In the 32 months since the events of October 7, Hollywood, and the film industry internationally, has been the subject of a series of cultural war skirmishes related to Israel/Palestine.

Actors and filmmakers on each side of the conflict have assembled separate cases for why their side is horribly discriminated against, while the issue has been fought over at film festival press conferences, on stage at the Oscars, in anger over where Mubi’s investment capital comes from, in film showings scheduled and canceled, and in a seemingly endless series of petitions and open letters.

Everyone thinks they’re being “blacklisted,” but almost no one actually is. But perhaps more importantly than that, just none of this has had any effect on what’s actually happening in Israel and Gaza, or has succeeded in actually preventing hatred and bloodshed. The movie industry’s role in the conflict, in the grand scheme of things, is pretty minor.

But there was one story this week that scrambled things a bit: Nadav Lapid, the Israel-born director of Yes, was set to participate in the jury at the Marseille International Film Festival, but pulled out, following “pressure from pro-Palestinian filmmakers,” who had threatened to pull out of the festival altogether if Lapid was invited.

This led, however, to yet another open letter, this time from hundreds of people in the French film industry — later joined by others, including the also Israel-born Natalie Portman — calling the festival boycott of Lapid “an intellectual failure.”

A lot of the coverage of this has painted Nadav Lapid as a left-of-center liberal Zionist who’s merely an opponent of the Netanyahu government, but that’s really not accurate at all: Lapid, who was born in Israel but long ago decamped to France, is a strident critic of Israeli society in general, and probably more contemptuous of modern Israel than are most people who wear kaffiyahs on U.S. campuses. It’s just that he is Israeli, and shot Yes mostly in Israel.

Yes is also a pretty great movie — I reviewed it here — and I’m getting the sense that most of the people having this debate haven’t seen it. A lot of the people wanting him kicked out of film festivals likely agree with him on most things, while a lot of those defending him might be horrified by his work, if they ever got around to watching it.

That is, alas, the limitation of cultural boycotts. As the petition notes, in also applying to Russian or Iranian dissident filmmakers, artists should not be held accountable for “crimes committed by governments they are often the most fervent critics of.”

If anything, I hope this controversy, as such contempreps often do, draws attention to the film and encourages more people to see it. Yes, which is now available for VOD rental, didn’t get nearly enough run in U.S. theaters, and never opened in my home market of Philadelphia at all. It’s a film that’s too anti-Israel to ever get included in a Jewish film festival, but not, I guess, anti-Israel enough to be exhibited in the leftier precincts of American cinemas and film societies.

As for that other controversy this week involved an Israeli film and a festival, the whole The Wedding Entertainer brouhaha at Tribeca, the lesson should not be to no longer show Israeli films, especially Haredi wedding comedies that have nothing to do with the conflict. Instead, it’s not to allow awful people on the red carpet with microphones. You know, unless you want your movie’s Wikipedia entry to devote 80 percent of its space to a sub-heading called “Palestinian dog rape comments.”

Ben Stiller films the Knicks

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The HBO Max menu for the three Paradise Lost documentaries currently lists them as a three-part series, making them look like one of the 500 or so true-crime documentaries available on that streaming service and others.

But in reality, all three parts, released in 1996, 2000 and 2011, were made individually, and the third even got a theatrical release and an Academy Award nomination. And while two of the three films debuted on HBO, make no mistake about it: These are films.

The original film, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, debuted on HBO on June 10, 1996, 30 years ago this week. The winner of an Emmy Award that year, it’s one of the best crime documentaries ever made.

In 1993, in West Memphis, Ark., three prepubescent boys (Steve Edward Branch, Christopher Byers and Michael Moore) were murdered and mutilated. Suspicion soon fell on three teenagers who were noncomforists and favored heavy metal music, and police and prosecutors developed a theory of the case: The three teens (Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley Jr. and Jason Baldwin) had carried out the murders as part of a Satanic ritual.

Two and a half hours long, the original Paradise Lost film is told in slow, veritae style, interviewing the defendants, family members of the victims, lawyers, and residents of the town, many of whom have an openly bloodthirsty attitude towards the defendants. We see John Mark Byers, the father of one of the victims and by far the weirdest, most enigmatic figure of the whole saga, repeatedly shooting at a pumpkin, while wishing it was the three accused teenagers.

The film also provides long tick-tocks of both criminal trials that took place in 1994, resulting in the convictions of all three defendants, despite scant real evidence tying them to the terrible crimes.

Watching the film today, and especially compared to what would happen to the true-crime documentary genre years later, it’s shocking how not-manipulative it is. There’s no narration, no treacly music, and none of the filmmakers putting their thumbs on the scale or telling their viewers exactly what to think. The filmmakers don’t come on camera, no amateur sleuths show up, and there’s no call-to-action URL at the end about “how you can help.” Nancy Grace does not make an appearance.

But what it does have in common with today’s true crime landscape is how rumor and misinformation leak out and soon become common knowledge about a specific case.

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The annual Tribeca Festival (they dropped the “Film” from the name a couple of years ago) is underway in New York and continues through June 14.

I’m credentialed to cover the festival, and while I didn’t end up making it up to Manhattan this year, I’ve been devouring screeners of the Tribeca films for the last couple of weeks. Here’s a selection of documentary reviews from the festival. Unless otherwise noted, there are no announced release plans; Tribeca films in particular tend to take a long time to come out.

I’m planning to do another roundup of docs next week, as well as a separate look at Tribeca features.

Earth, Wind & Fire: To Be Celestial vs. That’s the Weight of the World

Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson has emerged in the last five years as one of America’s leading documentary filmmakers and its top chronicler of Black American music of the 1960s and ‘70s. His Oscar-winning Summer of Soul may be the documentary of the decade, and he also co-directed a pretty great summation of Saturday Night Live’s musical history.

Now, Questlove has directed an examination of the great multi-genre band Earth, Wind and Fire in a documentary that premiered as Tribeca’s opening-night film and landed on HBO a couple of days later (it’s on HBO Max now).

Something like 30 people have been members of Earth, Wind and Fire over the years, but the frontman was always the late Maurice White. And a major throughline throughout the doc is the frequent tension between White and the other band members, two of whom were his brothers.

We hear from the surviving band members, White’s widow, and even the Obamas.

To Be Celestial isn’t quite the achievement that Summer of Soul was, as it’s more traditionally structured, but it’s still a first-rate archival documentary, with plenty of great music. And like Summer of Soul and Questlove’s subsequent doc about Sly Stone, it treats its subject with great reverence.

And if you were hoping to hear “September,” you’ll finally get to at the end.

Mario

Was Mario Cuomo a successful politician? That’s the major question raised by this film, which follows the life and career of Mario Cuomo, the three-term governor of New York.

He’s pitched by the film as a “liberal lion” — a term only used to describe Democrats who are either over 75 or just died — who served as something of a counterpoint to Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

He was elected three times and gave one of the best convention speeches ever, but he turned down demands to run for president or accept a Supreme Court appointment, and he lost his 1994 re-election bid. And that convention speech, which has its own Wikipedia entry, came in the 1984 election, when the Democrats lost 49 states.

Directed by the trio of Peter Kunhardt, George Kunhardt, and Teddy Kunhardt, the film is immersed in old New York politics, which is always a fun milieu.

But the doc makes some questionable storytelling decisions. There’s way too much of Cuomo’s children, both the famous ones and not. The film goes in depth on Cuomo’s decision not to run in ’88, while skipping entirely over ’92 — the near-campaign immortalized in the book Primary Colors. Also not mentioned? Cuomo’s long insistence, which he finally backed down on shortly before his death, on never watching The Godfather.

