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    ‘Faith’ Review: Training to Fight Demons at a Monastery

    Valentina Pedicini’s final documentary tracks the “Warriors of Light” — their leader, and their monks and mothers, in Italy.The director of this Italian documentary, Valentina Pedicini, died in November, 2020, of liver cancer. That’s a terrible shame for a variety of reasons. Pedicini was, in her too-short career, a remarkably intrepid documentarian. In her 2010 “My Marlboro City,” she investigated the cigarette smuggling trade in her hometown, Brindisi. For “From the Depths” (2013), she accompanied a female miner who works more than 1,500 feet below sea level.“Faith,” her final film, presented in wide-screen black-and-white, kicks off with an explanatory text, telling of how in 1998 a man the audience will know only as The Master founded a monastery of sorts and peopled it with so-called Warriors of Light. These are monks and mothers trained in martial arts, fighting “against demons,” ostensibly “in the name of the Father.”We see these warriors, 20 years after the formation of the group, all dressed in white, under a strobe light, doing a rave-style dance workout. We watch them intone “The Lord’s Prayer” and “Hail Mary” in unison. We see them sharing a pasta dinner, at the end of which all the diners lick their plates clean. We see their shared bathroom and watch them shaving their heads.It’s not long before one starts to wonder just what “Father” these ascetics are working in the name of. One meeting revolves around Gabriele, a monk who has apparently either flirted with or actually bedded every woman in the group. He declines to resign (his behavior is discouraged by the group) and halfheartedly promises to work on a confession. As for The Master himself, he browbeats the women, telling one, “You don’t deserve to be a warrior.”Pedicini structures the movie as an oblique narrative rather than an exposé. And “Faith” is all the more disturbing for that. Clearly this distinctive filmmaker was just getting started.FaithNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Film Movement+. More

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    ‘Mija’ Review: Hitting the Notes

    In this documentary, a new generation of Mexican American musicians reflect the nuances of their realities on both sides of the border.In the documentary “Mija,” the music manager Doris Muñoz wonders aloud in voice-over if her brothers resented her for being the only person in their Mexican immigrant family with U.S. citizenship. She concludes with what could’ve easily been a throwaway line: “How could they not?”But her delivery is so full of raw emotion that it breaks the film open and sets a poignant tone for this coming-of-age story from the director Isabel Castro. Poetic in its musicality yet rooted in the mundane, “Mija” sheds fresh light on the longings of a new generation of Mexican Americans making music that reflects the nuances of their realities on both sides of the border.Shot in vérité, and including the use of camcorder footage from Doris’s family, the film follows Doris as she works behind-the-scenes with her Gen Z singer-songwriters (Cuco and later, Jacks Haupt) all while helping her parents navigate the green card process. Castro favors close-up silhouettes of her subjects paired with the sparing use of Doris’s confession-like voice-over that sounds just above a whisper. And when we eventually get to hear Doris sing from her own considerable depths, we know that she too is a star.The subtitles in “Mija” are loose — some Spanish, and Spanglish, is translated, some isn’t. A subtle choice that might point to Castro, much like Doris and her artists’ songs, making a decision to forgo explanatory commas and simply let the ineffable, untranslatable parts of their story breathe.All this adds up to an immersive, deeply empathetic look at what it means for first-generation Americans like Doris and Jacks to reclaim the right to pursue unpredictable dreams. With all the familial sacrifices made to forge a life for them in America, one could argue this was the point: how could they not?MijaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Claydream’ Review: Same Mold Story

    In this documentary, Will Vinton, the animation visionary who gave life to the California Raisins and the Noid, gets a tribute.Will Vinton (1947-2018) wasn’t the first person to toy with clay figures in stop-motion animation, but his fingerprints are on some of the most famous and successful uses of the technique. He shared an Oscar for a short, “Closed Mondays,” in 1975. His studio’s 1980s commercials with the California Raisins and Domino’s Pizza’s Noid helped turn those characters into pop-culture phenomena. He trademarked the term Claymation. In the 1990s, Vinton worked advertising magic again with computer-animated talking M&M’s.He was also, judging from “Claydream,” a documentary from Marq Evans, the sort of visionary whose big dreams, business sense and intrafamilial skills did not always operate on equivalent levels. “He had trouble expressing emotions when it wasn’t with clay,” says Mary McDonald-Lewis, identified as a friend of Vinton’s, in the film. His twisted character Wilshire Pig did not catch on like Mickey Mouse. The movie opens by teasing a legal battle between Vinton and the Nike founder Phil Knight, who has been described as having forced him out of what was then called Will Vinton Studios in 2003.The career-highlights structure is perhaps overly familiar, but “Claydream” benefits from extensive interviews with Vinton and his many associates, and from the fact that Claymation is an engaging onscreen subject. Reading a history of Will Vinton Studios would not have the impact of getting to see the sometimes-ribald early shorts Vinton made in Berkeley, Calif., or of hearing old answering-machine messages left for Vinton by Michael Jackson, who eventually played a Raisin. Evans has made a lively and illuminating tribute, and not always an unduly flattering one.ClaydreamNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Exposing Muybridge’ Review: Putting a Cinematic Pioneer in Focus

