director Lois Weber in 1934. Her pre-Hays-Code melodrama followed a doomed romance between a plantation owner and one of his workers, and ended with its spurned heroine burning the fields of her former lover. In the new documentary, the director, Anthony Banua-Simon, explains in voice-over that the original film was shot on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, and that his great-grandfather was one of the Filipino plantation workers hired as an extra.In the spirit of this opening acknowledgment, Banua-Simon’s version of “Cane Fire” uses his own family history to demonstrate Kauai’s legacy of plantation colonialism. Woven into this record, archival footage shows how Hollywood beckoned to tourists with its romantic vision of Bali Hai — a paradise where visitors are kings and locals are set dressing.Banua-Simon interviews relatives who still live in Kauai, along with their neighbors and co-workers. Through these conversations, he chronicles exploitation that spans generations. In the film, locals explain that while sugar plantation workers once organized unions, their descendants now break their backs to fuel Kauai’s tourist and real estate industries.The cinematography is often grainy, and occasionally Banua-Simon’s choice of interview subjects feels unfocused or repetitive. But there is tremendous educational and moral value in his overview of the history of Kauai. He has a strong grasp of how industries mutate, replicating their practices of exploitation like a cancer. The context he provides in voice-over and through archival footage lends power to his interviews, suggesting the generations of exhaustion that underlie simple statements of frustration and grief.Cane FireNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More