TikTok Never Dies

This is one of those documentaries that tells an interesting story, in the most annoying way humanly possible.

You may remember that there was a years-long effort to ban TikTok in the United States, based on the notion that it was owned by a company in China (true) and that the Chinese Communist Party was using the app to funnel propaganda to impressionable youths (probably not true). What was indisputable was that TikTok’s algorithm is way better at serving people the things they want than any of the American social media companies are. Like Slurm, it’s highly addictive.

Directed by Hao Wu, TikTok Never Dies does a decent job explaining how TikTok works and the sometimes confusing battle lines. After all, the efforts to ban TikTok were kind of muddled, with politicians on both the left and right supporting and opposing. Donald Trump supported a ban in his first term and vowed to reinstate it in the 2024 campaign, before pushing through the sale. We see lots of footage of members of Congress from both parties acting like grandstanding idiots.

But we also see several TikTok creators, most of whom are the sort of people I would rush to scroll past if they came up on my For You page. I was aggressively annoyed by almost everyone interviewed. I liked the explanation of how TikTok works, although I wasn’t that interested in the creators’ individual stories.

It led to TikTok going offline for less than a day, before Trump, on the eve of his inauguration, reached some sort of deal to keep it alive. And the film ends with an even more annoying song.

Mineshaft: The Cruising Murders

This is a documentary about William Friedkin’s 1980 film Cruising, that has two stories to tell: The one about the actual murders that inspired the film, and the one about the making of Cruising itself, the protests and controversy that greeted it, and the film’s not-very-positive reception upon release.

Those are both worthy stories, although the film, directed by Jeffrey Schwarz, sort of shifts uneasily between them.

The best thing about the film, by far, is a series of testimonials from men in New York’s gay community who were around back then and, in more than one way, have survived a lot. Some of them are from the Village Voice extended universe, as Michael Musto and Richard Goldstein are both here, and many of them remember Addison Verrill, a journalist who was killed in 1977.

Friedkin, who died in 2023, is heard from mostly from what appears to be the audiobook version of his memoir, where he steadfastly defends the film and also discusses Paul Bateson, who confessed to Verrill’s murder and had actually appeared in a small role in Friedkin’s The Exorcist. Also remarked upon was that this very community was decimated by HIV/AIDS, very soon after Cruising was filmed.

The film raises some fascinating questions without easy answers about who gets to tell which stories. And it also explores how Cruising, a flop upon release that alienated the gay community at the time, has undergone a major reappraisal, even gaining fandom among queer audiences.

Time Warp

Last year on the spring festival circuit, Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror debuted, commemorating the 50th anniversary of The Rocky Horror Picture Show as a movie and a phenomenon.

Now, we have another Rocky Horror doc, directed by Allison Berg, about a local drag company prepping a production of the “shadowcast” for Rocky Horror, in a rural Wyoming town, featuring mostly queer people who live in a part of the country where it’s not especially easy to be queer.

The subjects are well chosen and have compelling backstories — starting with “Kenny Starling,” who plays the Dr. Frank N. Furter role — and their joy is certainly infectious. There’s also an interview with a guy in a pickup truck who shows off his guns and Trump bumper stickers, who then wistfully shares memories of a deceased gay relative, before stating that he wants to see the Rocky Horror show. People are complicated.

My one complaint is that the film is a bit long and long-winded.

The Lorraine

Directed by documentary specialist Sam Pollard, this film tells the full story of Memphis’ Lorraine Motel. You probably remember from history class that this was where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, but the documentary tells the compelling story of the motel, covering the many decades before and since.

For decades, the hotel was operated by Walter and Loree Bailey, and served as a safe haven for Black travelers in the South. After the assassination, it was eventually converted into a National Civil Rights Museum, a decision that was not 100 percent popular.

Throughout, there’s lots of fantastic music.

Spin Wars

This is a delightfully dishy documentary about the history of SoulCycle, the fight over control of it, and its later competitors FlyWheel and Peloton.

The main takeaway? Everyone involved in this saga is bitter and petty as hell.

SoulCycle, as we learn, started out as an elite exercise activity, mostly in Manhattan and the Hamptons, before expanding and eventually losing its cool factor. It pushed out one of three cofounders relatively early on, and she went on to start FlyWheel.

Then came Peloton, which briefly took over the world during the pandemic before suffering a swift collapse, though the film shows little interest in the Peloton story.

But while we’re dealing with SoulCycle, there’s a lot about sexualization of instructors both of the same-sex and opposite-sex varieties, and yes, we get to hear the Dave Portnoy story. We also get to hear the phrase “It’s not often I say ‘Fuck that guy in the eye socket, but…”

The Tribeca Festival continues through June 14.

With Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg revisits several themes he’s tackled throughout his long career, most notably human-alien contact and the revisiting of childhood trauma.

But he handles both in a way that feels original, or at least different from the director’s past treatments of such subjects. If anything, between the futuristic technology and the numerous chase scenes, it feels more like Minority Report than any of Spielberg’s previous alien-related pictures.

I am a hardened skeptic when it comes to alien stuff, and especially conspiracies more broadly. But I was sold on this film, which represents Spielberg’s first new film since The Fabelmans in 2022, and arrives a few months before the director’s 80th birthday.

While Spielberg has the “story by” credit, the screenwriter is David Koepp, who previously worked with the director on several films, including Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds. The script reportedly went through more than 40 drafts, but Koepp appears to have nailed it, because Disclosure Day is meticulously constructed in the way it slowly parcels out information. It puts all the pieces in place for a third act that absolutely delivers.

It’s hard to describe the film’s plot without getting into spoilers, but I’ll give it a shot: At a time when it appears the U.S. and Russians are on the brink of war over North Korea, there’s another war going on, over whether to disclose decades of secret contact between humans and aliens.

Much like in the mythology of The X-Files, there’s an evil corporate syndicate (led by Colin Firth) that has hidden the alien knowledge from the American people, with some degree of government complexity (yes, there’s a fantastic Nixon joke)

There’s also a rival group (led by Colman Domingo) of defectors from the other syndicate, who want to disclose everything. Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) is an Edward Snowden figure, who has stolen a massive cache of incriminating documents, with the help of his girlfriend (Eve Hewson, channeling a younger Rachel Weisz.)

O’Connor, who’s assembling a Chalamet-like resume of working with great directors, was the right choice for the role, which probably wouldn’t have worked as well with a major A-lister in the part. I also enjoyed Firth, in a rare turn as a villain.

The other key figure is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City weather woman who ends up the key to everything. I can’t tell you much about what Blunt gets up to without spoilers, except to say it’s probably the best performance I’ve ever seen the actress give.

The plot resembles a long series of chases across the Midwest, although it was mostly filmed in New Jersey. It also invents a futuristic interrogation technique called “diving,” in which a Firth appears to invade the mind of his target.

There’s a nifty action setpiece, involving a car and a train, and also a scene, involving Blunt talking her way through a crowd of people, that might be the most Steven Spielberg scene ever to appear in Steven Spielberg’s filmography.

It’s all set to a first-rate score by the now- 94-year-old John Williams, who I keep hearing has retired, at least until it’s time to score a new Spielberg film.

The one thing I didn’t quite buy into was the film’s use of a certain gizmo, which gives characters situational powers that seem to depend on what the plot requires at that specific moment; the recent I Love Boosters had a similar “you know, whatever device” as well.

The film, much like Robert Zemeckis’ Contact 30 years ago, raises the question of whether proof of alien existence might upend major world religions, although it resolves that issue a bit too easily.

