8 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
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newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town PACHO VELEZ AND COURTNEY STEPHENSThe explorations undertaken by the directors Courtney Stephens and
Pacho Velez in their documentary “The American Sector” turn a high
concept into high political drama. (It’s streaming in Lincoln Center’s
“Art of the Real” series.) Travelling widely to film dozens of fragments
of the Berlin Wall that are on display, publicly and privately, throughout
the United States, they also talk history with people who visit, curate, or
own the slabs. The film’s fascinating, far-reaching, and sometimes wryly
skewed dialogues about the Wall, paired with symbolically resonant
images of the fragments at significant sites—such as the Mason-Dixon
Line—are centered on current American politics. One man likens the
Wall to the Trump Administration’s separation of immigrant families;
another takes it as a sign of divinely ordained nationalism; and many
participants, including two college students and a rigger delivering a
slab, link the Wall to racism in America, past and present. Stephens and
Velez’s ultimate subject is the real-world stakes of the ongoing struggles
between historical myths and historical knowledge.—Richard BrodyWHATTO STREAM
Jackson). Named after a formerly enslaved an-
cestor who had spiritual powers, Eve also has
the gift of second sight, but she’s more troubled
by what she witnesses with her own eyes—her
father’s philandering. Fearing that the family
will be torn apart, and gleaning a hint of her
father’s even graver misdeeds, Eve consults a
voodoo priestess (Diahann Carroll) in quest of
justice. Lemmons briskly but deeply sketches the
community’s tight and memory-rich bonds. She
dramatizes a mighty clash of men’s social privi-
leges and women’s supernatural forces—and the
burden of moral responsibility that those forces
place on Eve’s young shoulders. With Lynn
Whitfield, as Eve’s mother, and Debbi Mor-
gan, as Eve’s aunt, another clairvoyant.—R.B.
(Streaming on Amazon, iTunes, and other services.)
Her Smell
Elisabeth Moss’s terrifying energy and agonized
tenderness reinvigorate the familiar trope of
the out-of-control rocker in Alex Ross Perry’s
explosive tale of burnout and redemption, set
mainly in the nineteen-nineties. Moss plays
Becky Something, the leader of the three-woman
group Something She, which has a few hits and a
big following but is collapsing under the burden
of Becky’s self-destructive behavior. Her sub-
stance abuse forces the group to cancel concerts;
her cruelty and violence toward her bandmates
(Agyness Deyn and Gayle Rankin) provoke a
breakup. Yet Becky’s tormented and punishing
furies have a flamboyantly poetic inspiration
that she flaunts onstage with a seductive charm
that captivates audiences. Her circle—including
her ex-husband (Dan Stevens), her producer
(Eric Stoltz), her mother (Virginia Madsen),
her shaman (Eka Darville), and her nemesis
(Amber Heard)—shares, willingly or not, in
the intricate and ecstatic turmoil. Perry infuses
the classic setup with a transformative intimacy
and pugnacity; Sean Price Williams’s cinema-
tography veers between in-your-face fervor and
breathtaking stillness. Released in 2019.—R.B.
(Streaming on Amazon, Kanopy, and other services.)I.Q.
Half a great movie. For the first hour, Fred
Schepisi’s 1994 comedy hits a high note of
tolerant goofiness. Walter Matthau as AlbertEinstein, Meg Ryan as the physicist’s niece,
Stephen Fry as her intended, Tim Robbins as
her grease-monkey love interest: with a cast
like that, it’s not hard to keep the movie kick-
ing along, and the blooming backdrop of nine-
teen-fifties Princeton adds to the sensation that
these guys are living through an age of innocence
and making the most of it. Schepisi fools around
nicely with the contest between logic and love;
Einstein and his cronies hatch a plan to bring
Robbins and Ryan’s characters together, thus as-
sisting an already benign universe. The jokes are
never a blast; they feel subtle and syncopated,
hitting you at quiet moments, staying away from
the main rhythms of the plot—a wise move, be-
cause the plot (never strong to begin with) soon
starts to crack. By the end, it’s in total collapse,
and the good mood dissolves.—Anthony Lane
(Streaming on Tubi, Google Play, and other services.)Six in Paris
The six short films of comic irony in this 1964
compilation are set in a wide range of neigh-
borhoods, from the upper-class (where Claude
Chabrol filmed) to the red-light (Jean-Daniel
Pollet’s setting). Éric Rohmer’s segment adds a
surprising dose of violence to its erotic under-
current; Jean-Luc Godard’s short—filmed by the
American documentarian Albert Maysles—is a
riff on romantic crime and punishment. The best
of the bunch by far (indeed, one of the greatest
short films ever) is by Jean Rouch, who turns
his analytical gaze upon a young working couple
whose domestic conflicts—over money, sex, table
manners, and dreams deferred—break out into
marital warfare in a single stunningly long take
that roams from the kitchen to the bedroom, out
the door, and into the street, where a random en-
counter offers life-changing possibilities. Rouch
poses weighty challenges to the unquestioned
routines of daily life; his small-scale film has the
rich social, political, historical, and psychological
implications of an epic feature. In French.—R.B.
(Streaming on Metrograph.)Wojnarowicz:
F**k You F*ggot F**ker
This deeply moving documentary portrait of
the artist and activist David Wojnarowicz, who
died of AIDS in 1992, at the age of thirty-seven,
prominently features self-depictions taken from
his copious audio and visual archives to evoke
his life and work with a bracing, tragic sense of
immediacy. As a teen-ager, Wojnarowicz fled
a hellish home life and survived as a self-de-
scribed hustler; living on the Lower East Side,
he became an artist in active opposition to the
established art world. His work, which explicitly
depicted homosexuality and expressed his queer
identity, was shown in new East Village galleries
in the mid-eighties before becoming a subject of
national controversy. Denouncing governmental
indifference to the AIDS crisis, Wojnarowicz—
giving artistic form and uninhibited voice to his
rage—created one of the era’s exemplary bodies
of work. The director Chris McKim incisively
intertwines a generous batch of audio interviews
with Wojnarowicz’s friends, family, and associ-
ates; a rich set of archival footage to conjure his
time and place; and vigorous effects to evoke his
inner world.—R.B. (Streaming via DOC NYC.)