Movie review by Greg Carlson

A captivating lead performance by Lene Cecilia Sparrok anchors the stout and handsome “Sami Blood,” winner of the award for Best Narrative Feature at the 2018 Fargo Film Festival. Set principally in the 1930s, director Amanda Kernell’s inaugural feature film identifies fiercely and intimately with Sparrok’s teenage Elle-Marja, who plots to leave her family and way of life for a different future in the city. A member of the indigenous Scandinavian people known as the Sami, Elle-Marja has grown up participating in the semi-nomadic reindeer herding traditionally identified as one of the main livelihoods of the group.

“Sami Blood” debuted at the 2016 Venice Film Festival, earning a pair of key awards before moving through additional festival successes. Interestingly, the near present-day sections of the film that offer a framing device tracking the now almost 80-year-old Elle-Marja (the older version of the character is played by Maj-Doris Rimpi) are incorporated into the feature directly from Kernell’s short “Stoerre Vaerie” — known in English as “Northern Great Mountains” — which showed at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.

The Sami people have faced institutionalized racism and government-supported discrimination for centuries, a reality that Kernell makes crystal clear in both the contemporary and period eras she depicts. Additionally, the director’s decision to shoot on location constructs a layer of documentary-like realism. The audience accompanies Elle-Marja in both the rural and semi-urban places she visits, and Kernell is especially good at communicating tiny details of emotional identification. The proximity to animals and the joy of a bracing and cleansing dip contrast sharply with the adrenalized fear lit up by a group of bullies. The awful result of the encounter with the latter functions for the remainder of the story as a symbolic marker of Elle-Marja’s permanent link to her culture.  

Kernell’s own heritage — her father is Sami and her mother is “traditional” Swedish — illuminates the movie in significant measure. The filmmaker insisted on casting a pair of real sisters fluent in South Sami, a language estimated to be spoken by fewer than 500 people, and that commitment pays off in the stunning verisimilitude crafted by Kernell and her collaborators. The most memorable sections of “Sami Blood,” including one painful reconstruction of the grotesque physical examinations forced on schoolchildren to drum up state “evidence” of Sami inferiority, directly and unflinchingly confront the horrors and humiliations — large and small — perpetrated against Elle-Marja.  

As our protagonist navigates the impossible realities outside the life she feels is suffocating her, the brilliance of Kernell’s rendering straddles the universal and the specific. Countless stories explore the liminal passages of painful adolescence and the yearning for adulthood that accompanies experimentation with grown-up desires. Elle-Marja joins many youthful literary runaways, hiding her origins to the extent that she can, and seeking what immediately appears to be an ill-fated romance with a boy met at a dance. But just as we encounter some element we have seen before, the director draws on her rich knowledge and personal experience to visualize all kinds of singular wonders that should satisfy even the most voracious consumers of world cinema.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Iconic feminist and women’s rights attorney Gloria Allred is the subject of Sophie Sartain and Roberta Grossman’s “Seeing Allred,” now on Netflix instant watch following its debut at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival in the U.S. documentary competition. The veteran filmmakers craft an unapologetically worshipful highlight reel of Allred’s life and career, successfully recontextualizing the widespread public and media perception of the lawyer as a publicity-seeking celebrity who never turns down an opportunity to appear on television. Instead, “Seeing Allred” makes good on its title — illuminating many details of the now 76-year-old’s long crusade against gender-based discrimination.

Like so many personality-driven documentaries, “Seeing Allred” appears to soften criticism and scrutiny in exchange for access to its subject. The archival content spans several decades (the movie opens with a snappy 1977 clip from Dinah Shore’s talk show) and easily beats both the fawning talking heads and the endless supply of images illustrating the road-warrior realities of Allred’s life in airports and hotel rooms. Footage of Allred holding press conferences with victims of sexual misconduct and assault constitutes another of the movie’s key categories.

Sartain and Grossman gamely press Allred with a few pointed questions, even though they seem to know their “witness” will elect to withhold information. This particular kind of back-and-forth applies most obviously to a short passage on the contentious break-up of Allred’s second marriage, but also pops up when Allred speaks to her daughter Lisa Bloom’s decision to briefly represent Harvey Weinstein in the fall of 2017. The moviemakers, favoring breadth, fare much better on the solid ground of topics like Allred’s participation in the efforts that led to the passage of California’s SB 813, removing the statute of limitations for the criminal prosecution of rape and sexual assault.