There was a recent documentary called The Age of Disclosure, which seemed to posit that something like the revelations in this movie are headed down the pike in real life, although it mostly came up empty in the proof department. The most it could muster was a series of government officials claiming they have seen such evidence that they’re not able to produce. That film did, however, make it clear that religious leaders have given real pushback to the idea of alien disclosure.

I’m happy to see Spielberg go back to the alien well one more time, especially since he seemed to have something new to say. At the premiere of The Fabelmans at TIFF in 2022, which I covered, he swore that his choice to make such a personal film “is not because I have decided to retire and this is my swan song.” And while Spielberg has not yet announced his next project, I like to think this film does not represent that, either.

Almost every week, there’s a direct-to-streaming movie starring actors who are either A-listers or close to it, in some high-concept set-up, usually involving either romance, action, or a combination of the two.

Nine times out of ten, these movies are crushingly mediocre, and almost always completely forgettable. They’re the kind of films that, when I do my annual year-end countdown, I’m going to have trouble remembering anything about.

That’s what makes Office Romance, now on Netflix, so surprising. The movie stars Brett Goldstein (from Ted Lasso) and Jennifer Lopez as co-workers who fall into an ill-advised romantic affair, even as Lopez’s airline CEO risks reputational ruin from such an entanglement.

It’s a surprisingly daring romantic comedy that skewers modern-day norms about inter-office dating, although it does so in a knowing and witty way that isn’t especially mean-spirited.

It’s everything the recent Sacha Baron Cohen office-politics misfire was not, and it also smartly avoids the ugly recent red-pill vilification of the archetypical “HR lady” (the film’s HR rep is even played by a man, Tony Hale. And that’s part of another smart decision: Movies are always way better when all of the bit parts are played by great character actors. In Office Romance, there’s Amy Sedaris, there’s Roger Bart, there’s Ali Stroker, there’s Edward James Olmos, and there’s Bradley Whitford, all of whom bring it in all of their scenes.)

The film was directed by Ol Parker, who made the second Mamma Mia movie — the one that lifted the plot structure of The Godfather Part II — and also Ticket to Paradise, the George Clooney/Julia Roberts Amazon Prime movie that was also punched above its weight as a direct-to-streaming picture.

Lopez stars as Jackie Cruz, the owner of a small airline, which she inherited from her father, “Captain Jack” (Olmos), who’s constantly battling lawsuits as well as rumors that she’s slept with people to get ahead. Goldstein is Daniel Blanchflower, a British legal counsel who’s brought in to defend her.

They first seem to hate each other, but you can quickly tell, and not only from the title of the movie, what direction things are going. It threatens to complicate things, especially with Lopez’s massively pregnant second-in-command (Betty Gilpin, absolutely walking away with the movie).

Also- problematic age gap! (Goldstein 46, and Lopez is 56, although not too old for the camera to still constantly focus on her behind.) And almost 30 years after her best-ever movie, Out of Sight, Lopez is still having hotel trysts with men she shouldn’t have hotel trysts with.

Goldstein co-wrote the script, which includes some British/American culture clash humor, starting with an extended bit about how, despite British customs, it’s not wise to use the c-word in an American office.

Office Romance, which is way better than I had any expectation about, is streaming on Netflix.

I’ve been pretty clear that I’m not in favor of the Paramount/Warner Bros. merger going forward, even though it’s looking pretty inevitable at this point.

Movie studio consolidation has seldom been a good thing historically, and the merger would likely lead to countless job losses. Plus, it will leave lots of important media assets, including HBO and CNN, in possibly untrustworthy hands.

I haven’t yet heard any persuasive arguments for why this merger is a good idea, and who it’s good for. Sure, Warner shareholders (and David Zaslav) will get a huge windfall, but that’s about it.

But last week, I heard the single worst argument yet for the merger: That the people seeking to block it are antisemitic.

That’s a comment from Makan Delrahim, Paramount Skydance’s chief legal officer and, per the Los Angeles Times, David Ellison’s “savvy wingman.” His job before this one, per an LA Times profile, was “ the nation’s top antitrust regulator in the Justice Department during Trump’s first term.”

As part of the Q&A, Delrahim said this:

Politics is part of life. It’s part of the beautiful process of democracy. Generally, we are very empathetic to the folks in Hollywood, but this transaction will actually create more and better and exciting jobs. David is an absolute lover of films; he’s a filmmaker himself. For the first time, you are getting an owner who comes from the creative side.

Let’s be honest. There’s a lot of fear-mongering, particularly from people in Washington, D.C. They are running a political campaign. Some of these people are trying to inflict harm on this transaction really because of their own antisemitic views. Regulators and law enforcement officials will see right through that.

Huh?

I’ve heard some bizarre invocations of antisemitism, especially in the last few years, but this one is particularly head-scratching.

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The box office story of the early summer is clear: The new Star Wars movie, The Mandalorian and Grogu, has underperformed significantly, while Obsession and Backrooms — both films without stars or high budgets, made by young men at the beginning of their careers who got their start in the YouTube world — have been massive hits.

Both sides of this story are clearly notable. But do they represent an inflection point, after which the movie business will never be the same? No. Let’s not go crazy.

Backrooms and Obsession are certainly significant box office achievements by promising filmmakers, and I have little doubt that a lot more filmmakers are going to emerge from the realm of YouTube (and eventually, TikTok), but it’s clearly way, way too early to compare Kane Parsons and Curry Barker to the Movie Brat generation of the 1970s. Backrooms is not Easy Rider, and not only because of its complete lack of countercultural heft, and these are two guys who have made exactly two features.

Also, the Mandalorian flop seems to indicate that Star Wars is finally running out of steam, and that no one really wanted to watch a longer version of what’s already on Disney+.

But slow your roll, people. This is not, by any means, the end of big-budget or franchise filmmaking. We’re a month away from the third Minions movie probably making in the hundreds of millions, and after that comes The Odyssey, a film as un-Backrooms as can be, which is already selling out in premium formats.

We tend to overlearn and overinterpret the lessons of the weekly box office results. There was a time, in the spring of 2024, when a bunch of big movies in a row, including Furiosa and The Fall Guy, flopped, and a lot of people wondered why so few people came out to see movies that looked like sure things, and what that meant for the post-COVID box office going forward.

But plenty of blockbusters since then have performed the way they were supposed to.

Box office figures, way too often, are used to settle arguments, for and against the viability of certain stars and directors, to litigate fandom beefs, and to sustain “go woke, go broke” arguments. But they’re not the be-all and end-all of everything, nor are they a signifier of cinematic virtue.

Backrooms and Obsession will also certainly have imitators, like anything successful in Hollywood always does. But as to whether they represent an inflection point? We’re not there, or anywhere close to there.

And besides: Neither is my favorite feature debut of the year (although Obsession, if Barker’s earlier YouTube film counts, is not technically a debut.)

That would be Is God Is, Aleshea Harris’ first film, and one that absolutely knocked me on my ass when I saw it a couple of weeks ago.

This super-assured film is based on Harris’ play of the same name, but unlike most theatrical adaptations directed by the playwright, it never for a moment feels like a filmed play.

It’s a revenge story, of the Southern Gothic variety, about two sisters seeking revenge on their dastardly father (This is Us dad Sterling K. Brown, playing against type as a bad guy.)

It was not, sadly, a box office hit.

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A Prairie Home Companion is a movie about the endings of things.

It depicts the (fictitious) final night of the popular St. Paul-based variety show, ahead of the (also fictitious) demolition of the Fitzgerald Theater.

It’s one of the great movies about the final night of something, along with Goodbye Dragon Inn, Bloody Nose Empty Pockets and Eephus. (The director of Eephus, Carson Lund, has cited A Prairie Home Companion, and the others, as an influence.)

