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      ‘A-ha: The Movie’ Review: The Creative Purgatory of the ‘Take on Me’ Trio

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      The documentary about the Norwegian synth-pop band plays like a slavish yet intermittently lucid Wikipedia entry.A tragicomic air clings to bands who light up the sky like a firework and fade away. The Norwegian subjects of “a-ha: The Movie” are best known for their 1985 hit “Take on Me,” but, despite successful shows, seem mired in creative purgatory. Thomas Robsahm and Aslaug Holm’s documentary trawls the band’s career with musings from its three members — Paul Waaktaar-Savoy, Magne Furuholmen and the Ken Dollesque lead singer Morten Harket — and key associates.Bouncing around synth-pop-happy London in the early 1980s, the driven trio of accomplished musicians landed a contract with Warner Brothers. “Take on Me,” with its infectious arpeggios and liberating high notes, made them stars, boosted by a delightful part-animated music video from Steven Barron (who also made videos for “Billie Jean” and “Money for Nothing”).Then what? The documentary reviews the band’s chronology like a slavish yet intermittently lucid Wikipedia entry. We don’t learn how a-ha continued to get the privilege of releasing albums (including denim and shiny-shirt phases at either end of the 1990s) or what kept thousands of fans coming back for more. But we do witness a hundred muted shades of glum and listless: Furuholmen still seems sad about abandoning guitar for keyboards, decades ago, while Harket talks about needing his space. Waaktaar-Savoy’s attitude can be summed up by a sticker behind him in one shot: “No Stupid People.”There’s a slight wonky interest in seeing the grind of recording sessions and fan service. But the film feels promotional enough that it won’t lean into the potential humor of their situation.a-ha: The MovieNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘¡Viva Maestro!’ Review: A Documentary in Need of a Conductor

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      A wunderkind conductor attempts to keep young Venezuelan musicians working despite political strife at home in this film from Ted Braun.The Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel earned his reputation as a wunderkind by leading prestigious symphonic groups like the Los Angeles Philharmonic. In front of the orchestras he leads, Dudamel is a live wire, his signature curls bouncing with each wave of the wand. And when the music stops, Dudamel turns his passion for his profession toward advocacy, supporting programs that help young Venezuelan musicians develop professionally.The documentary “Viva Maestro” follows Dudamel, combining vérité footage of him in rehearsals with interviews in which Dudamel explains how orchestras can help young people create a more beautiful world.The film begins in 2017, as political and economic strife in Venezuela forces an end to Dudamel’s planned tour with the Simón Bolivar Symphony Orchestra, the country’s premiere youth orchestra. Dudamel leaves Venezuela, and the orchestra’s tour is canceled, leaving the young members of the Bolivars to join millions of protesters in the streets of Venezuela. But Dudamel continues to fight for his musicians to be able to perform, organizing international concerts as a way to keep his acolytes focused on a positive vision of the future.Dudamel is a joyfully appealing figure, and the film benefits from following such an amiable subject. But the documentary lacks the rigor it would take to turn this warm portrait into a proper cinematic symphony. The protests in Venezuela represent a major upheaval for Dudamel, even resulting in the death of one of his musicians. But the director Ted Braun does not take the time to show the protests or to explain what has prompted them, and so, much of the film’s conflict feels indistinct. Braun prefers to fondly listen to Dudamel’s musings in interviews. But even the most passionate speakers can come off as rambling with enough repetition.¡Viva Maestro!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘La Mami’ Review: Tough Love

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      This documentary about the den mother of dancers at a Mexico City cabaret is vérité at its best.At the Cabaret Barba Azul, women get paid to dance and drink with the male patrons, a custom that dates back to the 1930s. In the beautifully-rendered documentary “La Mami,” the director and cinematographer Laura Herrero Garvín (“The Swirl”) immerses us in the behind-the-scenes world of these dancers through the lens of their den mother: Doña Olga. Like them, Doña Olga also used to spend her nights dancing for pesos, but after 45 years working various jobs at the cabaret to support her five children, she has settled into her post in the club’s dressing room-bathroom combo. There she regulates the distribution of toilet paper with an iron