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    ‘Genius: MLK/X’ Offers Portraits of the Icons as Vital Young Men

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    “We wanted to take them off the T-shirts and make them real,” said Gina Prince-Bythewood, who created the series with her husband Reggie Rock Bythewood.The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are among American history’s most thoroughly chronicled figures, their voices and mannerisms captured forever on recording after recording, their lives picked over in book after book.By himself, Malcolm X has been the subject of two Pulitzer-winning biographies in the past 13 years and just last year Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life” landed a spot on Barack Obama’s yearly best-books list. Both men adorn countless T-shirts, posters and memes. They aren’t just people; they’re also symbols — of civil rights, of social progress, of a decade that saw many of its heroes murdered.But symbols don’t make for particularly compelling drama. So when Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Aaron Pierre signed on to play King and Malcolm X, respectively, in the new National Geographic series “Genius: MLK/X,” which premiered earlier this month, they knew their imperative was to make their iconic characters as human as possible and leave more famous portrayals in the past.“The first thing I had to do, and the first thing I needed everyone around me to do, was to stop speaking about them as icons,” Harrison said in a video interview last month alongside Pierre. “I had to live in the moment that they existed. They did not know who they were or where they were going.”Gina Prince-Bythewood, who, with her husband, Reggie Rock Bythewood, are among the executive producers of the series, put it this way: “We wanted to take them off the T-shirts and make them real and tangible for an audience. And to do that, you need to show their humanity.”Jayme Lawson, as Betty Shabazz, and Pierre in “Genius.” The series emphasizes the strength and support of the men’s wives.Richard DuCree/National GeographicWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Watch This Weekend: An Upbeat Documentary Series

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      A new three-part documentary follows a group of bright and charming high school students who are practically bursting with passion for science.“Science Fair: The Series,” a three-part documentary that airs in full on Sunday at 8 p.m., on National Geographic (and begins streaming Monday on Disney+ and Hulu), follows high school students from across the world who are vying for a spot at the International Science and Engineering Fair, which they consider their Olympics.Each student has been conducting specialized and advanced research for years: eliminating micro algae from the backyard lagoon, turning reeds into biofuel, prototyping sustainable electric car batteries.To a one, the students here are bright and charming, practically bursting with passion. And at a moment when vibes discourse would lead us to believe that every teen on earth has TikToked themselves into being a depressed robot who wants fast fashion and can’t do homework, it’s a treat — a relief, even — to encounter work that is so enthusiastic about young people.Our main teacher-anchor here is Dr. Serena McCalla, a teacher in Jericho, N.Y., whose team is such a powerhouse that families move from other countries to put their kids under her tutelage. (McCalla was also in the 2018 film “Science Fair,” which is the inspiration for this series.) She drills students not only on their scientific work but especially on their sales pitches and their answers to the judges’ questions. She’s tough and judicious, and the biggest lesson she seems to impart to one superstar is not how to win but how to lose.After the success of the 2003 documentary “Spellbound,” about competitors in the National Spelling Bee, there seemed to be a lot stories for a while about kids pursuing niche excellence. (I still think of you, teen magicians from the 2011 documentary “Make Believe,” who I guess are all adults now.) These days, we are never too far from a football or ballet documentary in which a stern talking-head reminds us that in real life, not everyone can win. All geeky enthusiasm and showmanship seems to have been conflated with musical theater since “Glee,” so it’s nice to see science research get its own moment of teenage glory.Format-wise, “Science Fair” is standard fare, but that’s fine — it’s so earnest and endearing, and it even has those satisfying “Where are they now?” updates at the end. If you need a bubbly pick-me-up kind of show, or if you have fond memories of whatever your “thing” was in high school, watch this. More

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      ‘The Mission’ Review: Blinded by the Light

