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

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

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

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

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      Stream These Three Great Documentaries

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      This month’s nonfiction picks include a reflection on a father, a immersive dive into the fishing industry and an alternative approach to the rock band biopic doc.The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.‘Film About a Father Who’ (2020)Stream it on the Criterion Channel. Rent it on Apple TV and Vudu.In “Film About a Father Who,” the director Lynne Sachs sorts through her feelings about her elusive, problematic dad, Ira Sachs Sr. The movie, which mixes film and video formats, brings together footage that Lynne shot over more than 30 years along with other material from her filmmaker brother, Ira Sachs Jr. (“Love Is Strange”), and Ira Sr. himself.Right from the start, Ira Sr. sounds like a bit of a flake. Lynne, explaining what her dad did for a living, calls him “a hippie businessman, buying land so steep you couldn’t build, bottling mineral water he couldn’t put on the shelves, using other people’s money to develop hotels named for flowers.” He also seems to have been a serial compartmentalizer. That trait may have been harmless enough when it came to extravagances (he owned twin Cadillac convertibles and kept one secret), but it caused a great deal of drama for his family. Lynne interviews some of the women Ira Sr. had been involved with and the many children he fathered, including two grown half sisters Lynne didn’t know about until 2016. Did she have suspicions, you might ask? Lynne suggests that Ira Sr.’s secret-keeping led her and her siblings to adopt a stance of what she calls “complicit ignorance.” And Ira Sr.’s mother, called Maw-Maw by Lynne, only complicated matters when she was alive, because, Lynne says, she “could not take the constant flow of people that she was supposed to, quote, ‘love,’ in the way that we’re taught to love family.”In interviews, Ira Sr. nevertheless comes across as a genial lug — maybe fun at parties, but surely a handful to have as a father or a partner. “Film About a Father Who,” whose title was inspired by Yvonne Rainer’s “Film About a Woman Who,” is a consideration of how one man’s easygoing attitude yielded anything but an easy family dynamic as it rippled across generations. The movie runs only 74 minutes, but it contains lifetimes.‘Leviathan’ (2012)Stream it on Kanopy or Mubi. Rent it on Google Play and Vudu.Some documentaries aim to impose order on the world. “Leviathan,” by contrast, revels in abstraction and disorientation, as Dennis Lim noted in 2012 when profiling the filmmakers for The New York Times. The co-directors Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, of Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, a group that merges the academic discipline of ethnography with the artistic possibilities of filmmaking, shot it during six trips aboard a Massachusetts fishing trawler. But it’s hardly an exposé or elucidation of the fishing industry. It opens with a quote from the Book of Job and unleashes a furious torrent of images in which it’s often difficult to know which way is up or even whether it’s day or night.As the title implies, the human presence is something of a secondary concern next to the monstrous churn of the sea or the clanking, threatening chains of the boat’s equipment. The waterlogged, slicker-wearing fishermen aren’t identified until the closing credits; their voices are often barely possible to understand (the distortions of their words suggest Charlie Brown’s teacher fed through some sort of metallic feedback), and their routines are never explained.In interviews, the filmmakers noted that they sought to surrender some of their agency to the elements. Waterproof cameras get dragged underwater like a fishing net or pulled above the surface to skip along with some hovering seabirds. They slosh around on the floor with the day’s catch, as much a part of the detritus as the ginger-ale can that rattles around in a pile of shells. Shooting at ultra-close-range from boot height or at odd angles, Paravel and Castaing-Taylor offer perspectives on the way the boat looks and sounds that seem untethered from where our eyes would naturally dart for meaning. It’s so vivid that at times, you swear you can smell the ship as well.‘The Velvet Underground’ (2021)Stream it on Apple TV+.Todd Haynes doesn’t exactly reinvent the rock-band-biopic documentary in “The Velvet Underground,” but there are times when he seems pretty close to it. The title is in some ways a misnomer: The focus isn’t so much on the band as the Warholian cultural ferment of the 1960s that the group grew out of. (It’s more underground and less, uh, velvet.) Dedicated to the memory of Jonas Mekas, who appears, and featuring excerpts from films by him and film-artist contemporaries like Bruce Conner, Stan Brakhage and many others, Haynes’s movie is as interested in picture, sound and sensation as it is in recording history.The copious use of split screen evokes Warhol’s “Chelsea Girls,” a work that places imagery from two projectors side by side while the soundtrack alternates between the film strips, allowing viewers to draw connections. In a similar spirit, Haynes is devoted to capturing the cultural crosscurrents that shaped the band and its members.John Cale, one of the band’s founders, speaks of the influence of experimental musicians like John Cage and La Monte Young on the music he was making. Later, offering a fan’s perspective, the musician Jonathan Richman talks about hearing “overtones that you couldn’t account for” while seeing the Velvet Underground play. The film critic Amy Taubin draws a link between Warhol’s silent films — meant to be played at the slower-than-standard speed of 16 frames per second — and the avant-garde music scene: “It was all about extended time.”Haynes’s film doesn’t avoid standard biographical details. There are tales of Lou Reed’s prickliness and a long section about what happened to the band after its game-changing (if famously not best-selling) first album. But you don’t have to be interested in the music, or music at all, to appreciate “The Velvet Underground” as a movie. More