And speaking of the ends of things, A Prairie Home Companion was the final film directed by Robert Altman, who passed away five months after its June 2006 release, which was 20 years ago this week.

I hadn’t seen A Prairie Home Companion since 2006, until rewatching it this week, and it’s a way, way better film than I remembered.

Opening and closing with shots of Mickey’s Dining Car in St. Paul, A Prairie Home Companion doesn’t crack the Big Three of Minnesota Movies, which are Fargo, Purple Rain and A Serious Man, but I’d consider it a strong fourth.

The real-life version of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion was one of those delightfully corny, long-running traditions that could only have originated in my original home state of Minnesota.

It was an old-timey variety show, featuring musical acts, and the centerpiece of each show was Keillor himself sharing “the news from Lake Wobegon,” a series of folksy stories about the fictitious Minnesota small town of that name; we used to listen to the Wobegon stories, presumably as part of some best-of collection, on family road trips. (I’m partial to the Babe Ruth story, about the baseball player who had the power to hit a foul ball anywhere he wanted in the stadium; he once “fouled twenty-eight consecutive pitches off the home-plate umpire, for which he was thrown out of the Old Sod Shanty League.”)

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Introducing the monthly roundup of short reviews of new and recent documentary releases:

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist

Artificial intelligence is the hot topic of the day, and this documentary about it arrived in theaters in March, before landing on Peacock in May.

Directed by Daniel Roher, the Oscar-winning director of Navalny, along with co-director Charlie Tyrell, the documentary examines the pros and cons of the technology as it currently stands.

Yes, it could cure cancer. It could also make all of our jobs obsolete; it could take up all of our water and energy, or turn into Skynet and kill everyone on Earth.

So, really, who’s to say?

Roher, who also directed the newly released feature Tuner, tells the story through the birth of his child and his wonder about how AI will affect his newborn’s life.

It all gets a bit cutesy, while “APOCALOPTIMIST” is kind of a stupid term. And I don’t love documentaries that look at two diametrically opposed conclusions and then throw up their hands without a decision. And I really don’t like when documentaries feature a URL call to action at the end, especially when its conclusion is so muddled.

Still, I did love the metaphor, “the shit’s out of the horse, but the horse is going to keep shitting.” And the filmmakers actually got OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to sit for an interview, unlike a different documentary, Deepfaking Sam Altman, which merely interviewed an Altman deepfake.

The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist is streaming on Peacock now.

Everybody to Kenmure Street

This is an outstanding documentary, one of the best of the year, about a 2021 episode in Glasgow, Scotland, in which British immigration officials came to arrest two men on the first day of Eid. This led to a daylong standoff in which essentially the entire neighborhood stepped in to prevent their neighbors from being taken away. One man, known as “Van Man,” even got under the van and grabbed the axle.

Directed by Felipe Bustos Sierra, the film uses social media videos and witness testimony, including a couple of people who were played by actors (Emma Thompson, an executive producer, portrays Van Man). It’s all very harrowing, and also inspiring.

I admit I didn’t know this story before hearing about the film, and I visited Scotland a year later and stayed about 3 miles from where it happened. It’s impossible to watch this and not think of the events in Minneapolis earlier this year, especially the way neighbors came together.

There is that moment where the film does what a lot of documentaries do, which is stop dead in its tracks for ten minutes to tell the complete history of slavery in Scotland. It’s worthwhile history, for sure, but I wanted it to get back to the main story.

I saw Everybody to Kenmure Street last week, when it was the first showing in CineSPEAK’s Under the Stars outdoor film series at Clark Park in West Philadelphia. I’m not sure about release plans, beyond that. Here’s a list of engagements here.

The Pink Pill: Sex, Drugs & Who Has Control

This film is about the years-long efforts to create a Viagra for women, which, it turns out, is an idea that scares a lot of people.

Directed by Aisling Chin-Yee, this is a rare documentary in which the hero is a pharmaceutical company CEO, Cindy Eckert of Sprout Pharmaceuticals.

The documentary follows several years in which the company fought to get the pill approved, which ultimately happened, quite a few years after the first “male enhancement” drugs were approved.

The Pink Pill is streaming on Paramount+.

Summer of ’94

Ahead of this year’s World Cup, here’s a documentary about the last time the U.S. hosted the soccer competition. (That was also the first World Cup I ever watched, although I didn’t get seriously into soccer until about 15 years after that.)

It was a very different world of soccer, when soccer was not all that popular in the U.S. These days, every kid and even a lot of adults have a favorite English Premier League club (Come on You Spurs!) Also, while both the 1994 and 2026 World Cups are being played in NFL stadiums, not a single stadium from ’94 is being used this year.

The film uses a lot of ‘90s documentary aesthetics, and interviews most of the players from the 1994 USA team.

There’s some enjoyable stuff that I had forgotten about. Robin Williams hosted the World Cup draw! When the FIFA president announced the actual match pairings, I thought for a minute it was just Robin doing one of his funny ethnic voices. Chris Berman does nicknames for all of the soccer players, who it’s clear he probably hadn’t heard of until that moment.

Of course, the U.S. match against Colombia in that World Cup, which ended on an own-goal and led to the murder of the Colombian player responsible, was already the subject of the great 30 for 30 installment The Two Escobars. (And it was touched on in a different 30 for 30- the World Cup kicked off on June 17, 1994- famous as the day of the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase.) The players acknowledge that they couldn’t go to bed the night before their first match because they were fixated on the chase.

The late soccer journalist Grant Wahl is missed; I feel like if he were alive, he’d be a major talking head in this.

The documentary debuted at South by Southwest, and now it’s streaming on Tubi. There’s going to be a completely different ’94 World Cup doc on Netflix next month, about Brazil’s victory, and probably a lot more World Cup tie-in docs that we don’t even know about yet.

Modern Whore

This is a very stylish documentary about Andrea Werhun, who tells the story of her life in sex work, before she retired and became a writer and filmmaker.

The film was directed by Nicole Bazuin and produced by Hollywood’s #1 public booster of sex workers, Sean Baker; Werhun had served as a consultant on Baker’s Oscar-winning film Anora.

Adapted from Werhun’s memoir, the film shows how she got into sex work, the ups and down of that life, and why she ultimately got out of it. But throughout, the cinematic style is possibly the coolest of any recent documentary.

Modern Whore is available to rent on VOD channels.

W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause

An expansive, exquisite, very well-done documentary telling of the life of Du Bois, the African-American writer, thinker and civil rights activist, who had a long and complicated life.

Du Bois, as the promotions from PBS note, lived to be 95 years old, born shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, and died shortly before the March on Washington.

Most of his contemporaries are long gone, so the film has to get creative, and does so through various means in its two hours. The film is narrated, in part, by Jeffrey Wright, the film, directed by Rita Coburn, utilizes expert testimony, as well as a lot of dramatic readings of his work.

W.E.B. Du Bois: Rebel With a Cause debuted on PBS’ American Masters in late May, and remains available on the PBS app.

Third Act

This touching film was directed by Tadashi Nakamara, and was made about his father. That’s Robert A. Nakamura, known as “the Godfather of Asian American media,” but a man not widely known outside of that community.

Robert Nakamura had once made a documentary about his father, while Tadashi has a young son of his own. A continuing theme is understanding between multiple generations of fathers and sons.

After a long run on the Asian Film Festival circuit last year – it was the opening night selection at the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival in 2026 — the film debuted on PBS on May 25, and remains on the app.

Food Roots

Another PBS documentary in May was this one, in which Billy Dec, a Nashville-based restauranteur, who visits the Philippine island of his mother’s origin, to see some related elders.