    A documentary of the 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge’s legacy shows the enduring fascination of his work.“Exposing Muybridge,” a documentary on the art and science of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge, trots into release less than two weeks after Jordan Peele’s “Nope” put a new spotlight on Muybridge’s proto-cinematic images of horses in motion.The documentary, written and directed by Marc Shaffer, is in some ways a standard, PBS-ready biographical survey in which talking heads relate the highlights of Muybridge’s career. By comparison, Thom Andersen’s “Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer,” from 1975, made more innovative use of Muybridge’s photographs for visual and storytelling purposes. Still, Shaffer devotes time to aspects of Muybridge’s legacy that don’t make all the standard rundowns.Before Muybridge turned his attention to motion, the movie notes, he shot landscapes in the West. Shaffer trails the photographers Byron Wolfe and Mark Klett to Tenaya Lake in Yosemite National Park in California, where they try to locate Muybridge’s original vantage point. They also analyze photographs of the same location by the 20th-century photographers Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, to shed light on Muybridge’s distinctive eye as an artist.Others share views on Muybridge’s eccentricities. The actor Gary Oldman, a collector of Muybridge’s work who has been involved in trying to make a Muybridge biopic, comes off as a serious enthusiast when expounding on the photographer’s motives and photographs. The biographer Marta Braun and the art historian Amy Werbel challenge the idea that Muybridge’s motion studies at the University of Pennsylvania should count as scientific, in line with the university’s ostensible expectations. The film historian Tom Gunning suggests that Muybridge was, unwittingly, something of a Surrealist forebear.While starchy in presentation, “Exposing Muybridge” makes clear that its subject’s images still have a lot to show us.Exposing MuybridgeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    ‘We Met in Virtual Reality’ Review: Home Sweet Home

    This innovative documentary tags along with people who are finding happiness in a graphical online world.Joe Hunting’s “We Met in Virtual Reality” is the rare documentary shot entirely within an online world. It surveys the sort of space — specifically, a platform called VRChat — where people hang out “in person” as avatars of their choice. It’s a place of acceptance and social ease, and while it might not look as mind-bending as the fantasy realms portrayed in science fiction, it’s clearly no less liberating.Cannily conceived as an observational documentary, the movie tags along with a few regulars and also tracks a couple of relationships. The activities include chatting at a bar, learning belly-dancing or sign language in a class, going on a dinosaur safari, and vibing to music at a club. Despite the virtual setting, the locales lean into bodily endeavors, as well as special occasions that foster community, like a birthday or a wedding.The avatars tend to have anime-character physiques, lovingly (and sometimes bodaciously) self-fashioned. The animated landscape can be mildly trippy in its lo-fi glitchiness, and amusing: At one point the point-of-view pans to reveal that a voice we’re hearing comes from a Kermit the Frog look-alike.The prevailing mood is sweet and affectionately dorky. But again and again we hear how life-changing VR can be, creating a sanctuary for recovery (from depression, alcoholism, grief) and acceptance (for nonbinary visitors, for example, and for people of all abilities).Hunting’s documentary catches up with where many people are finding their dreams realized, and understands that sometimes the dream is simply to be yourself.We Met in Virtual RealityNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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    Rediscovering Australia’s Generation of Defiant Female Directors