fist, and doles out a charming mix of motherly nurturing and fierce rebukes. Like this bit of poetry: “Men are only good for two things: for nothing, and for money.”Garvín’s adept camerawork allows the story to unfold so seamlessly in its vérité style, that the film emanates the magic of a scripted drama without revealing any noticeable interference. And it creates a palpable depth of intimacy too: from Doña Olga waving incense and whispering prayers throughout the club before the doors open, to the nervous new girl Priscilla putting on makeup in the mirror.The triumph of “La Mami” is that in depicting how Doña Olga and the Barba Azul dancers navigate a job where male pleasure dominates, the film does not look down on them, but instead revels in their humanity. And in so doing, this remarkable portrayal of female friendship offers a poignant, elemental take on the lives of working-class women in urban Mexico today.La MamiNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Meat the Future’ Review: The Growth of a ‘Clean Meat’ Start-Up

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      In her new film, the documentarian Liz Marshall depicts the rise of Upside Foods, a company that produces meat from animal cells.With drama series about defective start-ups — like “The Dropout” and “WeCrashed” — in the spotlight, it’s weird to see a Bay Area-based biotech operation take off without turmoil. Yet that is the ultimate goal of Upside Foods, a new company headed by a cardiologist, Uma Valeti. By taking animals out of the process of meat production, the company hopes to minimize all kinds of strife to humans and livestock alike. In her new documentary, “Meat the Future,” the director Liz Marshall detachedly depicts Upside’s rise, starting in 2016. Opening narration by Jane Goodall describes this as “the next agricultural revolution.” But if you’re not well-versed in bioengineering or food regulation, it’s a bit of a slog.The film centers mainly on Valeti as he works to get Upside — originally Memphis Meats, as it’s called throughout the documentary — off the ground. Upside advances along with its technology, which seeks to grow real meat from animal cells, an endeavor known in some circles as the “clean meat movement.” By eliminating industrial agriculture, “Meat the Future” explains, companies like Upside could significantly reduce deforestation, methane production, animal mistreatment and the spread of disease.It’s certainly compelling to think about a future where the United States is free from industrial agriculture, but that fantasy is the most interesting thing on offer here. For the many, many people whose eyes glaze over at the mere mention of agricultural policy and scientific technicalities, this straightforward film will be about as engaging as a corporate PowerPoint — with no graphics.Meat the FutureNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Tony Hawk Discusses His Broken Leg

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      A documentary chronicles the challenges of Hawk’s skating career. He sat down to discuss the devastating leg injury that made promoting it (and walking) a challenge.While everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere, another thing happened at this year’s Oscars. Tony Hawk, the world’s most iconic skateboarder, unveiled his latest trick: Standing without a cane.Hawk, 53, took the stage with Kelly Slater and Shaun White to introduce a James Bond movie montage, but it was Hawk’s mobility that seemed the most notable. Less than three weeks before, he had snapped his right femur when he misjudged the landing on a McTwist — a 540-degree aerial rotation. It’s a trick he’s done tens of thousands of times. That day, though, his speed was off.“After I fell,” he said, “I rolled over and my leg didn’t.”Surgeons repaired the bone with a titanium rod, and a physical therapist designed an aggressive rehab regimen, but neither offered a timeline for recovery. Their reticence granted Hawk something like permission. The next day, he posted a video of himself crutching his way down a hospital corridor.A week later, he shared another video where he tentatively skated across the bottom of his ramp.Hawk was able to walk unassisted onto the stage during the Oscars but he used a cane at the various related events.