Directed by Michele Josue, the documentary features some touching family stories, and also some really great-looking food.

The film is available on the PBS app.

Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure

PBS was also the home of this film, a documentary about a documentary, which in this case is David Attenborough’s Life on Earth.

Just before David Attenborough’s 100th birthday, on May 8, PBS debuted this documentary about his series, which debuted in 1979.

I’m nobody’s biggest fan of nature documentaries, but I was fascinated by this story, in which Attenborough essentially saved his career- which has since continued for another five decades.

It’s the third showbiz documentary in the last six months in which the occasion has been the subject’s approaching 100th birthday, joining those about Dick Van Dyke and Mel Brooks.

The Shooting at Hawthorne Hill

This is a documentary, part of Netflix’s Untold series, about a bitter dispute between two horse people, in which one of them shot the other.

As usual with Untold, it’s a mediocre rendering of what should be an interesting story, and both subjects are kind of awful people. Although the one who did the shooting was certainly worse.

But there are some memorable highlights, such as the male competitor using the phrase “they did a mini-9/11 to me,” his later showing up in court looking like the Unabomber, and later claiming a social media post was “threatening,” when it turned out she was merely quoting lyrics from “The Greatest Showman.”

The Shooting at Hawthorne Hill is streaming on Netflix.

A movie version of Masters of the Universe, about 40 years after the cartoon’s heyday, directed by Phil Knight’s son, written by four people each with “screenplay” and “story by” credits, and featuring a combination of homage, wisecracking, and fan service, didn’t seem like the most promising idea when it was first announced.

But the new Masters of the Universe, it turns out, is a pleasant surprise. It features a believable performance by Nicholas Galitzine as He-Man, a fairly basic but still convincing Hero’s Journey-type plot, a surprisingly witty script, and an ‘80s-accented soundtrack by Daniel Pemberton.

And Jared Leto gives an all-timer voice performance as villain Skelator, featuring a half-dozen of the year’s best line readings. If you thought Leto was over-the-top in House of Gucci, that was nothing.

Sure, the plot is a bit longer and spread out than it probably needed to be, and the CGI isn’t the greatest; He-Man’s pet tiger, Cringer, looks especially unconvincing. I’m not sure I bought the story’s take on the He-Man theology, especially in the third act. But overall, I liked this much more than I thought I would.

Masters of the Universe was a toy line before it was anything else. Between 1983 and 1985, the property became a popular animated TV series, featuring the sword-wielding hero He-Man, the skeleton villain Skeletor, and a large cast of allies for each, all centered on Castle Greyskull. This eventually led to a live-action movie in 1987 that starred Dolph Lundgren as He-Man and Frank Langella as Skeletor.

I was obsessed with this stuff when I was 7 or 8 years old; I had all the action figures, and there was probably a time when I knew the lore well enough that I could tell you the names of every single side character.

That said, this is an intellectual property from quite a long time ago, and while I guess there have been a few different reboots, including a Netflix version of the cartoon just a couple of years ago, I never saw it. My kids, who are teenage boys, have barely even heard of He-Man.

The new movie goes the origin-story route, but gives it something of a modern twist.

We first meet Adam, the man who will become He-Man, when he’s a young prince back on the planet of Eternia. The planet is invaded by Skeletor’s forces, and – in one of many bits lifted from the Superman mythology — Adam is sent by his parents to Earth, with instructions to hang on to the Sword of Power so he can wish himself home.

We next see him 15 years later, when he’s a nervous, sensitive guy in his 20s who works in HR (!) and has a sign on his desk listing his “He/Him” pronouns. The inclusion of these things in the trailer led the usual suspects to freak the hell out, but I thought the pronouns thing was just a funny “He Man” pun. In reality, it ends up creating an ironic juxtaposition later, when the Sensitive HR Guy will have to learn to be a world-beating warrior.

Before long, he’s back on Eternia to join up with his allies, including Idris Elba doing a drunk fallen-from-grace version of Man-at-Arms, and Camila Mendes as potential love interest Teela. Skelator’s main sidekick, Evil-Lyn, is played by a welcome Alison Brie.

Not every henchman or woman is giving a character to play, but I especially enjoyed the robot voiced by Kristen Wiig, and Fisto, played by Game of Thrones vet Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, and the subject of a running joke involving fisting.

But it’s Jared Leto who walks away with the picture, giving a voice performance that’s never less than hilarious.

The new Masters of the Universe movie was in the works for quite a long time, juggled among different studios and writers and directors and He-Man actors for the last 15 or so years. The Nee Brothers and two other writers have the screenplay credit, while the Nees and two additional writers get the “story by.” The director is Travis Knight, best known for Laika animated movies and another toy-derived movie, Bumblebee.

That a process that chaotic led to a decent movie is somewhat suprising, but I’ll take it.

For the past five years or so, I’ve been a little bit obsessed with the fate of the Riverview, the multiplex on Columbus Boulevard in South Philly.

The venue, a central part of Philadelphia movie theater lore, from its appearance on an Always Sunny episode to that Christmas Day shooting at a showing of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, shut down in late 2020, during the pandemic, meaning it’s now been closed for five and a half years.

I wrote a remembrance for Broad Street Review that November, and called it “the Veterans Stadium of movie theaters.” It may not have been the most state-of-the-art venue of its kind, but it was a unique place that made a lot of memories for many different Philadelphians. Also, free parking.

For a few years after its closure, the Riverview sat empty, as part of a unique, very dated real estate development, built in the 1980s, in which the other storefronts had been empty even longer. But that area of the city has been resurgent in recent years, with thousands of new condos going up within a mile or two of it.

In October of 2024, it was announced that the theater would reopen, via a company called Apple Cinemas. After that, almost a year passed without any indication that work had begun or the status of the theater. In August of 2025, there was another announcement, this time that the theater would return, with an IMAX screen- which, somehow, would be the first IMAX screen within the Philadelphia city limits since the pandemic.

Local real estate baron Bart Blatstein, whose Tower Investments owns venue, told the Inquirer in August that the theater would likely return in 2026, but could possibly open its doors by the end of 2025.

And then, once again, months passed with nothing happening. I’ve frequently driven by the location, and the theater didn’t look much different from the day it closed. The lights inside always seemed to be on, but that was about it. I made some attempts to do some reporting on this, but I couldn’t seem to get a hold of anyone either on the theater side or the real estate side.

It isn’t especially rare in Philadelphia for massive real estate projects to be announced, and then get delayed indefinitely, or perhaps never happen at all. Whatever the exact opposite is of the Abundance Agenda, that’s long been the order of the day in Philly.

In recent months, there were indications of progress with the Riverview here and there. In February, a guy on one of those “Abandoned Places” Facebook groups posted some recent pictures from inside the theater, indicating that some internal work was happening. Various Reddit rumors indicated the same, and just a couple of weeks ago, I saw a crane in the parking lot outside the theater, the first indication I’d seen in recent memory of external work.

But alas, on Friday, Michael Tanenbaum of PhillyVoice reported that the theater’s return had been “scrapped,” due to a dispute between Apple Cinemas and Blatstein.

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Obsession and Backrooms are a pair of horror movies currently in theaters. Obsession came out a few weeks ago and is already a huge hit, while Backrooms comes out today and is tracking very positively.

I liked Obsession a lot and Backrooms quite a bit less, but the two films have several things in common: both are directed by very young men (26-year-old Curry Barker and 20-year-old Kane Parsons, respectively) who got their start in the trenches of YouTube.