Allred’s involvement in so many cases forces Sartain and Grossman to skip enough material for an entire miniseries on their subject, even though the filmmakers take time to highlight the famous suit against Sav-On Drugstore, the membership policies of the Friars Club, and Allred’s work with the family of Nicole Brown Simpson. The lawyer exudes comfort with her own level of fame — a running gag is that people on the street frequently mistake a gracious Allred for retired Senator Barbara Boxer. Given the film’s prominent coverage of Allred’s representation of the alleged victims of Bill Cosby and Donald Trump, the absence of comment about her lengthy history of taking on clients in suits against celebrities was a missed opportunity for more richness and depth.  

The strongest and most satisfying thread in “Seeing Allred,” however, traces the tireless and significant contributions made by Allred to the modern legal history of feminism, civil rights, and the dismantling of workplace-based inequities. Allred, who we learn came to the law following a gig as a high school teacher, dispels any number of constructed myths framing her primarily as a fame-seeking ambulance-chaser. Sartain and Grossman convincingly upend that narrative by showing that Allred’s relentless use of the television camera has given voice to the unheard and spoken truth to power inside a system designed to marginalize and silence.    

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Considerably less accessible than his directorial debut “Ex Machina,” veteran writer Alex Garland’s “Annihilation” very loosely adapts Jeff VanderMeer’s novel into a demanding thought experiment bound to frustrate viewers counting on some of the trailer’s promise and premise. As multiple critics have pointed out, the new film owes a thematic debt to Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker,” a movie that Alissa Wilkinson suggests is, like “Annihilation,” about the “complicated nature of desire.” More precisely, Wilkinson claims, “What we truly desire… is what will ultimately take us apart from the inside.” That concept certainly drives a viable reading of “Annihilation,” though its success or failure resides within the eye of the beholder.

A bookend device communicates to the viewer the information that Natalie Portman’s soldier-turned-academic(!) Lena has survived an incredible and inexplicable ordeal within the Shimmer, a time-bending, DNA-blending, electronic device-resisting, magnetic field-defying region within an energy “curtain.” Flashbacks fill in the rest: Lena’s husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) returned home after a protracted absence within the Shimmer, and his trauma compelled Lena to volunteer with Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Dr. Ventress to seek answers on a new mission into the weird territory.

Ventress and Lena are joined by physicist Radek (Tessa Thompson), paramedic Thorensen (Gina Rodriguez), and anthropologist Shepherd (Tuva Novotny). Lena’s relationship to Kane is withheld from the new team members in a questionable ploy that makes little narrative sense beyond functioning as a moment of manufactured conflict provided by its eventual and inevitable disclosure. Both the emphasis on Lena’s primacy as key protagonist and the presentation of the Shimmer’s wide variety of effects — from rainbow-colored flora and fauna to stomach-churning gore — reduce the overall effectiveness of the supporting characters.   

Despite the familiarity of the pick ‘em off sequencing associated with “And Then There Were None,” “Alien,” “The Thing,” and dozens of lesser examples, Garland can be commended for resisting the more conventional pace of recent, less-effective genre sibling “The Cloverfield Paradox,” even if the action-horror highpoint of “Annihilation” is a j’accuse confrontation that introduces a terrifying hybrid certain to provide nightmare fuel to people who get seriously creeped out by the kind of unholy mergers glimpsed in “Pinocchio” and the 1978 version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”        

The filmmaker’s commitment to a more cerebral and abstract investigation of the death instinct/todestrieb comes at the expense of rich characterization — especially outside Lena, and “Annihilation” arguably would have been improved through a more deliberate exploration of the reasons why each woman is drawn toward her personal impulse to self-destruction. The final sequences, despite Garland’s bold, CGI-aided trippiness, are simply no match for anything in “Under the Skin” or “Arrival,” a pair of films that have already popped up several times in writings and conversations on “Annihilation.”   