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesHis unmistakable goal in an aggressive therapy regimen was to walk unassisted onto the Dolby stage. Hawk’s stick-to-it-iveness is the stuff of legend — his quest to land the sport’s first 900-degree spin spanned four White House administrations — but his approach to this rehab is, in technical terms, bananas.Hawk’s femur break came the day before HBO released a trailer for “Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off,” a long-awaited documentary about his life and career which spends ample time on his injuries. Directed by Sam Jones, the film excavates the roots, reaches, and complex consequences of his perseverance.In many ways, the documentary is an unlikely coming-of-middle-age story, for both Hawk and skateboarding, with an arc shaped by loss. The loss of innocence, sure, and loved ones, certainly and sadly, but Hawk’s other losses have sometimes liberated him rather than constrained him. Like most skaters, he sees skateboarding as his means of self-expression, yet the medium is more chisel and stone than brush and canvas. Every failed attempt, passing year, and snapped femur becomes a chunk of unessential marble that must be cast aside for the sculpture to emerge. It is an art born of battering, but what many fail to see is that the skater isn’t the one chipping away with the hammer and chisel; the skater is the stone.With the documentary set to premier on Tuesday, Hawk sat down over the weekend to discuss his life, his career and the injury that will require even more reinvention.This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Jones’s vision for what a documentary about Hawk could be was what convinced Hawk to participate.Sam Jones Pictures/HBO Documentary FilmsHow’s the recovery going?I just had some X-rays, and I’ll see my doctor on Monday. His attitude is basically that my leg is never going to be stronger than it is now, so if I can handle the pain, then go for it. I’m in uncharted waters here, but it’s all on me. If I can drop the cane by next week, I’ll be on track.On track?We have an event on the weekend of May 12 in Las Vegas, and I want to skate in that demo. Devo, Modest Mouse, Descendents, and Warish are playing, and the best vert skaters will be skating all weekend. We’re never going to get that lineup again, so I don’t want to miss it.Your documentary comes out this week. It’s an inspiring ride. What made you want to tell your story now?It was Sam. Had anyone else done it, the story would’ve been formulaic: You have some ups and downs, then you find massive success, then the credits roll. Sam was interested in the whole trajectory. Anyone else would say my career ended 15 to 20 years ago. I like to think I’m still relevant and pushing boundaries, and Sam did, too. I also feel like I have enough distance after coming through my own challenges, so now was the right time to tell the story.Hawk’s professional skating career stretches back to the early 1980s, with some tricks taking him decades to perfect.HBO Documentary FilmsThe film doesn’t shy away from the challenges you’ve faced on and off your board, but it also gives a glimpse into how much you’ve changed.My wife Catherine [Obreht] was the catalyst. Our connection was so special, the idea of being able to envision a life with her, that’s why I wanted to make such a positive change. One of the moments in the doc is where Stacy Peralta is calling people around me after I’d taken a heavy fall. He was worried about me slamming like that at my age. One of the first people he called was Catherine. That’s how you get to me. The person I seek advice from starts and ends with my wife.Another theme in the film is the toll skating takes on the body, especially an aging one.Yeah, I didn’t expect that to be such a focus. I understand it, but when you see so many bad falls in close succession, you don’t realize that most of my skating now is goofing around with my friends and trying to relearn fairly basic tricks from the 80s. Before I broke my leg, I think I was skating the best I have in the last five or ten years. Not the best I’ve ever skated, but the best in recent years. I got cocky on a McTwist, and that’s on me. In general, I feel like I’m a much wiser skater now. I can still get obsessive about tricks, but I can also relax. I’m much more calculated now, more aware of worst-case scenarios. I guess that’s a form of maturity?Is there something you want people to take away from the doc?I hope it champions skateboarding for them. Yes, you’re seeing the grit and hard work and sometimes the setbacks, but I hope audiences see what skateboarding can do for someone; it can give them a sense of identity and self-confidence that maybe nothing else could. That’s exactly what happened for me.For all the things you’ve gotten from skateboarding, you’ve given back as well. What can you tell readers about The Skatepark Project?When I was young, I had a skatepark in my area. It was the only place where I felt like I belonged. At the time there were maybe five skate parks in America? I never took that for granted, so when I had a position of influence, the first thing I wanted to do was provide that kind of opportunity and environment for underserved communities. I wanted to offer that to youth that felt disenfranchised like I did. That’s still the priority, and The Skatepark Project staff does incredible work; they deserve all the credit. It’s amazing because skateboarding is for everyone, absolutely everyone, and that’s not true of other sports. Go to any skatepark and if it’s light out, the park is in use. What other sports facility is like that?So what’s next?I want to put weight on my leg. I want to skate the demo at the Weekend Jam in Vegas. Before I got hurt, I was working on a new video part, so I hope to be able to finish that. The irony is that before I broke my leg I was toying around with the idea of doing a farewell tour of demonstrations. I don’t know if anyone would be interested in that, but maybe? We’ll see. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: A Pair of New Docs, and ‘Killing Eve’