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      A documentary tries to bring context to the actions of John Allen Chau, an American missionary who was killed in 2018.The simplest way to look at the actions of John Allen Chau, an American who was killed in 2018 trying to introduce Christianity to the inhabitants of a remote island in the Indian Ocean, is that they were reckless and arrogant.Nothing in “The Mission,” a documentary from Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, proves inconsistent with that assessment. But the movie strives to add context to what one interviewee calls Chau’s “horse-blinder focus,” which apparently let him think that he could convert the people who lived on North Sentinel Island in the Andaman Sea. The islanders had long resisted outside contact.The film paints Chau, who died at 26, as a young man who had absorbed colonial fantasies. He didn’t act alone; at crucial points, he received help from others who shared his beliefs. Some of Chau’s friends and associates still speak of him with admiration.In voice-over, actors read excerpts from Chau’s writing and from a letter that his father, Patrick Chau, a psychiatrist, shared with the filmmakers. That the North Sentinelese’s perspective is absent is not lost on the directors. (“We’re telling a story about us, not about them,” cautions Adam Goodheart, a historian who has written about North Sentinel Island, near the end.) The most barbed aspect of the movie, a National Geographic release, is its acknowledgment of the role that National Geographic itself has played in exoticizing groups like the North Sentinelese.Some of this background comes off like making excuses for Chau’s fanaticism. More helpful is Dan Everett, a linguist who spent years trying to convert the Pirahã people of Brazil and ultimately changed his perspective. Chillingly, Everett notes that Chau’s supporters were simultaneously saddened and elated by the death. “He will become famous in the church,” Everett says. That could be bad news for the North Sentinelese.The MissionRated PG-13 for exoticized nudity. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      In ‘A Small Light,’ an Ordinary Woman Helps Anne Frank’s Family

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      A new series on Disney+ and Hulu tells the story of Miep Gies, a secretary who helped Anne Frank and others hide in Amsterdam during World War II.Two days after the Gestapo’s 1944 raid on the annex where Anne Frank and others were hiding, Miep Gies, a seemingly ordinary secretary, and her colleague walked into the hiding place and encountered a chaotic scene left behind by the Nazis.Years later, Gies described what she saw that day as a mess of books, newspapers and other everyday items. “And then we started searching. For what, I don’t know, but we were looking for something,” she said in a 1958 interview. Among the items, she found a red plaid diary. Gies grabbed it and put it in a drawer in her office.She had just saved one of the Holocaust’s most famous accounts: Anne Frank’s diary.On the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, the building that housed Otto Frank’s office is now the Anne Frank House, a museum that tells Anne’s story.Peter Dejong/Associated PressIn the show, Anne Frank is played by Billie Boullet as an angsty girl chafing against the restrictions of German occupation. Dusan Martincek/National Geographic for DisneyThat moment, and much more about Gies’s life and heroism, is at the center of “A Small Light,” a new eight-part series that tells the story of Gies (Bel Powley), her husband, Jan (Joe Cole), and their involvement in Dutch resistance efforts during World War II. The show premieres Monday on National Geographic, and comes to Disney+ and Hulu the following day.Work on “A Small Light” began six years ago, after its showrunners Joan Rater and Tony Phelan, a married couple who used to be producers and screenwriters for “Grey’s Anatomy,” visited the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Walking around the museum and listening to tour guides, they learned that many people don’t really know the story of the Frank family anymore, let alone the story of the people who helped them, Rater and Phelan said in a recent video interview.Since then, they said, the moral question at the heart of Gies’s story — whether to do the right thing, the wrong thing or nothing at all — has only become more important, given how war, nationalism and antisemitism have once again been spreading across Europe.“When we started this project,” Phelan said, “it certainly didn’t feel as relevant as it feels now.”While the show opens with Gies, who wasn’t Jewish, trying to dodge a Nazi checkpoint, the first episode quickly takes the viewer back to 1934, when Gies was single and living with her adopted Dutch family. She finds employment with Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber) — a stern, fellow German-speaking immigrant — and meets her future husband, a social worker. Much of the first episode follows Gies living life as a modern young woman, meeting friends and going out dancing.Rater and Phelan wanted to give the show a contemporary feel by focusing “A Small Light” not just around war, but also around ordinary people’s ordinary lives being suddenly interrupted.The show’s creators wanted to give the episodes a contemporary feel by focusing not just on war, but also on ordinary people’s ordinary lives being suddenly interrupted.Dusan Martincek/National Geographic for Disney“Period pieces for me sometimes feel a bit sepia-toned, and that makes you feel distanced from them,” Powley said. But “A Small Light” didn’t feel that way. “It didn’t feel like I was wearing a costume,” she added.