    Gillian Armstrong, Jane Campion, Essie Coffey and others had waited years to tell their stories, as a Museum of the Moving Image series shows.In the opening moments of Gillian Armstrong’s debut feature, “My Brilliant Career” (1979), a freckled, tawny-haired young woman stands in the doorway of her house in the Australian outback and declares: “Dear countrymen, a few lines to let you know that this story is going to be all about me.” The woman is Sybylla, played by a fiery, young Judy Davis, and she dreams of a long, fruitful career as a writer — love, marriage, motherhood and all of society’s other expectations be damned.Sybylla’s words might as well have been the rallying cry for a whole generation of Australia’s female filmmakers, who had waited for years to tell their own stories. Their defiant and eclectic body of work is the subject of Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema, a fascinating series that opened last week at the Museum of the Moving Image, in Queens, N.Y.“My Brilliant Career,” which shot Armstrong into global prominence, was the first feature to be directed by an Australian woman in more than 40 years. In 1933, “Two Minutes Silence,” the fourth and final feature by the three McDonagh sisters — Isabel, Phyllis and Paulette — had closed out a brief but booming era of early Australian cinema in which women had been active as producers and directors. (The MoMI series includes the 1929 film “The Cheaters,” the only feature by the McDonagh sisters for which a print still exists.)The intervening decades had drastically shrunk not just opportunities for women interested in film, but the scope of Australian cinema itself. Stiff competition from Hollywood and the ravages of World War II had more or less shuttered the country’s film industry by the 1960s. Government initiatives to subsidize production and establish a national film school eventually spurred a rebirth in the 1970s. The Australian new wave, as this resurgence came to be called, thrust antipodean cinema onto the world stage with stylized, maverick films like Bruce Beresford’s “The Adventures of Barry McKenzie,” Fred Schepisi’s “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” and George Miller’s “Mad Max.”Tracey Moffatt in “BeDevil,” a horror anthology she also directed.Women Make MoviesThe new wave was a male-dominated movement, with many of the films flaunting a grisly, macho vision of Australian culture; Armstrong often stood out as the sole female exception. But “My Brilliant Career” also represented the beginning of another kind of renaissance in Australian cinema — one led by women. Between the late 1970s and the 1990s, a number of women directed landmark films across genres, introducing rousing new feminist narratives to the Australian screen.“My Brilliant Career” is one of many firsts in the aptly named MoMI series, which was curated by the programmer and critic Michelle Carey. These include Essie Coffey’s “My Survival as an Aboriginal” (1978), often hailed as the first documentary to be directed by an Aboriginal Australian woman; the dystopian lesbian heist film “On Guard” (1984), written and directed by Susan Lambert and believed by some to be the first Australian film made with an all-women crew; and Tracey Moffatt’s rollicking three-part horror anthology, “BeDevil” (1993), regarded as the first feature to be directed by an Aboriginal Australian woman. Then there’s “Sweetie” (1989), the oddball black comedy that was the debut feature of Jane Campion, who would go on to make “The Piano” (1993), the first film by a woman to win a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.This flurry of breakthroughs resulted from two intersecting developments: the creation of state film institutions like the Australian Film Television and Radio School and the Australian Film Commission in the 1970s; and campaigns by women’s and Aboriginal groups to demand policies that would ensure fair access to these public resources. Armstrong was part of the inaugural class of 12 at the school, whose graduates also include Campion and her “Sweetie” cinematographer Sally Bongers, as well as Jocelyn Moorhouse, who produced the 1994 crossover hit “Muriel’s Wedding.” “Proof,” Moorhouse’s disarmingly mordant feature debut as a director, is part of Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema.While state support helped nurture a fledgling mainstream industry, it proved crucial in the development of a feminist documentary and experimental film tradition in Australia, which benefited greatly from the commission’s Women’s Film Fund. “On Guard” is a striking example. Lambert’s hourlong movie follows a group of lesbians who scheme to destroy the data held by a multinational company, U.T.E.R.O., which they suspect is performing illegal reproductive experiments on women. A kind of Aussie sister-film to Lizzie Borden’s 1983 cult classic, “Born in Flames,” “On Guard” subverts patriarchal control in both form and narrative. Told in short, sleek fragments, the film strips the heist thriller of all its usual machinations and violence, instead dwelling on the everyday struggles of its heroines — be it with child care, domestic division of labor or living an openly gay life.Essie Coffey’s “My Survival as an Aboriginal” serves as both a manifesto and an heirloom for her descendants.Ballad FilmsMoffatt’s movies similarly reimagine cultural and film tropes, but through the lenses of gender and race. The short film “Nice Coloured Girls” uses clever juxtapositions of image, voice and text to turn a wily story about three Aboriginal women who seduce and scam white men into a historical meditation on the power plays between early settlers and the women’s ancestors. This theme of colonial haunting is expanded with raucous invention in Moffatt’s “BeDevil,” which draws on Aboriginal folklore to tell a series of modern-day gothic tales. Tracing lines between past and present evils — colonialism, gentrification, cultural appropriation — with an irreverent and experimental approach to editing and sound, “BeDevil” refashions Australian history as a deeply unsettling ghost story. Like many films in the MoMI series, “BeDevil” feels startlingly ahead of its time.As does Coffey’s “My Survival as an Aboriginal,” despite its simple and straightforward documentary structure. Made one year before “My Brilliant Career” — and no less seminal than that film in inspiring an entire tradition of filmmakers — “My Survival” is both a personal manifesto by Coffey and an heirloom for her descendants. Coffey speaks bluntly, straight into the camera, of the violence suffered by her people, the Muruwari, at the hands of white settlers. Then she sets out with the camera, brusque and determined, to ensure that her heritage is preserved and passed down to future generations. She teaches the local children the traditional skills of her people — hunting, gathering, surviving in the bush — and laments that their education has left them without this essential cultural knowledge. At the end, Coffey declares, “I’m going to lead my own life, me and my family, and live off the land. I will not live a white-man way and that’s straight from me, Essie Coffey.”Between Sybylla’s fictional “this story is going to be all about me” in “My Brilliant Career” and Coffey’s raw and real “I’m going to lead my own life,” a whole history of Australian women’s cinema was born.“Pioneering Women in Australian Cinema” runs through Aug. 14 at the Museum of the Moving Image. Go to movingimage.us for more information. More

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    Nolan Ryan Had a Softer Side. He Just Hid It (Very) Well.