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      ‘Endangered’ Review: When Journalism Becomes Imperiled

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      A new documentary from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady explores threats to press freedom, but not with the focus this global issue deserves.Shot in 2020 and 2021, “Endangered,” the latest documentary from Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady (“Detropia”), explores a variety of threats to the freedom of the press across three countries.In Brazil, the writer Patrícia Campos Mello became the target of a barrage of sexist attacks — in one news clip President Jair Bolsonaro implies she was willing to trade sex for a scoop — after she reported on a disinformation campaign during the 2018 presidential election cycle. Campos Mello successfully sued the president and his son Eduardo Bolsonaro, also a politician, for “moral damages.”In Mexico, where, a title card says, more than 100 journalists have been murdered since 2000, the photographer Sáshenka Gutiérrez risks her safety to document protests against what critics see as an insufficient government response to a rise in femicides — girls and women being killed because of their gender.In the United States, Carl Juste, a longtime photojournalist for The Miami Herald, shoots the area’s George Floyd protests; he speaks about his father, who introduced him to journalism, and wonders if his own career is coming to a close. The British reporter Oliver Laughland documents the 2020 presidential campaign for The Guardian and encounters distrust for the news media from Trump supporters. There are also brief sections that concern the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit organization based in New York.“Endangered” spreads itself thin over 90 minutes, leaving even basic points, such as what laws protect journalists in Brazil and Mexico, mostly unaddressed. Covered in isolation, any of these interview subjects, or any of the problems facing journalists raised — online harassment, police intimidation, hedge fund ownership of newspapers, news deserts — might have made for a more detailed and compelling film.EndangeredNot rated. In English, Portuguese and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      ‘Beba’ Review: Learning From Ancestors

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      An Afro-Latina filmmaker explores her identity and generational trauma growing up in New York City and attending a predominantly white college.What’s most striking about the autobiographical documentary “Beba,” aside from the intimate lens and stunning cinematography, are its moments of vulnerability, which plunge the viewer into the Afro-Latina filmmaker’s familial and personal traumas, including heated arguments with her mother and her white friends.The film, written, directed and produced by Rebeca Huntt, traces her family’s migration to New York City, through her years at Bard College upstate, and then her move back to her parents’ place on Central Park West.“Beba,” which refers to Huntt’s childhood nickname, is not a glossed-over immigrant redemption story. Through poetry, narration — featuring the voices of writers like James Baldwin and Audre Lorde — and interviews with family and friends, Huntt, the daughter of a Black Dominican father and a Venezuelan mother, pieces together painful parts of her family and social history, extracting her own identity out of the remnants of her trauma. “Every one of us inherits the curses of our ancestors,” Huntt states. A focus is on her adversarial relationship with her mother and the tension that unfolds between them on and off camera. Huntt also interrogates her relationships to white friends amid rising racial and political tensions.Underexplored are the dynamics with and between the men in the family. Huntt’s father, who seems to be an idealized figure, is interviewed, but shies away from difficult questions. One gets the sense that he is let off the hook, perhaps because Huntt’s relationship with her mother takes up so much space. Though Huntt’s brother is a large part of the narrated story, the two are estranged, and his absence in the film is palpable. Still, “Beba” is profound. The filmmaker delves into all of who she is, including darker or more destructive aspects of her identity, pushing viewers to see Huntt’s complexity — and perhaps their own.BebaRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Vedette’ Review: A Cow’s Trouble in Paradise