“These people, they had washing machines and toasters. They were living in a modern world and they couldn’t believe, in this modern world that they were living, that these things could happen,” Rater said.While the story of Anne Frank and what happened to her is well known, Gies — who died in 2010 at 100 — largely stayed out of the limelight. She published a memoir, “Anne Frank Remembered,” in 1987 and was involved with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, but much of her story stayed private.“When we started digging, we started putting together these pieces that I don’t know that anybody had ever put together before,” Phelan said. In the course of their research, with the help of a local researcher in the Netherlands, Rater and Phelan discovered that Gies and her husband also helped people hide in their own home, including two nurses.In the show, we see nurses help save babies from being killed by the Nazis, and instead sending them to live in the Dutch countryside. One memorable scene shows how nurses swapped babies for dolls, telling Jewish mothers to lose the dolls on their way to concentration camps.Miep and Jan Gies, pictured in 1957, hid people from the Nazis in their own home, as well as in Miep’s office.Sueddeutsche Zeitung, via AlamyIn the show, Jan is played by Joe Cole, and Miep by Bel Powley.Dusan Martincek/National Geographic for Disney“It is such a fascinating, heartbreaking, hard to believe story at times,” Cole, who plays Gies’s husband, said in a video interview.When in 1942, Otto Frank asked Gies to help hide him, his daughters, Anne and Margot, and his wife, Edith, in an annex at their office, Gies didn’t hesitate before saying yes.“She had no idea what she was saying yes to,” Rater said. “And then she had to keep saying yes for two years.”This was until a warm day in August 1944 when Nazis raided the office and found the eight people — the Frank family and four others — hiding in the annex.“A Small Light” was shot in the Netherlands — in Amsterdam and Harlem — and in Prague.Dusan Martincek/National Geographic for DisneyIn “A Small Light,” Gies’s decision to help despite the dangers and disruption this posed to her life (she kept the secret, brought food and books and more), her unwavering spirit and her reluctance to be seen as a hero makes the viewer ask: What would I have done in that situation? The show’s title is taken from a quote by Gies: “Even a regular secretary, a housewife or a teenager can turn on a small light in a dark room.”The show “is about your personal dynamics that are interrupted by the war,” said Schreiber who recently spent time in Ukraine raising money for humanitarian aid. “That’s part of what I saw in Ukraine. These people’s lives have been interrupted and they try to continue.”“A Small Light” was shot in the Netherlands — in Amsterdam and Harlem — and Prague, where the interior scenes were filmed in a three-story replica of Otto Frank’s Amsterdam office, where the annex was hidden behind a bookcase. (The original building, on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam, is now the Anne Frank House.)While “A Small Light” has moments of levity and snippets of life’s mundanity despite the war raging outside, the episodes gradually become more intense, leading up to the inevitable betrayal that doomed all the people in the annex except for Otto Frank, Anne’s father.For Powley, the show never felt like a period piece. “It didn’t feel like I was wearing a costume,” she said.Dusan Martincek/National Geographic for DisneySchreiber, who is Jewish, said he was often asked to play roles in Holocaust films. “I hate the narrative that we went like lambs to the slaughter,” which is common in such movies, he said.“But this felt different,” he added. More

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      A Central Park Birder Has a New TV Show

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      Christian Cooper’s encounter in Central Park with a white woman who called 911 to falsely accuse him of threatening her spurred a national outcry. Now he is hosting a birding series for National Geographic.For years, Christian Cooper has studied the habits of Kirtland’s warblers, Swainson’s thrushes, Acadian flycatchers and the other birds he has spent countless hours searching for or observing.While Mr. Cooper, a resident of Manhattan, has watched birds all over the world, one of his most frequent haunts is his beloved Central Park, where more than 200 species, including, loons, egrets, falcons and owls, live or stop by during migratory flights.He is perhaps best known for his encounter there two years ago with a woman who called the police and falsely claimed that he was threatening her after Mr. Cooper asked that she keep her dog on a leash.Now, he is about to once again be in the public eye — this time on his own television show.On Monday, National Geographic announced a new series featuring Mr. Cooper, called “Extraordinary Birder,” that is expected to run on one of National Geographic’s channels or on Disney+. A premiere date has not been released.