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      Major documentaries about Benjamin Franklin and Tony Hawk are on PBS and HBO. And “Killing Eve” airs its final episode.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, April 4-10. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBENJAMIN FRANKLIN 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In the last half-century, Ken Burns has become among the most prominent chroniclers of American history — so maybe it was only a matter of time before his attention panned to Ben Franklin. This two-part, four-hour documentary from Burns looks at Franklin’s life and legacy. The first installment, subtitled “Join or Die,” focuses on the years of 1706 to 1774. Part 2, “An American,” covers 1775 through 1790, the year of Franklin’s death; it will air at 8 p.m. on Tuesday.JOHN AND THE HOLE (2021) 8 p.m. on Showtime Showcase. Michael C. Hall is probably best known for starring in the serial-killer drama “Dexter,” which was revived last year. But in the eerie, surreal drama “John and the Hole,” it is Hall’s character who gets put in the ground. He plays the father of John (Charlie Shotwell), a 13-year-old who traps his family in a large hole in the forest. (John’s mother is played by Jennifer Ehle; Taissa Farmiga plays John’s older sister.) In her review for The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis praised the “excellent” cast, but wrote that the underlying ideas of the story aren’t given the same attention as the eerie atmosphere. “Chilly, enigmatic and more than a little spooky, ‘John and the Hole’ patrols the porous border between child and adult with more style than depth,” she wrote.TuesdayTony Hawk in a scene from “Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off.”HBO Documentary FilmsTONY HAWK: UNTIL THE WHEELS FALL OFF (2022) 9 p.m. HBO. At the Academy Awards, Tony Hawk, Kelly Slater and Shaun White introduced a tribute to 60 years of James Bond movies by saying that no one Bond actor could possibly be considered the greatest of all time, before reconsidering. Hawk said: “Well, I don’t know about that,” there are a few athletes who you know are clearly the greatest in their field.” That the line got a laugh — more than two decades after Hawk made history by landing the aerial trick known as the 900 at the 1999 X-Games — speaks to how much Hawk remains synonymous with professional skateboarding. This documentary from the photographer and director Sam Jones gives a deep look at Hawk’s life and career. It pays particular attention to the challenges that came with his fame.WednesdayTHE KARDASHIANS — A ROBIN ROBERTS SPECIAL 8 p.m. on ABC. The “Good Morning America” anchor Robin Roberts takes a late shift for this prime-time interview with the famous sisters Kim, Khloé and Kourtney Kardashian and their mother, Kris Jenner.ThursdayDR. WHO AND THE DALEKS (1966) 10:15 p.m. on TCM. Here’s a curiosity: A vintage, noncanonical “Dr. Who” film with Peter Cushing in the title role. Shot in Technicolor by Amicus Productions, a British studio known for low-budget science fiction and horror movies, the movie imagines Dr. Who as an older human scientist who, in his efforts to invent a time machine, accidentally transports himself and a few companions (including two granddaughters) to another planet, where they get mixed up in a battle of good versus evil.FridayA BLACK LADY SKETCH SHOW 11 p.m. on HBO. Puppets, cannibalism and a “funeral ball” with a dance floor are some of the things teased in a recent trailer for the new, third season of Robin Thede’s successful sketch comedy show, which debuts Friday. Like the previous two seasons, Season 3 has a stacked lineup of guests, including Wanda Sykes, Jay Pharoah and Ava DuVernay.SaturdayJoaquin Phoenix and Woody Norman in “C’Mon C’Mon.”A24 FilmsC’MON C’MON (2021) 8 p.m. on Showtime 2. Joaquin Phoenix plays an uncle who steps in to parent his nephew in this black-and-white drama from Mike Mills (“20th Century Women”). Johnny (Phoenix) is a single radio journalist with no children. When his sister, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), asks him to take care of her 9-year-old, Jesse (Woody Norman), so she can deal with a family crisis, Johnny takes Jesse on a cross-country road trip. In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that the movie can’t quite carry the emotional weight that it tries to, but she praised Mills’s ability to create