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      In this documentary, two French filmmakers meet a formidable Swiss cow and, under her impassive gaze, ruminate on her Alpine life.Few places are lovelier for cows to ruminate in than the Valais in southern Switzerland. This alpine region’s most famous attraction is the Matterhorn, but it is also where you find a breed of cattle known as Hérens. There, on lush, steep slopes, these brown-black animals graze and graze some more, at times using their horns to plow into the dirt and one another.The title subject of the French documentary “Vedette” is a typically brawny specimen with a massive head and formidable bass-y moo. She looks so tough, so intimidating, though this may be fantasy; it is, after all, easy to imagine all sorts of nonsense about animals. That’s certainly one of the lessons of “Vedette,” which was directed by Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard, who are married, although it’s unclear if they entirely grasp their movie’s contradictory messages, its untapped complexities or its downright weirdness.Over a leisurely, sometimes slack hour and a half, the filmmakers tell an initially inviting and benign story of one cow and the sparsely populated area in which two- and four-legged creatures exist side by side, seemingly much like generations have done before. With Bories serving as the narrator and interviewer, and Chagnard handling the cinematography, the directors introduce a world that looks almost untouched by modernity, despite technologies like cellphones and portable milking machines. A lot of this seems genuine and true, even if there’s also a tourist-board quality to the upbeat tone and some of the hovering camerawork.Amid copious beauty shots of cows and land alike, the movie skitters from the personal to the lightly ethnographic and the quasi-sociological. One ritual that’s distinct to this region is cow fighting — “combats de reines” or “battle of queens” — bloodless, surprisingly watchable spectacles in which pairs of bovines push against each other’s heads. (Their horns have been dulled.) Each winner is then matched with another cow until a head-ramming champion is declared queen. She receives a little crown of flowers for her troubles; for their part, the proud owners earn bragging rights to owning a queen, a honor Vedette has long held.It’s not clear why, when or how this ritual emerged, which is typical of Bories and Chagnard’s frustratingly incurious approach. There’s much you never learn here, including fundamentals about dairy farming. Cows need to have calves to produce milk, and at one point, you see Vedette during a difficult birth. The calf needs to be pulled out using an obstetric chain, and right after it’s born, it disappears; like most dairy calves, it was probably sent to another farm or to slaughter. The possibility that Vedette’s calves were turned into veal chops might be a bummer for some viewers, but it would provide a true picture of life for most dairy cows.The movie loses its thread and interest midway through after Vedette loses a fight. As they do throughout, the owners speak about Vedette’s feelings — how it affects “her morale” — anthropomorphizing that Bories doesn’t question and repeatedly echoes. To spare Vedette’s ostensible shame, the owners move her alone to a barn next to the directors’ home, where Bories sings her a song and reads aloud passages from Descartes’s “Animals Are Machines.” I imagine the filmmakers thought this charming, though they’re also clearly fumbling toward some greater awareness about animals beyond the purely instrumental.“Vedette” joins a recent roster of documentaries about the uses and abuses of farm animals (others include “Cow” and “Gunda”). It’s disappointing that Bories and Chagnard fail to add anything to this environmentally urgent topic beyond their own surprise that these animals are more than indistinguishable milk factories. Vedette is a nice cow; she deserves more consideration than she receives. This shallowness is especially disappointing given the shocker ending, which throws everything that’s come before into a new, mind-bending light. I’ll say no more other than, as history teaches us, some queens lose more than their crowns.VedetteNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘We (Nous)’ Review: This Is Us