“Whether braving stormy seas in Alaska for puffins, trekking into rainforests in Puerto Rico for parrots, or scaling a bridge in Manhattan for a peregrine falcon,” National Geographic said in its announcement, “he does whatever it takes to learn about these extraordinary feathered creatures and show us the remarkable world in the sky above.”Mr. Cooper said that he first heard from National Geographic about the possibility of a show about a year and a half ago — “I was all in,” he said — and that he had completed six episodes of the show, traveling to deserts, cities, rainforests and the rural South.“I love spreading the gospel of birding,” he said in an interview on Tuesday, adding that he was looking forward to encouraging more people “to stop and watch and listen and really start appreciating the absolutely spectacular creatures that we have among us.”Mr. Cooper has loved birds since growing up on Long Island.Brittainy Newman/The New York TimesMr. Cooper, 59, has been a semipublic figure in various ways for decades. He served on the board of directors of GLAAD, formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. While an editor for Marvel Comics, he was credited with creating one of the first gay characters in the Star Trek comic universe.The confrontation in Central Park in 2020 thrust him into the public eye in a new way. Mr. Cooper took out his phone and began recording during a disagreement with the woman he encountered there, Amy Cooper. The video showed Ms. Cooper, who is not related to Mr. Cooper, making a 911 call and saying to him: “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.”After Mr. Cooper’s sister posted the video to Twitter, it was viewed tens of millions of times. In the resulting furor, Ms. Cooper lost her job with the investment firm Franklin Templeton and was charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office with filing a false police report. Ms. Cooper sued Franklin Templeton in Federal District Court in Manhattan, saying the company defamed and discriminated against her. Franklin Templeton has asked that the suit be dismissed.Mr. Cooper emerged as a thoughtful, measured voice. He spoke publicly about what he called the “deep vein of racial bias” that runs through society, and he said there was no excuse for the racism inherent in Ms. Cooper making a false allegation against him.But he also distanced himself from the public pillorying of Ms. Cooper and declined to cooperate with prosecutors, who ended up asking a judge to dismiss the case against her after she completed a therapeutic program that included instruction about racial biases.Mr. Cooper has loved birds since growing up on Long Island and being struck at the age of 10 by the sight of red-winged blackbirds. He still listens for birdsong, wherever he is.“It adds another dimension to just being on the street,” he said. “It adds another dimension to how you exist in the world.”While making “Extraordinary Birder,” Mr. Cooper said, he added to his life’s list, glimpsing burrowing owls for the first time. “They are actually quite adorable,” he said.Mr. Cooper still goes regularly to Central Park, especially this time of year — he’s usually there around daybreak. On Tuesday morning he had been excited to see a Tennessee warbler, a difficult-to-spot bird with “a really distinctive, urgent cry” that he said sounds in part like “a machine gun.”“The second you hear that,” he said, “it’s like, oh boy, there’s a Tennessee around.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Becoming Cousteau’ Review: The Old Man and the Sea

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      Liz Garbus’s new documentary is about the life of the French explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and the fate of the oceans he loved.Jacques-Yves Cousteau died in 1997, and it may be hard for people who came of age in the years that followed to grasp the extent of his fame, or even recognize the category of celebrity to which he belonged.A former French naval officer with an unquenchable love of the sea, he combined the dash of an old-fashioned adventurer with the technocratic discipline of the first astronauts. He was an inventor as well an explorer, a filmmaker who became an environmentalist and, thanks to his natural charisma and his signature red watch cap, a universally recognized pop-cultural figure.