believable, recognizable people and places. “Although he always lavishes conspicuous attention on the visual scheme of his movies — everything is very precise, very arranged — his gift is for the seductive sense of intimacy among characters,” she wrote, “which quickly turns actors into people you care about.”SundaySandra Oh, left, and Jodie Comer in “Killing Eve.”Anika Molnar/BBC AmericaKILLING EVE 8 p.m. on BBC America. The fourth and final season of this dark and funny spy thriller ends on Sunday night, bringing to a close the layered relationship between the former MI6 agent Eve (Sandra Oh) and the assassin she has long pined for, Villanelle (Jodie Comer). When Oh and Comer spoke to The Times recently, they naturally had only vague discussions about the ending (“we were together on set,” Comer said), but went deeper in their discussion of the relationship between Eve and Villanelle — which is itself ambiguous. “A lot of people describe this as a ‘cat and mouse,’ and I understand that within the first season,” Oh said. But, she added, “for me, the show is really exploring the female psyche and how these two female characters need one another.”ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN (2021) 9 p.m. on CNN. The documentarian Morgan Neville (“Won’t You Be My Neighbor”) looks at the life, career and death of Anthony Bourdain, the chef turned writer and TV host. The movie presents two overlapping sides of Bourdain: It celebrates his idiosyncratic energy, curiosity and charisma while also examining the struggles that led to his death by suicide in 2018. “In many ways, his strengths were his weaknesses, too,” Neville said in a 2021 interview with The Times. “His deep romanticism, his wanderlust, his profound curiosity and seeking, were his strengths, but also things that really kept him unrooted and unable to kind of sit back and enjoy things.” More

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      Using Film to Tell a Personal History of America and Race

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      With “Who We Are,” the lecturer Jeffery Robinson and the directors Emily and Sarah Kunstler follow in the tradition of documentaries that excavate our past.For over a decade, Jeffery Robinson has been telling an unvarnished history of the United States in an ever-evolving lecture presentation. His talks, now presented as part of his organization, the Who We Are Project, delve into how racism against Black people was bound up with the country’s legacy since its founding. The new documentary, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” captures Robinson’s eye-opening account (filmed at Town Hall in New York City) and intersperses interviews with civil rights figures and others from his travels across the country.The film, directed by Emily and Sarah Kunstler, joins a lineage of documentaries that excavate race and the histories of marginalized people in America, like Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro” and Ava DuVernay’s “13th.”“This is not ‘Eyes on the Prize,’” Robinson said of the new movie, which is available on major digital platforms. “But I think it is a call to us being something radically different going forward.”Reviewing “Who We Are” for The Times, Ben Kenigsberg made it a Critic’s Pick and wrote, “It’s a confrontational film, but never an alienating one.”Robinson, a criminal defense lawyer by profession, was the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Trone Center for Justice and Equality in New York, and he remembers walking past the former Cotton Exchange on the way to work. I spoke with him and the Kunstlers (whose last feature, “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” was about their father, the civil rights attorney). These are excerpts from our interview.“Who We Are” partly aims to chart the role of white supremacy in U.S. history. How did you approach that?JEFFERY ROBINSON I say it as a rhetorical question in the film: “What if I said America was founded on white supremacy? Somebody might say, ‘Jeff, that’s really extreme.’” But when you read the words of the people that founded our country and see what they did, I think it’s an inescapable conclusion. Some people have said the Constitution was a compromise between those who wanted slavery and those who didn’t want slavery. This “compromise” protected the institution of slavery, gave the South extra congressional representatives and Electoral College votes to protect the institution of slavery, and made Black attempts to be free unconstitutional. It was unconstitutional for me to try and get away from my owner!SARAH KUNSTLER And they accomplished all of that without using the word slavery. We have a history of hiding what we mean as a country. When we enact laws preserving and maintaining white supremacy, we don’t actually say what it is that we’re doing.ROBINSON There is no way you can associate white supremacy with a law that says you cannot change