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      Alice Diop’s observational documentary is a beautiful, loose-limned portrait of Paris’s suburbs.Alice Diop’s documentary “We,” a beautiful, loose-limned portrait of Paris’s “banlieues” or suburbs, brought to my mind the words of the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène. When asked if his films are understood in Europe, he replied, “Europe is not my center. Europe is on the outskirts.”That same decolonial spirit animates “We.” Diop, the daughter of Senegalese immigrants, grew up in the banlieues among other working-class Black and Arab immigrants. Her film traces an idiosyncratic route along the RER B commuter rail line, the artery that connects the communities on the outskirts of Paris to the heart of the metropolis.But Diop challenges the notion of a center altogether. Her cartography of her city begins with herself: The “I” opens into the “we.”Early in the film, Diop observes as commuters board the train at a station in Seine-Saint-Denis in the light of dawn. Peering through a glass window flickering with reflections, her camera settles on the face of an older Black woman, only partly visible behind a seat. As if following the logic of a train, that great equalizer of things near and far, “We” makes seamless connections between disparate images. The passenger sparks Diop’s memories of her mother, who died 25 years ago. Diop’s voice-over guides us through smudgy, decades-old home videos that she scans for traces of her mother, who only appears fleetingly, at the edges. “I start thinking about all the things that weren’t filmed, recorded, archived,” Diop says wistfully.An acute awareness of the relationship between memory, whether personal or collective, and identity emerges as the engine of “We.” Necessarily arbitrary and selective, Diop’s cinematic tour — which includes a long moment with a mechanic as he calls his mother in Mali; visits with the aging patients of Diop’s sister, a nurse; a solemn service at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, where generations of French kings are entombed — points to the impossibility of portraiture itself, whether of a life, a people or a nation. The first-person plural is always a subjective construction, but its elasticity, Diop suggests, can be as liberating as it can be exclusionary.We (Nous)Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Human Trial’ Review: The Race for a Diabetes Cure

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      The married documentarians Lisa Hepner and Guy Mossman follow people with diabetes who put themselves forward as test subjects for a potential solution.Imagine what a world without diabetes would look like. A vast reduction in pain, suffering, needless death. And, as a bonus, a significant drop in pharmaceutical ads, probably.The goal is far away, but not as remote as you may imagine. The married documentarians Lisa Hepner and Guy Mossman spent more than five years making “The Human Trial,” a movie chronicling one research company’s quest for a cure and following two people with diabetes who put themselves forward as test subjects.The movie opens with footage of Hepner taking a blood sugar reading. As someone with Type 1 diabetes, she is personally invested in this subject. Her narration tells of her 2014 discovery of a San Diego company, ViaCyte, which is developing a treatment by which insulin-making stem cells can be implanted in patients. (This is admittedly a simplistic description of what the treatment is meant to do; the movie goes into more detail, with clarity and patience.)Over the course of several years, the moviemakers keep tabs on two diabetes patients, Mason and Gregory, who allow themselves to have modules that release stem cells implanted in them. One finds his blood-sugar levels getting lower. But is this a placebo effect? The movie is blunt in presenting the patients’ emotional ups and downs, and shows the sometimes weary realism of the researchers. It also offers another kind of weariness: ViaCyte is in constant need of new funding.Shot largely in hospital waiting areas, offices and conference rooms, “The Human Trial” is not a visually dynamic movie. But it builds a good head of steam in the narrative intrigue department before resolving on a low-key note of hope.The Human TrialNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and virtual cinemas. More