Sexual desire, and the aching longing for physical intimacy in the absence of one’s partner, form an intriguing motif contained within the flashbacks, but curiously given the time spent on the set-up, Garland omits a deeper or more rigorous examination. That choice diminishes certain aspects of Lena and Kane’s connection to the Shimmer and to one another, especially in light of the film’s ambiguous conclusion.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Hungarian filmmaker Ildiko Enyedi, whose 1989 debut “My Twentieth Century” won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, achieved another career highlight recently with an Oscar nomination for her most recent feature. “On Body and Soul” has been selected to compete for Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards. The movie is currently available to view on Netflix.

Despite the bloody immediacy of the film’s slaughterhouse setting, “On Body and Soul” is an often ethereal and meditative romance. Endre (Geza Morcsanyi) is the lonely CFO at a meat processing plant on the edge of Budapest. Maria (Alexandra Borbely) joins the staff as a by-the-book quality inspector. Despite not knowing one another, Endre and Maria somehow share an identical series of dreams — a seemingly impossible coincidence revealed in the course of interviews conducted during an investigation into the theft of a potent dose of bovine mating stimulant.

Enyedi slyly observes both very familiar human behavior and the more cerebral and poetic dreaminess that addresses the challenges of making meaningful and intimate human connections in a modern world. The director’s interest extends briefly to a few supporting characters, including Reka Tenki’s psychological tester/human resources consultant and Ervin Nagy’s cagey, nervous new hire. Zoltan Schneider, as Endre’s leering, impolitic lunch partner, might have been given a little more to earn the payoff Enyedi prepares for him.

“On Body and Soul” is patient and deliberate. Those qualities effectively serve Endre and Maria from start to finish, but do put some strain on the movie’s secondary storylines. Viewers seeking muscular plotting should look elsewhere — Enyedi is far less engaged with the idea of a deep investigation of the meanings/possibilities of the parallel dreaming (a real shame) and the outcome of the missing vial than she is in the unique contours of the leads, even if Maria’s quirkier markers, like her comprehensive and superhuman memory, will test the patience of some.    

Enyedi concentrates primary attention on the lives of her two protagonists, shifting among scenes at the abattoir (including several awkward and deadpan exchanges in the company cafeteria) and scenes of each character outside of the workplace, often, though not always, alone. Once the mysterious double-dream motif — a forest scene in which a doe and a buck forage for juicy leaves under the snow — links Endre and Maria early in the movie, the narrative appears to place the characters on pathways that will inevitably intersect with one another. Enyedi, however, exhibits less concern for the barriers that separate the two and much more interest in the idiosyncratic details that shape and govern their personalities.

The almost painfully reserved and taciturn Endre seems practically outgoing next to Maria, who blurts out declarations of raw honesty that alienate her from the rest of her coworkers. Despite the scarcely concealed ridicule of Maria by several employees, Enyedi methodically aligns audience sympathy with her, and Borbely commits to the character’s prickliness. The dream motif unsurprisingly brings Maria into close proximity to Endre, but the director withholds a payoff related to that theme in favor of an intense climactic exchange that deftly balances on a tightrope stretched between potential tragedy and black comedy.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Given the film’s somewhat odd marriage of style — the personality-driven presence of chatty neophyte documentarian Bryan Fogel — and substance — the ugly realities of the longtime Russian doping program for Olympic competitors — the inclusion of “Icarus” as one of the five Oscar-nominated nonfiction features came as something of a surprise. But as the winter games get underway in Pyeongchang, South Korea on February 9, coverage of the Russians continues to dominate headlines in a bit of timing fortuitous to the profile of Fogel’s movie.

Prior to being added to Netflix’s catalog in August, “Icarus” premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, where it received a special jury commendation dubbed the Orwell Award. The movie begins with Fogel’s argument that the use of performance-enhancing substances offers the only pathway for him to rank with the long-distance cyclists at the very top of the sport. As diarist/guinea pig/deliberate cheater, Fogel seeks to partner with someone who can assist him with a drug regimen potentially undetectable by official testers. He intends to film the whole process.

The provocative plan for Fogel to record his own complicity in both the use of banned cocktails and the measures to obscure those drugs under testing prefigures the bombshells driving the story that soon emerges in “Icarus.” Fogel seeks out an expert in doping unafraid to collaborate with him on his wild plan and crosses paths with Grigory Rodchenkov, the former director of Russia’s anti-doping lab. The colorful, garrulous Rodchenkov then displaces Fogel as the film’s center of attention, and the drama turns from Fogel’s “Super Size Me”-style stunt to a heavier examination of state-sponsored fraud.