It seems like there is a great deal of young filmmaking talent that’s cut their teeth on YouTube and other social media sites, and that type of talent crossing over to the movies is a trend that’s likely to continue for the foreseeable future. We’re likely only a year or two from the first TikTok auteur-turned-mainstream filmmaker.

Also, both Barker and Parsons have been the subject of baseless rumors that they didn’t really direct their movies, and that they served as frontmen or “ghost directors.” This seems to be based on absolutely nothing solid, a misunderstood tweet here or a misread trade story there, but within days, actors from Backrooms were addressing this, issuing strong denials that its director wasn’t really its director.

This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon; I remember in the ‘90s when the hot rumor was that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck hadn’t really written Good Will Hunting and William Goldman had. If that had been true, Goldman probably would have rushed the stage and snatched the Oscars right out of their hands.

But come on, people: There’s such a thing as the Director’s Guild, and they tend to frown upon the director not really being the director.

Another thing that’s out there everywhere this week, despite being based on absolutely nothing? The idea that Tom Hardy left the TV show Mobland over Israel/Palestine disputes between Hardy and co-star Helen Mirren. Way too much of that these days.

Doing it for Johnny, on stage

The Outsiders was a novel (by S.E. Hinton) in 1967, the year when it was set, and became a movie in 1985 1983, directed by, of all people, Francis Ford Coppola. In 2023, it became a Broadway musical, winning the Tony for Best Musical. There are various differences between the versions, but at heart it’s about a battle between “greasers” good) and Socs (bad) in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

On Wednesday night, I saw the touring production, and it’s a really fantastic reimagining. The musical numbers are strong, it’s well-staged, and the rather dark story never lacks gravitas. Even if I didn’t quite buy Ponyboy being 14…

It’s at the Academy of Music in Philly through June 7, and the tour continues after that.

Neal McDonough: Still not “blacklisted” for not kissing his co-stars

I swear they’re just teasing us at this point:

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Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life is a nearly two-and-a-half-hour movie with, at best, about 20 minutes of plot. It spends the rest of that time on atmosphere, cosmic flights of fancy, and other things devoted to the overarching bigness of what it’s trying to do.

The film opened in theaters on May 27, 2011, 15 years ago this week, after premiering at Cannes about two weeks earlier.

The Tree of Life, which Malick wrote and directed, is a movie about a family and a tragedy, but it’s also about the dinosaurs, space, the ocean, and literally everything else in the universe. It’s a movie about what it’s about, but it’s also a movie about Life Itself.

The main story of the film follows the O’Brien family, whose parents are Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, and who have three boys. They’re a pretty typical white family of middle America and mid-century, likely inspired to some degree by Malick’s own Texas childhood. (Brad Pitt starred in The Tree of Life the same year he starred in Moneyball. He was, at that point in his career, a bit of a counterintuitive choice to play a cruel, domineering dad, but it’s a choice that worked. Chastain, meanwhile, was in his first major role.)

We soon realize that the family was shattered by both a crushing tragedy and the revelation that things weren’t as happy with them as they first appeared.

One of the sons, Jack, is played as an adult by Sean Penn, mostly wordlessly processing what had happened to him decades earlier, ambling around in an antiseptic modern city that’s probably meant to be Houston. Re-watching The Tree of Life reminds me that the ending of One Battle After Another was not the first time we saw an addled Sean Penn, slumped in a chair in the upper levels of a skyscraper.

But there’s a lot more to The Tree of Life than just that family story. Throughout, it features lots of meditative voice-over, even by Malick standards. It rewinds at one point to prehistoric times, from the dawn of the universe to the dinosaurs and hundreds of years of other events. (Matt Zoller Seitz wrote one of my favorite pieces about the film, which gets into a lot of its mysteries.)

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Backrooms is one of those horror movies that succeeds at world-building and at being creepy, even though it doesn’t quite succeed at being a good movie overall.

It’s got a great look, and an even better behind-the-scenes backstory, but at its heart, the story Backrooms tells isn’t all that interesting. It seems likely to inspire Reddit threads that are more compelling than the movie itself.

Quite possibly the first movie ever released that traces its origins back to a 4chan creepypasta, Backrooms later became a series of YouTube shorts by filmmaker Kane Parsons, who was just 16 when he started making them. Parsons, now 20, makes his directorial debut with the new Backrooms movie, which is getting a splashy A24 release.

(There are also completely baseless social media rumors that Parsons was a mere frontman and didn’t really direct the film; the same type of equally fake stuff has also surfaced about the season’s other big horror movie, directed by a guy in his 20s, Curry Barker, and Obsession. I see no reason to believe either hypothesis.)

Backrooms, which appears to be set in the early 1990s, introduces us to two characters: Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the owner of a low-end furniture store with a pirate theme, and Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), who is his therapist. Both actors are fine, although nowhere close to doing the award-garnering work we’re used to seeing from them.

Clark, whose wife left him and who lives in the store, is introduced making awful, low-end commercials — the kind that wouldn’t have been out of place in the recent Buffet Infinity — while Mary also lives alone, and is still recovering from bad events in her childhood.

That’s right, both characters, like most horror characters these days, have buried trauma and demons, but we soon realize that Clark is especially plagued by anger and alcoholism. Then, one day, he stumbles through a wall of the furniture store into a seemingly endless maze of the titular backrooms. And that’s where most of the film is ultimately set.

The production design of the rooms is fantastic, as it taps into the ways that furniture stores look a little bit fake. As the film goes on, everything gets exceptionally weirder, leading up to the film’s exceptionally odd centerpiece scene, which is especially Lynchian. I really liked that scene, and another one involving the use of a rope, but overall I didn’t feel like the film held together well-enough.

Mark Duplass also shows up as a character who seems destined to pop up at the end to give a 10-minute expository speech explaining what’s really going on, but luckily, that’s not what happens.

Studios appear to have realized that, these days, horror is one of the few genres that audiences will reliably come out to see, and as a result there’s a huge glut of horror movies this season. And while Backrooms has unusually strong early buzz, I didn’t think it was nearly as successful in achieving its aims as Obsession was.

Backrooms lands in theaters on Friday.

An Autumn Summer

Actress Lukita Maxwell, probably best known for playing Jason Segel’s daughter on the Apple show Shrinking, has a small role in Backrooms as an employee of the furniture store. She’s mostly wasted in the role, but she’s much better used in An Autumn Summer, a lovely coming-of-age romance.

Directed by Jared Isaac, and pretty clearly based on his own youthful experiences, An Autumn Summer follows a group of friends, spending the summer at the northern Michigan lake house of one of their parents, in the summer before college.

At the center of the story are a couple (Maxwell and Mark McKenna) who are deeply in love, but increasingly cognizant that real life is around the corner and their love probably has an expiration date. However, the film is wise enough to stay away from overwrought melodrama.

The dad, meanwhile, is played by Tony Horton, best known as the guy who created P90X.

The film is marked by absolutely gorgeous visuals, and appealing leads. The cinematographer is Brandon Somerhalder, who lensed the Oscar-winning short The Queen of Basketball, and also last year’s Oscar-nominated documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, two other films that also looked absolutely amazing.

Released slowly across theaters throughout May, An Autumn Summer lands on VOD on June 9.

There’s a lot more to Ask E. Jean than just E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuits against Donald Trump.

Carroll, who, in the wake of the #MeToo reckoning, alleged for the first time in a 2019 book that Donald Trump had assaulted her in a New York City department store changing room in the 1990s, later filed a series of lawsuits against the president.

Juries found that Trump had both sexually abused Carroll and defamed her, leading to damage awards of over $80 million, although both are under appeal, and I highly doubt Carroll will ever end up collecting a cent from him. (Trump was not found liable for rape, which is enough of a semantic distinction that it led to ABC News having to pay a $15 million lawsuit settlement.)

