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      ‘Jane by Charlotte’ Review: A Mother-Daughter Duet

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      Charlotte Gainsbourg makes her directorial debut with an elusive portrait of her mother, the French-English star Jane Birkin, at age 74.“Jane by Charlotte,” the directorial debut of the actress and singer Charlotte Gainsbourg (“Antichrist”), is a meandering and elusive documentary portrait of Gainsbourg’s mother, Jane Birkin. An “It” girl of the 1960s and ’70s, Birkin is known for starring in risqué art-house films (like “Blow-Up”), and for her romance with Serge Gainsbourg, with whom she collaborated on a hit album before starting her solo singing career.Gainsbourg pays homage to Agnès Varda’s 1988 docudrama, “Jane B. par Agnès V.,” which captures Birkin, age 40, considering her status as a muse and icon. “Jane by Charlotte” sees Birkin at 74 and picks up on fixations of hers apparent in that earlier film — her love of bulldogs, photographs and motherhood — as well as her ideas about femininity.In contrast to Varda’s metanarrative approach, Gainsbourg’s is straightforward, switching between elegantly staged mother-daughter conversations and home video-esque footage of Birkin’s everyday activities — like performing her music in Japan, gardening with her granddaughter and visiting a bulldog breeder.Gainsbourg purports to look at her mother as she’s “never dared before,” hoping to close a rift between them. Birkin speaks, rather obliquely, about intimate subjects like her lifelong dependency on sleeping pills and her maternal insecurities — the premature death of her first daughter, Kate Barry, looms over the film.Clearly a pet project for Gainsbourg (whose own electronic pop songs feature prominently in the soundtrack, clashing against her mother’s classic tunes), the documentary is defiantly insular and lacking in context.When Gainsbourg and Birkin visit Serge’s famed black-walled Paris home, for instance, the dwelling’s peculiarities are taken for granted. (The house has remained mostly unchanged since Gainsbourg’s death in 1991 and is now going to be a museum.) Those devoted to the Gainsbourg-Birkin universe may delight in the miscellanea presented here, but Gainsbourg has no interest in rendering her mother’s life, or their relationship, accessible or particularly fascinating to the uninitiated. This makes for an occasionally trivial experience, but one senses Gainsbourg doesn’t care — she might have made the film for no one but herself.Jane by CharlotteNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘More Than Robots’ Review: An International Battle

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      Despite the movie’s title, robots are the subject and spectacle of this lighthearted film about a high school robotics competition.The documentary “More Than Robots” (streaming on Disney+) centers on an international high school robotics competition. Despite the movie’s title, robots are, in fact, the subject and spectacle of this lighthearted film.Working in groups over the course of several weeks, young inventors participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition to create industrial-size robots that are complex enough to move automatically, shoot projectiles and even climb. The organization that runs the competition was founded by the inventor Dean Kamen, who wanted to host an event that would develop the skills of young engineers. (The international reach of the competition drew powerful patrons: When the organizers of the tournament present the season’s challenge, they acknowledge that the competition is sponsored by Lucasfilm.)The documentary follows four teams in early 2020 as they prepare for regional competitions in Japan, Mexico and California. The most memorable scenes come from the two teams in Los Angeles, each led by their teachers Fazlul and Fatima, who are also a married couple. Despite the apparent differences in funding between the two schools, both mentors encourage their students to build robots that stand up to the hard knocks of engineering battles.The movie is the first documentary feature directed by the actress Gillian Jacobs. As a filmmaker, she made the wise choice to feature bright-eyed inventors who are able to make technical innovation sound approachable in talking head interviews.Ultimately, though, the documentary lacks balance and growth in its storytelling. Jacobs has more footage to show from the tournament in Los Angeles than either Japan or Mexico, and this imbalance has the unfortunate effect of making the international story lines feel neglected. Like many of the young inventors she documents, Jacobs has created a project that doesn’t fall apart at first touch. But her film doesn’t meet the mark for excellence, either.More Than RobotsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘The Torch’ Review: The Blues Legend Buddy Guy Sows His Legacy