Currently in witness protection in the United States based on credible threats to his life, whistleblower Rodchenkov presents himself as an almost too-good-to-be-true character. “Icarus” tends to play up Rodchenkov’s willingness to spill the beans on every facet of Russia’s doping enterprise, connecting the dots all the way to Putin (even though the cover-up goes back long before the current leader of the Russian Federation assumed his job). As Fogel and Rodchenkov develop a close relationship, the filmmaker intersperses his new friend’s disclosures with updates on key players in the unfolding World Anti-Doping Agency response.

The timeliness of the Olympic connection and the broader, ongoing concerns related to Russia’s hand in world affairs — especially related to the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issuing a joint statement asserting interference by Russia in the 2016 United States presidential election — add some aspect of intrigue to “Icarus.” One can expect to see more of these kinds of stories in the pipeline.   

The extensive use of video chats on laptop screens burdens the movie with a cheap and fuzzy DIY quality unsuited to the importance of the subject matter, and several reviewers have mentioned the awkwardness of the bifurcated structure that juggles Fogel’s narrative alongside Rodchenkov’s. A section detailing the elaborate urine-swapping procedure and the process of defeating Swiss manufacturer Berlinger’s supposedly tamper-proof, locking-cap glass containers is arguably the film’s most compelling bit of storytelling, but “Icarus” concludes as a disjointed, mixed bag of half-formed hypotheses about the future of sport and sportsmanship that leaves the viewer wanting something more substantive.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Of the great designs in the history of movie monsters, there are few as satisfying as Universal’s stunning Gill-man. First envisioned by William Alland by way of Gabriel Figueroa’s Amazonian campfire story, the look of the Creature from the Black Lagoon belongs principally to Milicent Patrick. Christened “The Beauty Who Created the Beast” for a promotional tour, Patrick’s contributions to cinema iconography were unfairly squashed by jealous makeup artist Bud Westmore, who would for years claim sole credit for the scaly swimmer’s conception.

Patrick’s tale — among other things she also designed the influential Metaluna mutant for “This Island Earth” — would make a tremendous Hollywood movie by itself, and in one sense, Guillermo del Toro’s gorgeous “The Shape of Water” evokes any number of parallel Cold War-era realities for women in industries dominated and controlled by men. As one inspiration for the script he would write with Vanessa Taylor, del Toro has cited his childhood desire that the Gill-man and Julie Adams’s Kay Lawrence physically and romantically end up together. And while he’s not the only one who imagined cross-species love and romance while marveling at the poetry of Adams and Ricou Browning during their underwater ballet, “The Shape of Water” is quintessential del Toro.

Set in Baltimore in the early 1960s, del Toro’s meticulously imagined universe evokes via Paul Austerberry’s production design and Nigel Churcher’s art direction a stunning variation on Atomic Age nostalgia. Much of the action is set at a secret government lab that employs Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and Zelda (Octavia Spencer) on the custodial staff. Colonel Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon) arrives with an otherworldly “asset” (Doug Jones) an aquatic humanoid that can breathe in and out of water. Scientist/mole Dr. Robert Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) secretly witnesses the special bond that develops between Elisa and the Amphibian Man.

It’s impossible not to read “The Shape of Water” as a paean to queerness, to otherness, to love triumphing over hate. The captivating wonder of its frankness and vulnerability in matters of sexual expression, which are rendered fiercely and concretely by the incredible Hawkins, is rare in a genre film — or film in general for that matter. Nobody put it better than Anthony Lane, who wrote, “The lust that is, of necessity, thwarted and dammed in Disney productions of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is released, and allowed to flow at will, through the fable of Eliza [sic] and the Creature. So grimly accustomed are we to sexual violence onscreen that to see sex flourish as a rebuke to violence and a remedy for loneliness, which is what ‘The Shape of Water’ provides, is a heady and uplifting surprise.”     