For all of the many women who have accused Trump of different sexual misdeeds, Carroll is the only one to win a verdict against him. Whether you believe the accusation is likely to map directly onto how you feel about Donald Trump more broadly, I have no trouble believing it.

Ask E. Jean, directed by Ivy Meeropol, covers the Trump accusation from beginning to end, from Carroll giving interviews about the case to scenes from her depositions, conducted by the odious lawyer Alina Habba.

But the documentary is about much more than that, including Carroll’s long career as a magazine journalist and advice columnist. Throughout, she proves a fascinating subject.

The now 82-year-old Carroll, before the Trump accusation, was a fairly well-known journalist, who did an advice-columnist routine on television, in radio and in magazines. She had a really fascinating career in the world of magazine writing in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when she mostly wrote for men’s magazine; Hunter S. Thompson was an early mentor, and there are some good stories about him.

We see lots of footage of her on TV shows in the past, including times whne she advised women who are sexually assaulted to press charges, even though she didn’t do so herself, while also describing the likes of Paula Jones and Anita Hill as “wimps” for not coming forward more quickly.

The film was directed by Ivy Meeropol, the granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who has made various documentaries related to her grandparents’ case, like Heir to an Execution and Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn. Heir to an Execution, from 2004, was actually fascinating, because it was largely about the family having to come to terms with then-recent, post-Cold War evidence that the Rosenbergs were guilty of being spies after all.

She recently wrote a New York Times op-ed extolling the heroism of her subject — in which she admits she had never heard of Carroll before the 2019 revelations — so if you’re looking for traditional journalistic objectivity, that’s not what this documentary is.

Ask E. Jean, which opened on the festival circuit last fall, opened last week in New York City and is rolling out throughout the country.

The Hollywood Reporter had what sounded like big news last week: There’s going to be a new book set in the universe of The Godfather.

The book, coming out in 2027, was awarded to Random House after an “eight-way auction” — who knew there were even eight publishing companies left? — is being written by Adriana Trigiani. The original Godfather author, Mario Puzo, is long dead, but his estate has an arrangement with a publisher to publish books set in that universe, and a few have appeared over the years.

The new book, the trade pub says, is called Connie, and tells the story of the Corleones through Constanzia “Connie” Corleone, the sister of Michael, Sonny, and Fredo Corleone, who was played in all three Godfather movies by Talia Shire, the sister of director Francis Ford Coppola.

“‘Connie’ is a novel about how a woman works to forge her own way in a world that’s already decided who she is, what she’s about, and how she should be treated,” Trigiani said in a statement Wednesday. “People underestimated Don Vito Corleone and Michael Corleone at their peril. The same will be true for Connie Corleone.”

Paramount, the report says, holds the film rights, just as it did for the three previous Godfather movies. Therefore, some misunderstandings and aggregations gave the impression that this means a new movie is in active development.

But the news of the book doesn’t mean a movie is going to be made- in fact, it’s pretty unlikely, at least in the short term. In fact, there’s been no solid reporting that a new Godfather movie is anything close to happening.

As indicated by the Hollywood Reporter, it’s more of a formality:

When Paramount bought the rights to Puzo’s original novel in 1969, it claimed ownership of the entire franchise, future books included. Puzo died in 1999, and after his heirs published two more Godfather novels over the studio’s objections, they ended up in court. The eventual settlement gave the family the freedom to publish new books, as long as Paramount gets first crack at the film rights. It wasn’t personal. It was strictly business.

In other words, there have been multiple in-universe Godfather novels already, none of which resulted in movie adaptations, or even serious talk of them.

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Just one more thing on the Helen of Troy casting brouhaha, which you can now hear about in Lupita Nyong’o’s own words, in Elle magazine…

Ever since this became a controversy back in early February, the person driving it has been Elon Musk. And every time Musk has weighed in on how terrible it is for a Black woman to be playing Helen of Troy, the Hollywood trades have dutifully written about it. Variety alone has written versions of that story several times:

My question is, why must Variety instantly write up a story every time Elon Musk barfs up a movie opinion? Because what does Elon Musk have to do with movies at all?

The recent death of Ted Turner reminds us that there was a time when the world’s most famous business moguls wanted to be in the movies. Turner spent years trying to buy a movie studio, spent more time with an ill-fated push to colorize classic films, and later launched Turner Classic Movies. Decades before that, Howard Hughes was both filmmaker and mogul.

Donald Trump, in his pre-politics years, never tried to be a movie mogul, but he was always very much on the periphery of celebrity and showbiz, and upon returning to the White House, he announced an initiative (so far, as far as I can tell, moribund) to revive the movie business.

Elon Musk, though?

He’s had cameos in a few films, like Iron Man 2, and quite a few movie characters, most of them villains, have been at least in part inspired by him. That supposed Tom Cruise movie that was being shot in space was supposed to involve SpaceX, but that never happened and probably isn’t going to. He dated one actress, that we know of.

But Musk has never made any attempt to produce movies, fund a production company, or buy a movie studio. If he wanted to, he certainly could afford to, but he hasn’t.

Beyond that, Musk has never shown any indication that he cares about art or culture, or has any special knowledge of either. Every one of his pop culture opinions is pretty much the same opinion: “Woke” is bad, non-woke is good, comedians should be more free to be racist without pushback, and it’s an obscenity for a Black woman to play Helen of Troy. He’s just another online chud with bad opinions, but unlike all the other chuds, he owns the social media network.

There’s really no reason for Elon Musk to be driving the conversation about the most anticipated movie of the summer. And each time he expresses an ignorant opinion about movie casting — something he’s done before, by the way — Variety doesn’t immediately need to write about.

RIP, Barney Frank

The former Congressman Barney Frank passed away this week at the age of 86. He was a “liberal lion” — a term only ever applied to Democrats who are either over 80 or dead — and also one of the first-ever openly gay members of Congress.

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Three new documentaries this week, all of which concern people in unusual subcultures, and doing unusual things:

Stolen Kingdom

This film, directed by Joshua Bailey, introduces us to the subculture of “urban explorers,” who enter forbidden areas of the Disney parks to film themselves, steal stuff, and sometimes both. At the centerpiece is “The Ocean’s 11 of Walt Disney World,” as one interviewee describes the theft of “Buzzy,” an animatronic from a long-abandoned EPCOT attraction that was stolen, leading to a major news story, as well as one of the most hilarious police interrogations I’ve ever seen.

You might think “Disney adults” are annoying, but these people are way worse. And they’re also complete imbeciles. I didn’t have any particular sympathy for any of these people. Especially those who see fit to include their real names and faces in publicly posted breaking-and-entering videos. Or in one guy’s case, while wearing a jacket with the logo of his YouTube channel. A lot of the talking heads are from the world of Disney YouTubers, who aren’t the most reliable of narrators. There’s also a lot of the Jia Tolentino-style “actually, stealing is good” justifications.

Which isn’t to say that they’re not compelling documentary subjects, as some of them are, but if you think these guys are brave truthtellers, who are bravely striking back against The Man, they’re not. Especially the guy who declares that, like the people who actually create characters and movies that have endured, they should be considered “Disney legends.”

Still, playing the Dishwala song “Disneyland” the Dada song “Diz Knee Land” over the closing credits was an inspired choice.

Stolen Kingdom has been kicking around the festival circuit since back in 2023, and it’s opening this week in a theatrical roadshow, and also on the Letterboxd video rental store. Do not ever expect to see this one on Disney+.