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      A new documentary by Jim Farrell focuses on the musician’s sense of mission.This documentary centered on the blues musician Buddy Guy is a very good rather than a great movie. But any opportunity to spend almost two hours in the company of Buddy Guy is an opportunity not to be missed.Directed by Jim Farrell, “The Torch” takes an unusual tack. It’s as much about Guy’s sense of mission as it is about his stunning musicianship. It begins with Guy on acoustic guitar, singing of how his mother identified him as a blues man when he was only 2 years old. Then we’re at Guy’s Chicago nightclub, Legends, following a young man into the club. He appears to be a fan, but he’s there to play. He’s Quinn Sullivan, a youthful protégé of Guy’s. He’s one of several musicians to whom Guy is passing the torch of the movie’s title.Guy tells stories of his early years across Louisiana and in Chicago. Practically starving as he tries to find work, he is introduced to the singer-songwriter Muddy Waters, who gives him a ride around town, during which Waters offers Guy bread and salami as they drive. Realizing he’s going to play with one of his heroes, Guy’s hunger seems to disappear.Then there’s the footage of Sullivan’s white, middle-class upbringing. The guitarist has real talent but might be considered by some lacking in the blues-as-lived-experience department, since it is a Black musical tradition. This doesn’t concern Guy, who is Black; and race is never once mentioned verbally. Instead, as onscreen interviews with musicians such as Carlos Santana, Joe Bonamassa and others underscore, the bottom line is what you give to the music. Depicted here in appearances before the pandemic, Guy, who is in his 80s, still gives his all, combining soul and virtuosity with off-the-wall showmanship.The TorchNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 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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      Mandy Patinkin Finds Healing in Refugee Work and Praying With His Dog