the name of iconic monuments in the state of Alabama — until you understand that these are all monuments to slavery, essentially, and to people that enslaved people.Robinson with Josephine Bolling McCall, the author of a book about her father’s lynching in Alabama in 1947.Jesse Wakeman/Sony Pictures ClassicsThe film also uncovers the details of lived Black experience: for example, the fingerprints that enslaved builders left behind on walls they made.EMILY KUNSTLER The facts in the abstract don’t mean anything if you can’t connect them to actual human experience. Those fingerprints are one example of a monument to a history of lived experience of enslaved Black people in Charleston, S.C., and in fact, all over this country, that despite the best efforts to erase them, persist. The same way the foundations for the houses in Tulsa, Okla., [site of the 1921 massacre], still exist where the homes were never rebuilt.ROBINSON There was a moment when we were talking with Mother Randle [a survivor of the Tulsa massacre] and she was saying, “There was a pile of bodies.” There was just a chill that went up and down my spine — this woman over 100 years old going back to that memory in her life.Jeffery, how did it feel to share your, and your family’s, experiences of racism, like the school basketball game where the hosts didn’t want you to play?ROBINSON We went to Dr. Tiffany Crutcher and asked her to talk about her feelings about her brother being killed on live television, practically, by the Tulsa police [in 2016]. And it felt like, All right, I should share something. Dick [a basketball coach who stuck up for Robinson] was 21 years old at the time this incident happened in Walls, Miss. This is just several years after civil rights workers got disappeared and murdered in Mississippi. Where he got the courage to handle that the way he did, I just don’t know. But it was clear that if I didn’t play, we were all leaving. And he wasn’t going to put that on me at 12 years old. I think he saw me as essentially his younger brother.Could you talk about including the conversation about slavery with a man you encountered at a Confederate statue who represented Flags Across the South, the pro-Confederate flag group?EMILY KUNSTLER I felt like it encompassed the thesis of the film. I asked Jeff, “Do you think that that gentleman could be reached?” And Jeff said, “I don’t know if he can be reached, but I know that if nobody tries, he certainly won’t be.” There’s value in making the effort, there’s value in laying out the facts and continuing to do so. We can’t be frightened into silence by people who think differently, speak very loudly, and come out in force and wave Confederate flags.ROBINSON The conversation didn’t go the way he perhaps thought it was going to go in terms of me getting angry at him or something. There’s a little twitch in his face as we were leaving, and I think we at least made some wheels turn in his head.How does the movie relate to the controversy around laws banning the teaching of certain American history?ROBINSON The first time we met in person to talk about this [movie] was June 20, 2017. No one was even talking about CRT [Critical Race Theory] back then. It would have been like, “What is that, a breakfast cereal or something?” So this was not done in response to those laws. But those laws coming up can tell you how afraid people are of the information that’s in this film.This goes to the concept of “the minds of the rising generation.” All the way back in 1837, John C. Calhoun, one of the most virulent racists in American history, was saying that we can’t teach children in school about the abolition of slavery, because if we teach that, slavery is done for. The day before the [Trump] administration left office, they put out something called “The 1776 Report” that talked about a return to patriotic education, and they use the exact same quote that John C. Calhoun did: “the minds of the rising generation.”SARAH KUNSTLER Before there were anti-CRT laws, there were textbook wars. So there’s an unending battle of what and how much our children are taught in school about our nation’s history. One of the most compelling things about Jeff’s talk is that he goes back to primary sources. You don’t need to just learn it in school. You can seek it out for yourself. More

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      ‘Babi Yar: Context’ Review: Unearthing Footage of a Nazi Massacre