“Becoming Cousteau,” Liz Garbus’s new National Geographic documentary, succeeds in restoring some of Cousteau’s luster, and also his relevance. It’s a swift-moving, detailed biography, recounting a life that was long, eventful and stippled with tragedy and regret.The archival footage is enthralling, whether it is tracking coral reefs and shoals of fish or glancing the remarkable history of French men’s swimwear. Cousteau’s ship, a decommissioned minesweeper named the Calypso, appears as a place of swashbuckling, macho high spirits — Simone Cousteau, the captain’s wife, insisted on being the only woman aboard — and rigorous scientific inquiry.But Garbus (whose recent documentaries include “Love, Marilyn” and “What Happened, Miss Simone?”) is after more than poignant nostalgia or a lost sense of wonder. The story of Cousteau as she tells it — aided by narration culled from interviews with Cousteau’s colleagues and children, as well as audio from the man himself — is about the awakening of his conscience, about how his fascination with Earth’s oceans turned into a crusade to save them.From the perspective of the present, it seems intuitive that someone devoted to exploring the oceans would also be committed to their preservation. “Becoming Cousteau” suggests something close to the opposite. In the annals of human exploration, curiosity is often a prelude to and enabler of conquest. And so it was, at least at first, with Cousteau.After injuries suffered in a car crash put an end to his dream of becoming a pilot, Cousteau turned to spearfishing off France’s Mediterranean coast. With his friends Philippe Tailliez and Frédéric Dumas, he developed new diving techniques and underwater breathing machines that opened new vistas.After World War II, his ambitions expanded. “The Silent World,” Cousteau’s 1956 feature film — which won both the Palme d’Or in Cannes and the Oscar for best documentary — offered “an hour and twenty-six minutes of pictorial (and piscatorial) thrills,” according to The New York Times’s critic. Like many explorers, Cousteau viewed this newly charted world as something to be exploited, even colonized. He looked forward to permanent undersea human settlements, and the rise of “homo aquaticus,” a new type of human habituated to life in the water.He also accepted money and commissions from the petroleum industry, which was eager to find offshore sources of oil. Much of Cousteau’s later activism was frank penance for this work, and for his role in hastening the fouling of the oceans he cherished. His ecological warnings were prescient, and not without cost. American television executives stopped broadcasting his documentaries, finding them too “dark,” “strident” and “cynical.”Garbus’s film takes account of the personal losses that shadowed Cousteau’s later years, including the death of Simone and of their son Philippe. But like most documentaries about environmental and social issues — and about well-known, well-regarded people — it accentuates the positive.Cousteau provides an inspirational example of passion harnessed to a noble purpose, becoming an ambassador on behalf of beleaguered and fragile ecosystems. He is determined in his optimism, even as he worries — in the 1980s and 90s — that it may be too late to save the whales, the coral, the glaciers and the fish. “Becoming Cousteau” clings to that optimism, perhaps because the alternative is too worrisome to contemplate.Becoming CousteauRated PG-13 for personal tragedy, environmental peril and smoking. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      Review: ‘Genius: Aretha’ Speaks Loudest When It Sings

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      Cynthia Erivo is dynamic in a bio-series that is strongest when it makes the case for the Queen of Soul as a creative force.At a recording session in 1967, Aretha Franklin (Cynthia Erivo) sits at the piano and plays a chord none of her studio musicians recognize. It’s “funky,” one of them says. But it’s also “celestial.” Earth and heaven. Body and soul.To create something new out of nothing more than vibrations in the air is as good a definition of genius as any. And it expands on the definition implied in the first two seasons of National Geographic’s bio-anthology, which focused on Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso. These “Think Different” poster stars were not exactly out-of-the-box choices, and “Genius,” its title notwithstanding, plodded in that mushy middle ground where dutiful biography meets mediocre storytelling.Choosing Franklin, who died in 2018, for Season 3 is a statement, not just because it breaks the series’s Great Man pattern to focus on a Black, female popular entertainer. It’s also an extension of Franklin’s own career-long project: to be recognized not simply as a volcanic performer but as a thoughtful interpreter, artist and creator.So “Genius: Aretha,” which airs eight episodes over four nights starting Sunday, has an argument, and an opportunity to shake up the format. It does — sometimes.The new “Genius” spends most of its time in routine music-biopic mode: exposition, childhood traumas, historical checkpoints. But in the moments when it finds its groove, thanks to Erivo’s incandescent performance and its insight into Franklin’s process, it socks it to us.The showrunner, Suzan-Lori Parks (a Pulitzer Prize winner for her play “Topdog/Underdog”) hopscotches decades in her narrative. One thread follows Franklin through the meat of her career (from her 1960s breakthrough to the 1970s, in the seven episodes screened for critics). The other has Little Re (a luminous Shaian Jordan) finding her voice, literally and figuratively, as the daughter of C.L. Franklin (Courtney B. Vance), a high-profile pastor in Detroit.The elder Franklin was a civil-rights advocate and gospel-caravan preacher, who, as people say of him, loved Saturday night as much as Sunday morning. The breakup of his marriage over his infidelities weighs on Little Re and the older Queen of Soul. But as a performer in his own right — Vance finds the rolling-thunder musicality in his sermons — he recognizes and promotes his daughter’s talent early. (He also keeps a hand in her career long into her adulthood.)The indispensability of the Black church to American culture — it gave our song music and lyrics — is a through line of “Aretha.” (It would make a good companion to PBS’s recent “The Black Church.”) Another through line: Franklin’s determination to maintain her independence and vision among the men in her life, first C.L., then her first husband and manager, Ted White (Malcolm Barrett), given to jealous fits and violent tantrums.Unfortunately for those hoping to hear the hits, “Aretha” did not have the rights to “Respect” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.” But this shifts the season’s focus toward more unexpected, artistically revealing choices, like her finding the gospel sway in Elton John’s “Border Song.”It’s no surprise that Erivo, a Grammy and Tony winner for “The Color Purple,” can re-create Franklin’s gale-force vocals. But her performance is more than imitation. It’s an idea of the character, her passion and dignity, her release and control, the way that music transports her.Projecting confidence and protecting her image is key to Franklin, in an industry that would gladly tell her who she is. After a frustrating effort to break out as a jazz singer, she forms a long, sometimes contentious partnership with the producer Jerry Wexler, a curiously cast David Cross. (Fairly or not, it’s hard not to see and hear Cross’s “Arrested Development” persona in his bearing and speech; while the show brings the funk, he brings the Fünke.)Courtney B. Vance playing Aretha’s father, C.L. Franklin, in one of many flashback scenes starring Shaian Jordan as the singer’s younger self, nicknamed Little Re.Richard DuCree/National GeographicThe most interesting parts of “Aretha” are in the stage and the studio, not just for the excellently produced songs but also for the series’s rendering of her art. Franklin, as “Aretha” presents her, knows who she is.She is a musician, not formally trained, but with an acute producer’s ear. (During one session she has someone return an empty pizza box to the top of her piano for the ineffable tone it gives the instrument.)She is Black, and Blackness becomes increasingly central to her music and her politics — which are also rooted in her early church experience. (Her conversations with the family friend Martin Luther King Jr., played by Ethan Henry, recall the discussions in “One Night in Miami” about the obligations of the Black artist.)All these aspects converge in the sixth episode, about the recording of her 1972 live album, “Amazing Grace,” at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, filmed by Sydney Pollack for a movie that would stay in the can for nearly a half century. Just as the performance synthesized Franklin’s history and identity, her personal vision and community consciousness, so the episode brings together the threads of “Aretha.” It might have made a strong movie, or the centerpiece of a more tightly focused series.But “Aretha” feels bound, like the earlier “Genius” seasons, to give us the usual encyclopedia entry of life moments. The high points are connected by overfamiliar biopic beats and historical moments conveyed through TV news broadcasts. The scripts and the direction hold the viewer’s hand, using melodramatic scoring and imagery and blunt dialogue. (“You’ll get there,” Wexler says, “when you realize you’re Aretha Franklin and nobody else.”)While the series has an animating sense of Franklin as an artist, she is a moving target as a person. Her determination could make her difficult, with colleagues and family, and “Aretha” faces this — when, for instance, she undercuts her sister Carolyn (Rebecca Naomi Jones), also an aspiring singer. But the series sometimes seems caught in the void created by Franklin’s careful image management; the central figure turns reserved and enigmatic at key moments.This adds up to a revealing portrait of Franklin’s art inside a fuzzier bio-series of her life, which is a trade-off, but better than the reverse. After all, the name of the franchise is “Genius,” and Parks’s story sings convincingly of why Franklin deserves the same title as Einstein and Picasso. “Aretha” is a vibrant effort to give her artistry some R-E-S-P-E-C-T, even if we don’t entirely find out what it means to her. More