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      Right when the actor thought he’d done almost everything, Ken Burns offered him the role of Benjamin Franklin, and, just maybe, held off an early retirement.Mandy Patinkin arrived so long ago in his career — winning a Tony Award for “Evita” and an Emmy for “Chicago Hope” and being the object of adoration and imitation as Inigo Montoya in “The Princess Bride” — that he likes to jest he’s getting ready to leave.“I keep seeing the exit door,” Patinkin, 69, said jovially on a video call from his cabin in the Hudson Valley in New York.In fact, he toyed with retiring after “Homeland” ended in 2020 but discovered during the pandemic that he missed the structure, the learning and even the anxiety of acting.Around that time, Ken Burns came knocking.Burns wanted Patinkin’s sonorous voice for “Benjamin Franklin,” his two-part dissection of the multifaceted, often contradictory founding father: a writer and publisher, a scientist and an inventor, a diplomat and signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, a slave owner and, later in life, an abolitionist.“And, all of a sudden, I’m sitting in front of a microphone with some of the world’s greatest historians guiding me through how to speak a language that was somewhat older and from the queen’s England at times,” Patinkin said. When he finally saw the four-hour documentary (premiering on April 4 and 5 on PBS), he was stunned by what he thought he knew about Franklin and didn’t.“I couldn’t get over that I got to be this guy,” he said. “Talk about parts you get to play.”But singing is his first love. And after being stranded without an accompanist during the pandemic, Patinkin — who hears music even in the mundane and can transform a classic into something wondrously unfamiliar — is back to working three hours a day with the pianist Adam Ben-David in preparation for a new concert tour beginning May 25 in Baltimore.“I’ve never been happier,” Patinkin said.In the meantime, he and his wife, the Obie-winning actress and writer Kathryn Grody, keep their creativity alive and their opinions heard through wildly popular social media videos masterminded by their son Gideon.“We have this crazy platform,” Patinkin said, “and he realizes what a gift it is to have a voice like this.”Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. His new grandson I was in tears last night. I’ve got this grandchild in my arms, and I couldn’t believe this family was together after all this time, at this moment in our history, with this new life. In the midst of such cuckoo-ness, my son, Isaac, and daughter-in-law, Lennon, had the courage to bring a child into this world. I can’t imagine something more hopeful.2. Praying with his dog, Becky With the pandemic and all the healing that needs to be done, I thought, “I’ve got to feed this dog twice a day. I’ll say the healing prayer for the whole world.” So I do three Jewish prayers: the Shema first; then the “Mi Shebeirach,” which my dear friend Debbie Friedman made the popular version of for the reform Jewish community; then the blessing over breaking bread. And she knows to sit there. She knows each melody, and she knows when it’s getting close. Then I say, “OK,” and she goes to her bowl.3. Live performance Work-wise, my favorite thing to do is to sing music in concert for people all over the world. I finished a 30-city concert tour the week before the pandemic hit. Then, all of a sudden, we’re locked up. My piano player, Adam Ben-David, and I started working again about two, three weeks ago.It’s interesting. The concert I put together, called “Diaries,” [reflected] what was going on in our country, with the election and the polarization. Friends would come and went, “Wow, we loved what you had to say, but that’s pretty dark.” So we changed. I went over hundreds of [more upbeat] songs, and I said to Adam, “Let’s put all these songs back in our bones and our bodies and work them together because I need happier stuff.” And that’s what we’ve been doing — welcoming us back to being alive with the music.4. International Rescue Committee They are trying to take myself and my wife and my son Gideon to the Ukraine-Polish border as ambassadors from the I.R.C. to bring attention where attention must be paid. Our initial question was, “What is the Covid situation in Poland?” And then you think of the optics. We’ve been vaccinated and boosted. Essentially what’s there now, you’re well-protected and you won’t die from it. And I thought, “I’m going to wear a mask next to these women and children who have been fleeing for their lives? I’m going to keep a distance from these people when they need to be held and near humanity who cares?” And I finally came, “No. I’ll take my chances because they need people that pay attention. I’m finished being afraid.”5. National Dance Institute We have a place in the country that we love. One day, I believe my son Isaac was 3 or 4, this car drives up and this guy gets out and he comes running down the mountain, and he goes, “Hello, hello, hello! I want to meet Isaac!” And this is Jacques d’Amboise, the true Pied Piper of the world. He grabs Isaac and he says, “You’re going to be a dancer!” We don’t know what he’s talking about. Then Isaac became part of the Tiny Tots [renamed the First Team in 2004], and we became part of Jacques’s life.6. “Benjamin Franklin” by Walter Isaacson and “John Adams” by David McCullough I started reading the Isaacson book again, and I couldn’t get over how much I missed the first time I read it. These guys are just phenomenal history teachers. You know, as you read any book, it’s mentioning all kinds of other books along the way. Isaacson is constantly nodding the head toward McCullough. So I’m three-quarters of the way through McCullough’s book, which I’ve tried to read countless times in the past. And because of this experience, I’m sailing through it.7. “C’mon C’mon” from the director Mike Mills I’m a member of the Academy, so we watch everything, and my favorite movie was “C’mon C’mon” with Joaquin Phoenix. That movie is so great. There’s a kid [Woody Norman] in it who’s just off-the-charts brilliant. And Joaquin is, bar none, my favorite actor of this time. Period. There’s a lot of great ones out there, so that’s saying something because this man is the gift to the arts, and this is one of his most beautiful performances. Run to see it.8. “Lucy and Desi” from Amy Poehler I couldn’t get over what a gorgeous job she did telling that love story — the influence they had on the whole industry, but, really, on the human heart. I got to meet Lucy when I was doing “Evita” in 1979 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. There’s a knock on my dressing room door after a performance, and I hear this voice [Patinkin mimics in gibberish a gravelly baritone voice], and I go, “That’s my Aunt Ethel!” And then this woman comes in, and my Aunt Ethel had red hair. So she walks into my dressing room like a bulldozer, talking in that voice. And I go, “Aunt Ethel!” I even think I said, “How’s Uncle Joe?” And at some point it hits me, “Oh my God, you’re not Aunt Ethel. You’re Lucy!”9. Toy trains My father came home when I was 8 years old, and he bought me, supposedly — me, spelled himself — a Lionel toy train, an engine of which I still have. To this day, it runs perfectly, with almost no maintenance whatsoever. Over the years, I built layouts in my basement on a 4-by-8-foot sheet of plywood. Then we got this place in the country and there was an old barn, and we took the upstairs and made it a train room. We slowly built this wonderful layout. My kids were not interested when they were younger, but for Hanukkah or my birthday, they would give an hour in the train room with Dad. That would be their gift to me.10. Quiet The thing I love most these days is quiet and being with my wife, doing nothing and just having her nearby. It’s my greatest pleasure after 44 years of two people that spend some time loving each other and some time killing each other that, after all this time, we can gaze into the face of our grandchild and do it together. That we have each other, and we’ve stuck it out through all the troubles. More