    A new documentary explores the unique challenge of facing Ryan, the game’s most prolific strikeout artist, but also shows off a gentler version of the Ryan Express.Like the Beatles did shortly before him, Nolan Ryan performed at Shea Stadium and sang on the Ed Sullivan Show.The former is a well-known and well-told part of Ryan’s life, the early days of a Hall of Fame career that eventually launched the Ryan Express as if by rocket fuel. The latter, when he and the entire 1969 Mets World Series-winning roster sang “You Gotta Have Heart” to a national television audience, is less known and one of the many surprising parts of a new documentary, “Facing Nolan,” that surely will elicit smiles.“I thought that was the worst suit I’ve ever seen,” Reid Ryan, the oldest of Nolan and Ruth’s three children and an executive producer of the film, said. Reid laughed and added: “I’m not sure the mustard suit was ever in. I know he can’t sing, but that was funny.”Nolan Ryan said that though it might look as if he and his teammates were lip-syncing, they really were singing.“We were all plenty excited about being on that show and the honor it was to be on it,” Ryan said during a recent telephone conversation. “But the highlight of the evening for me was that Eddy Arnold was there. I was a big Eddy Arnold fan, and that made the night special.”What is both charming and disarming about the film, which began streaming on multiple services this week, is the surprising humility shown by Ryan. A Hall of Fame pitcher that still owns 51 major-league records — according to the film’s count — Ryan has a legend that easily fills his native Texas, but to some of his on-screen co-stars he is simply grandpa, who tells corny jokes and who, yes, cannot sing. And he loves it.The high praise for Ryan comes in interviews with his fellow Hall of Famers. George Brett, Rod Carew and Dave Winfield are among those who offer keen insight into the challenge that is described in the film’s title. Pete Rose, too. Upon being reminded that Ryan finished second to Baltimore’s Jim Palmer in the 1973 American League Cy Young Award voting after a record-setting 383 strikeouts — of course, Ryan also led the league that year with 162 walks — Carew reacts as if hearing it for the first time.“You’ve got to be kidding!” Carew exclaims when told Ryan never did win a Cy Young.Says Brett: “Nolan never won a Cy Young Award? I thought he won three, four, five.” More

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    ‘The Reverend’ Review: A Beer With a Music Chaser

    Get out of his way. With two decades of sharing worship and making music at a Brooklyn bar, the Rev. Vince Anderson appears to be unstoppable.When singing “Get Out of My Way,” the Rev. Vince Anderson takes no time getting to a growl and a wail. Anderson, the subject of the oft-rousing documentary “The Reverend,” and his band, the Love Choir, have had a 20-year residency at Union Pool, a bar in Williamsburg. And that brassy, organ-banging, sax-honking representative of what Anderson dubs “dirty gospel’’ has been the invocation to Monday evening gatherings.An acolyte of observational filmmaking, the director Nick Canfield follows Anderson as he jams; cooks pastrami at his home in Queens’s Ridgewood neighborhood; works with teen rappers in Bushwick; and barnstorms with Vote Common Good, an evangelical group focused on energizing religiously oriented voters to support progressive candidates during the 2018 midterm elections.Fond of caftans and straw hats, Anderson is a big guy with a burly singing voice but a storytelling cadence when sharing the spiritual journey that took him from a Lutheran childhood in California to New York’s Union Theological Seminary. He planned to become a minister but left. (He has since been ordained.)An early turning point came in college when he crossed a picket line of nuns to see “The Last Temptation of Christ,” with its depiction of “a beautifully human Jesus,” he says.The defining one came at Union when he crossed the street on, yes, Epiphany Sunday, and entered Riverside Church where the day’s sermon was “The Mystery of Christian Vocation.” The message, he recounts, was, “We’re all called to goodness and justice.” He embraced music as his ministry.The arrival of Millicent Souris was a boon. Of their first date, she of the equally splendid caftans said, “He’s got no moves. He’s got nothing.” They married in 2018. There are other amusing and thoughtful interviews (Questlove offers some choice words), as well as musings about grace. Canfield’s debut feature is infused with its own measure of that gentling spirit. It is also blessedly low on piousness.The ReverendNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More