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      Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, about the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews in 1941, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own.Over two days in September, 1941, German soldiers, assisted by Ukrainian collaborators, murdered 33,771 Jews at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kyiv. The massacre was one of the earliest and deadliest episodes in what is sometimes called the “holocaust by bullets,” a phase of the Nazi genocide that took place outside the mechanized slaughter of the death camps. These mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, are estimated to have taken at least 1.5 million lives.The Ukrainian-born filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s new documentary, consisting of archival footage interspersed with a few tersely informative title cards, is called “Babi Yar: Context.” What’s meant by “context” isn’t so much a broad, explanation of the event — such as one finds in the historian Timothy Snyder’s book “Bloodlands” — as a detailed visual narrative with a hole in the middle.When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, they brought movie cameras as well as rifles. So did the Soviet Army when it took back Kyiv in 1943. Some of those cameras were instruments of propaganda; others were wielded by amateurs. The two sides left behind an extensive cinematic record, a pool of images that have mostly languished unseen since the end of the war. Weaving them together and dubbing in sound (the rumble of tanks and the murmur of crowds, with an occasional snippet of intelligible speech), Loznitsa has assembled a wrenching and revelatory collage.The killing itself took place off camera. What is astonishing is how thoroughly nearly everything that happened before and after the massacre was documented, in black-and-white and sometimes in color. The detail is unsparing and relentless: farms and villages set on fire by German soldiers; Jews being rounded up, humiliated and beaten; snowy fields strewn with frozen corpses; bombs exploding in downtown Kyiv; the public hanging of 12 Germans convicted of atrocities after the war.Though there is a military and political narrative to be gleaned from all of this, Loznitsa’s method (displayed in earlier found-footage films like “State Funeral,” about the aftermath of Stalin’s death) is to allow the human reality to speak for itself. A few prominent officials are identified — you may recognize Nikita S. Khrushchev, who became the leader of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic soon after the Germans were driven out — but what the film displays most vividly is the intense individuality of anonymous, ordinary people. History is a catalog of faces: city-dwellers and peasants; victims, perpetrators and bystanders; Germans, Jews, Russians and Ukrainians.Mostly, these people don’t speak. Toward the end, there are scenes of courtroom testimony, during which a German soldier and several witnesses and survivors talk about what happened at Babi Yar. Their words, in the absence of images, have a harrowing intensity beyond what any pictures might convey. So does the Soviet Jewish writer Vasily Grossman’s 1943 essay “Ukraine Without Jews,” quoted onscreen to emphasize the enormity of what can’t be shown.Much of the rest of “Babi Yar: Context” works the other way around, finding an eloquence in actions and gestures that words might not supply. And also an element of indeterminacy, as you try to read the thoughts and feelings on those faces.There is a political, moral dimension to the work of interpretation that Loznitsa compels. After Kyiv, other cities like Lviv fall to the Germans; the streets fill with Ukrainians celebrating their victory as liberation from Soviet oppression. Girls in traditional costumes present bouquets of flowers to Nazi officers, and banners are hoisted proclaiming the glory of Adolf Hitler and the Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera. When Jews are rounded up, harassed and brutalized, local civilians are on hand to participate.Later, there are parades and flowers to welcome the Red Army. Hitler’s likeness is taken down and replaced with Stalin’s. You might wonder about the composition of the crowds. Did some of the same people who welcomed the German army as liberators also turn out to support the Soviet army’s return? Did residents of Kyiv who cheered the arrival of Nazi fighters also cheer their execution?Forcing you to think about these questions is one of the ways Loznitsa’s film draws you closer to the horror at its center, stripping away the easy judgment of hindsight as well as the layers of forgetting and distortion that accumulated around the massacre in subsequent decades.And of course “Babi Yar: Context,” completed before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, arrives in theaters with a grim context of its own. The Babi Yar Memorial near Kyiv was damaged in early March by a Russian missile. Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, has claimed that one of his goals is the “denazification” of Ukraine, whose current president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish. The past that Loznitsa excavates casts its shadow on the present. Knowing about it won’t make anything easier, but not knowing can make everything worse.Babi Yar: ContextNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More