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      ‘The Last Mountain’ Review: Impossible Summits

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      This documentary from Chris Terrill struggles to make emotional sense of its story, involving a mother and a son who both died on climbs.Even viewers accustomed to mountain-climbing documentaries, in which climbers routinely concede a willingness to face death, may struggle to adjust to the grim stakes of “The Last Mountain,” a documentary that involves two fatal climbs in one family.In 1995, the British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves died, at 33, on descent after summiting K2. In 2019, her son, Tom Ballard, died at 30 making a run at Nanga Parbat nearby in the Himalayas. Like his mother, he was a world-class climber, maybe even born to do it. (In archival audio, Ballard says Hargreaves climbed the Eiger in Switzerland while she was six months pregnant with him.)“The Last Mountain” draws on footage that the director, Chris Terrill, shot of the family over the long term, beginning in the 1990s, when Tom and his sister, Kate, were children. While the film jumps around chronologically, the present action follows Kate to Nanga Parbat after Tom’s death. Near the end, she explains that she “wanted to see what he’d seen.”Terrill doubles back to reconstruct Tom’s final climb, using video and online posts from the expedition, including a moment in which Tom says that it’s “time to go down.” Karim Hayat, a member of the team who turned back, considers why Tom pressed on. The movie raises the possibility that Tom’s climbing partner, Daniele Nardi, was a bit of a daredevil who overcame Tom’s better instincts, but also pushes back on that theory.There are no real answers for anyone in “The Last Mountain.” If Terrill never finds a clear narrative or emotional through line for this account, it’s not entirely a surprise. The material resists attempts at uplift.The Last MountainRated R. Icy deaths. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘I Am Here’ Review: A Holocaust Survivor Reckons With Her Pain

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      Decades after experiencing some of the most nightmarish moments of World War II, a woman shares her stories.“I Am Here” begins with a promise it does not entirely keep. Jordy Sank’s documentary about the Holocaust survivor Ella Blumenthal ends its opening montage depicting antisemitic acts with a talk radio host telling listeners about the open letter Blumenthal wrote to a social media Holocaust denier.“Instead of condemning the person who posted it,” the host says admiringly, Blumenthal “reaches out an arm of friendship and even of love.”Given that lead-in, one might expect a documentary about a survivor who engages, maybe even transforms, those people who would refute history. That movie is not forthcoming. Instead, “I Am Here” is something more familiar, although undeniably stirring: a portrait of a dynamic soul whose life continues to defy the horrors she experienced.Whether she is swimming laps or walking a beachfront in South Africa — where she has lived since the 1950s — Blumenthal is a vision of vigor and faith, yet it was not until late in life that she began to reckon openly with her memories.In the film, as her 98th birthday nears, Blumenthal sits with her assembled children and grandchildren, recounting the ordeals she and her niece, Roma Rothstein, endured during the war.Animated sequences accompany Blumenthal’s accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps. The animation tempers the graphic tortures of the Holocaust without quelling the heartbreak.Sank was a teenager when he first met Blumenthal, and “I Am Here” feels like a primer pitched to younger viewers. As inspiring as his chosen subject is, the director missed an opportunity to use the story to deepen our understanding of our own memories, trauma and forgiveness.I Am HereRated PG-13 for Holocaust-related thematic content, disturbing images and violence. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Playing in the FM Band’ Review: A Free-Form Radio Legend

