Weekend Film Reviews

In 1972, filmmaker William Greaves gathered surviving members of the Harlem Renaissance at Duke Ellington’s townhouse for cocktails and debate. They reminisced about the movement they built and argued over its meaning as Greaves recorded everything. It was never released — Greaves died in 2014 without completing the film — but now his son, David Greaves, has finished the job, editing the footage into the new documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem. “You have this once-in-a-lifetime gathering of all these extraordinary people, and [you get] to see them remember things, and remember things differently,” says film critic Alonso Duralde.

“The very texture of the film itself transports you physically through just the color grading, and the grain of it,” says critic Dave White. “We don’t think about that much as viewers until we are bathing in the technique and formal qualities of another era.”

Duralde and White also review Wicker, Possible Love and Fatherland.

Disgraced tech CEO Elizabeth Holmes has made a few curious decisions throughout her life. The most perplexing may be inviting absurdist comedian Nathan Fielder to make a documentary about her in the 34 days before she went to prison for defrauding investors. Film critic Tim Grierson says the result is “a kind of standoff” between Fielder and Holmes, who have something in common: neither are reliable. Holmes “is someone who is playing with reality and truth in ways that are akin to what Nathan Fielder does” in his own work, Grierson says.

Critic Alison Willmore says You Can See Everything is the movie of the year. “It also becomes a film about the nature of documentary,” Willmore says. “And about how you get to know someone, and whether you can — by asking them questions and pointing a camera at them — get to a truth.”

Grierson and Willmore also review Street Fighter, La Bola Negra and Whalefall.

Billionaire tech CEOs are villainized in two big releases this week: The Social Reckoning, a dramatization of Mark Zuckerberg’s showdown with a Facebook whistleblower, and Musk, a documentary about Elon Musk. Critics Amy Nicholson and Katie Walsh say that the films, while informative, turn unpleasant men into unpleasant viewing. Zuckerberg is portrayed before “his bro-y makeover,” Nicholson says, “which is sort of sad for Jeremy Strong, who just plays him as this very uptight, solemn, serious, dour, humorless, miserable little man.” According to Walsh, Musk is similarly grating in Musk, but she argues the film has at least some merit. “I do think it’s important that people know how much power he has,” Walsh says. “And how dumb he is.”

Nicholson and Walsh also review Misty Green and Fjord.

It took world-class makeup and prosthetics to turn Tom Cruise into Digger Rockwell, the titular star of Alejandro Iñáritu’s climate apocalypse satire Digger – even though Rockwell happens to be roughly as old as Cruise is in real life. The actor’s dramatic physical transformation is one of many heightened choices in the film, which, according to critic Christy Lemire, makes its arguments too loudly for them to land. “It is frantic, it is shrieky, it is incessantly pitched at the same level for nearly all of its two-hour running time,” Lemire says.

“The approach is let’s turn everything to 11 – in fact, let’s turn everything to 12 or 13,” says critic Tim Grierson. “It’s a movie that’s really hard to sit through.”

Lemire and Grierson also review Verity, The Last First: Winter K2, and Atonement.

NBC’s hidden camera series, To Catch a Predator, transfixed audiences in the early 2000s. Host Chris Hansen baited suspected child predators with actors playing minors, then intervened at the last second with police. A new film, Primetime, asks whether this was moral. “After the screening, I couldn’t get home fast enough to take a shower,” says Shawn Edwards, film critic for Fox 4 News in Kansas City. “But Robert Pattinson is excellent” as Hansen. Alison Willmore, film critic for New York magazine, was more impressed by supporting performances from Merritt Wever, as the show’s producer, and Skyler Gisondo, as one of the actors hired to bait potential predators. They’re “terrific as characters who are much more conflicted, and also tragic, in getting swept up in this really nightmarish production.”

Edwards and Willmore also review Heart of the Beast, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother and Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!