Never Get Busted

Barry Cooper, the protagonist of Never Get Busted, has had a pretty great life arc, at least according to his own telling. He used to be a narcotics cop in Texas, where he had a front row seat to all sorts of police misconduct, so he switched sides and became the guy who gives people advice on how to avoid getting arrested and hide their drugs, mostly through several years worth of DVDs and later YouTube videos.

In the documetary, directed by David Anthony Ngo and Stephen McCallum, Cooper proves a fascinating and charismatic on-camera presence, as he tells his wild life story, and also puts together an elaborate sting on camera to catch crooked cops in the act. Cooper is very much coded as a He’s very coded as “Libertarian Party political candidate,” which he of course once was.

Other characters include a Texas prosecutor named “Joe Commander” (yes, that’s his name) as well as the notorious TV lawyer Adam Reposa. The film depicts what it describes as "some real cloak-and-dagger, Breaking Bad, Ozarks shit.”

Never Got Busted had a run last year on the festival circuit, and I remember it being recommended by several people when it played at the Philadelphia Film Festival last fall. The documentary was posted in full to Cooper’s YouTube channel earlier this month, which is where I watched it, although it appears to no longer be posted, although it is streaming on Paramount+ in Canada.

The Python Hunt

Directed by Xander Robin and produced by Lance Oppenheim, The Python Hunt is of a piece with certain recent documentaries and docuseries like Tiger King, Neighbors, and the Oppenheim-directed Ren Faire- it depicts a rural, very American subculture, and the wild characters within it.

In what one subject accurately describes as “a Florida-ass event,” The Python Hunt depicts the Florida Python Challenge, which is a state-sanctioned competition to remove invasive pythons from the Florida Everglades, usually by violent means.

We’re introduced to several different rival teams, some local to the Florida swamps, and others from further away, and there are some serious narcissicism-of-small-differences rivalries among the teams. Some want to preserve the ecosystem, while others are a bit more bloodthirsty. Throughout, the film preserves its subjects’ dignity; this is not the place for lazy “Florida Man” jokes.

Beyond the characters, it’s just a visually gorgeous documentary, giving this odd American place its due.

The Python Hunt opened in New York’s Angelika Film Center in early May, and appears to be slowly rolling out.

Here’s what I remember most about Backdraft from 1991: It’s a firefighter movie that, while it lands roughly in the middle, quality-wise, of director Ron Howard’s filmography, is still one of the better movies about firefighters.

Also, its Hans Zimmer-composed theme song was later pilfered by the original Japanese version of the competition show Iron Chef- a property that, tone-wise and genre-wise, could not possibly be more different.

Roger Ebert’s review was in line with the critical consensus: The film did a particularly great job of presenting fire as a special effect, but in the service of a rather thin plot, based on a crime that was somewhat convoluted.

Released in May of 1991, 35 years ago next week, Backdraft begins with a flashback to 1971, in which a young boy accompanies his Chicago fireman dad on a call- an ill-advised move that it’s very clear, from the first minute, is going to end in the dad’s tragic death. And since the photograph of the kid holding his dead dad’s helmet ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize, the tragedy goes on to define the kid’s life.

That idea was everywhere in the cinema of the early ‘90s- the movie protagonist whose Father Was a Great Man. That kid grows up to be Brian (William Baldwin), who lives in the shadow of both his late dad and his older brother Stephen (Kurt Russell, 40 at the time but looking considerably younger), a veteran firefighter. After a series of failed careers, Brian decides to pursue a Fire Department career of his own, even as he and his brother are frequently at odds.

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When it comes to evaluating new Star Wars projects, I’m very careful not to be the guy who has a certain idea of what Star Wars is supposed to represent, and therefore knocks any new movie or show that isn’t exactly that.

However, The Mandalorian and Grogu, the newest Star Wars movie and first since The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, just isn’t up to the standard that this franchise, through all of its ups and downs, has set over the last 50 years.

There are quite a few reasons why: The storytelling is disjointed, the action sequences are subpar, the visual style is bland and uninteresting, and it doesn’t really do anything creative or inventive with established Star Wars lore.

It feels less like a movie than a two-or-three episode arc of the TV series, and it’s not a surprise at all that it was first developed as a fourth season. The best Star Wars movies have magical moments that people seeing them are going to remember for the rest of their lives, but The Mandalorian and Grogu lack them.

In other words, it doesn’t feel special. It feels like television.

There are some decent ideas here and there, at the margins. But overall, this is a big miss.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is, of course, a continuation of The Mandalorian, which was both the first-ever Star Wars live-action series, and the first original show at the launch of Disney+ in 2019.

Set after the events of The Return of the Jedi and the fall of the Empire, the show featured the helmeted bounty hunter The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu, the impossibly cute little character colloquially known as “Baby Yoda.” No, he’s not a baby version of the actual Yoda, but rather a baby of Yoda’s species.

The show quickly caught on, and while the last six years of Disney+ Star Wars series have gotten a mixed reception — and that’s being charitable — The Mandalorian has landed much better. It may feature one character who never talks off his helmet and another who doesn’t speak, but their banter is nevertheless enjoyable, and the show presents a fascinating exploration of the outlaw culture of the post-empire world.

The movie, though? It builds little on the TV show.

(Spoilers from here on out)

Directed by Jon Favreau and written by Favreau, Dave Filoni, and Noah Kloor, the new film sees The Mandalorian continuing to work as a bounty hunter, now employed by the restored Republic (in the person of Sigourney Weaver), while Grogu is his apprentice rather than his protectee.

There are various sidequests, but the main thrust of the plot concerns the heretofore unknown surviving family of Jabba the Hutt. Jabba’s brother and sister, known as “the twins,” have inherited his criminal empire, but they’re pushing Mando to rescue Jabba’s son, Rotta the Hutt, who’s in bondage and forced to work as a cagefighter. This is under the auspices of a shady bald impresario who, as my son noted, bears a more than passing resemblance to Dana White.

While Hutts are, by their very nature, somewhat limited as characters, Rotta the Hutt is a Star Wars answer to Adonis Creed from the Creed movies: He’s a character in a legacy sequel who’s the son of an antagonist from the long-ago original movies, who’s eager to carve out a path outside of his father’s shadow, even doing so as a fighter.

His arc is probably the most compelling in the movie, but he keeps disappearing for long stretches. Plus, he’s voiced by The Bear actor Jeremy Allen White, but his voice is so modulated that I don’t know what the point was of hiring the actor.

Even worse, the film is massively over-reliant on a certain scene construction: The heroes are in a location, a fearsome-looking creature pops out of nowhere, they fight for a while, and the heroes win.

Most of the old Star Wars movies have a scene like this, but in The Mandalorian and Grogu, it happens about ten times, and gets really tiresome really fast. And while the show often had crowd-pleasing moments of Grogu using The Force, there’s plenty of that here as well. We also get Babu Frik and a few of his compatriots, who are this movie’s answer to the Minions.

Also, people keeping mentioning “The New Republic,” and saying things like “I work for The New Republic,” and I kept thinking they meant the political magazine, or paying homage to Shattered Glass.

There were a few elements and ideas, here and there, that I liked. Ludwig Göransson’s score is fantastic, different enough from John Williams’ traditional Star Wars themes and a fine thing on their own.

One planet they visit is essentially Space Hong Kong, and it features my favorite character: A monkey-like alien who operates a street food stand, and is voiced by Martin Scorsese, although speaking of great directors, we don’t get an appearance from Werner Herzog’s character from the Mandalorian TV show.

What’s the proper way forward for Star Wars? I have no idea, which is why I’m a film critic and not a film executive. But I can’t help but wondering, of all the Star Wars movies that were announced or developed over the years and never went forward, why was this the one that was made?