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      The trailer for this documentary shows today’s New Yorkers saying they had never heard of Steve Post. The film itself tries to make a case that they ought to have.Taking its title from a book written by its subject, “Playing in the FM Band: The Steve Post Story” memorializes Post, a New York radio personality who, the movie insists, helped define what became known as free-form radio — a kind of programming without a strict format, in which the D.J. chooses the music and riffs on whatever they like, often soliciting call-in listener responses — beginning at the FM station WBAI in the late 1960s.The documentary posits him as a pioneer but struggles to pin down how he was unique. We hear that he was influenced by Jean Shepherd, the radio personality whose wry storytelling brought him to prominence in the 1950s. And, sure enough, sometimes Post sounds an awful lot like Shepherd. Early in the movie, the director, Rosemarie Reed, chooses to highlight Post’s humor by playing a skit Post did with the character actor Marshall Efron, in which Efron impersonates a swami and speaks with a straight up offensive accent. As the audio runs, Reed presents shots of statues that seem to depict South Asian deities.These shots, like those of the talking heads of colleagues and friends who speak of Post, are enveloped in a black that seems ready to swallow the movie whole. The film’s texts are white on the same shade of black. This visual mode renders the movie drab, a condition not ameliorated by the introduction of animated sequences illustrating Post’s stories. Combine that with poor narrative organization, and you have a movie that’s hard to sit through.“Playing” latches onto a couple of interesting grooves in its last twenty minutes. Descriptions of how great Post was during radio station pledge drives are intriguing, and a tale of how Post got onto a 39th-floor ledge in the middle of a broadcast is hair-raising.Playing in the FM Band: The Steve Post StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Last Exit: Space’ Review: Not-So-Final Frontiers

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      The director Rudolph Herzog, with his father, Werner Herzog, narrating, explores the feasibility of off-world colonization.In the documentary “Last Exit: Space,” the director Rudolph Herzog grabs a baton from his father, Werner Herzog, and continues his dad’s explorations of oddball aspiring visionaries. The topic is space colonization: who might do it and how, and, ultimately, what reaching for the stars says about living on Earth.The initial interviewees, including a father and daughter preparing for D.I.Y. spaceflight in Denmark and a scientist using the Ramon Crater in Israel to mimic the surface of Mars, offer pitches that are a bit utilitarian for the Herzog house style. The movie grows weirder when it looks further out, to the possibility of space travel across 5,000 years. A “leading space sexologist” considers the problem of cross-generational inbreeding. A geneticist describes his lab’s 500-year plan to build humans more physically resistant to the ravages of space.It’s not all wonderment. Werner, who delivers his peerless voice-over, explains that life on Mars might be less exciting than it sounds: “A crew of hardy astronauts would hunker down in radiation-proof bunkers enjoying drinks of recycled urine.” The anthropologist Taylor Genovese warns that corporate colonies on Mars would be a means of creating a feudal system, with a work force trapped on another planet.“Last Exit: Space” is variably engaging depending on who’s talking, and a late but typical shift toward mysticism (a group in Brazil believes it was descended from aliens) is a letdown from what came before. The movie gives a stimulating but standard-by-Herzog-standards treatment to a stellar subject.Last Exit: SpaceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More