“The Shape of Water” is also, to the shock of no one given del Toro’s affinity for the movies, an intertextual kaleidoscope of references and homages to silver screen dreams. Elisa’s apartment over the cavernous auditorium screening “The Story of Ruth” in CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color may remind you, like it did me, of the sanctuary provided by your most beloved movie palace. Dual Astaire references dazzle. Glenn Miller and Alice Faye are elegant choices for Elisa to communicate some counterpoint to the brutal electric shocks administered by the inhumane Strickland. The film’s flights of fancy, as weird and sublime as anything del Toro has done, outstrip the ambitions of a messy subplot involving the Russians. The giant-size heart belonging to del Toro, however, is indisputable. He believes, makes believe, and subsequently makes us believe.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A delectable and devilish exercise in exquisite restraint, “Phantom Thread” offers compelling evidence that Paul Thomas Anderson and Daniel Day-Lewis can do quiet and still as effectively as the thunder and lightning they made together in “There Will Be Blood.” A supremely funny homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca,” the new movie Day-Lewis claims will be his last sets the table for yet another master class in screen performance. The leading man’s perfectly monikered 1950s haute couture designer Reynolds Woodcock (as telling a label as Quell, Plainview, or Diggler) sits at one point of a triangle that includes Lesley Manville as Woodcock’s icy and imperious sister Cyril and Vicky Krieps as Reynolds’ waitress/model/lover Alma.

Alma is the sleeper surprise of “Phantom Thread,” steadily asserting herself and imposing her will on the tight siblings who seem unable and/or unwilling to acknowledge as a human being the latest addition to their house. So much of the story is devoted to the passive-aggressive ways in which Reynolds and Cyril stifle Alma that the latter’s process of awakening shocks and delights with each new revelation. Turns out she’s as good with wild-picked fungi as Katherine Lester in William Oldroyd’s brilliant “Lady Macbeth.” The way to Reynolds’ heart — if in fact he possesses one — is most certainly through his stomach.   

Anderson’s liberal use of the F-word is but one indicator of the carefully tailored comedic sensibilities of the filmmaker. Reynolds is practiced and quick with the mocking insult and the withering put-down. But the more he ridicules Alma, the more he reveals his own vulnerabilities. Vexed at Alma’s intrusion while he works, Reynolds sends her out, snapping, “The tea is leaving, but the interruption is staying right here with me.” As Anthony Lane and others have noted, food, especially breakfast, is rarely out of sight or out of mind. An unwelcome surprise dinner prepared by Alma brings out the most patronizing snot in Reynolds: “I’m admiring my own gallantry for eating it the way you prepared it.”

Anderson has made another great film, and many of its thrills turn out to be wonderfully perverse, even kinky. Especially that ending. And from start to finish, the very presence of Day-Lewis works as a beautiful feint; Woodcock expects to be the center of attention at all times, just as his reputation and station would insist. It follows that going in, audiences would assume that “Phantom Thread” belong to its biggest star. Anderson and company have other things in mind, however, and the ways in which Reynolds and Alma push and pull together and apart (oh, that New Year’s Eve sequence!) will spark with familiarity to many couples.   

“Phantom Thread” is dedicated to Jonathan Demme, and one imagines the filmmaker would have loved it. The movie presents a concrete world that complements the deceptively straightforward story events as they unfold. And yet, Anderson adds so much to the margins, the multiple themes and rich subtext will bring back admirers for second and third servings. “Phantom Thread” wonders about the boundaries of vocation and avocation, the self-doubt that panics the artist who — no matter the level of talent — must sing for supper, and the thin line that separates love and contempt.  

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Making its way to Netflix a year after debuting at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival, “The Polka King” is the fictionalized version of Ponzi schemer Jan Lewan’s jaw-dropping journey from bandstand to prison cell. Played with his usual antic panache by Jack Black as an optimistic entrepreneur with mostly benevolent intentions, Lewan is an American dreamer by way of Poland in way over his head. Filmmaker Maya Forbes, whose semi-autobiographical first feature “Infinitely Polar Bear” earned some well-deserved looks in 2014, continues her collaboration with spouse Wallace Wolodarsky, who served as co-writer of “The Polka King.”

Basing their dramatization on John Mikulak and Joshua von Brown’s stranger-than-fiction 2009 documentary “The Man Who Would Be Polka King” (also currently available on Netflix instant watch), Forbes and Wolodarsky bend toward the absurdly comic details of Lewan’s self-made empire, projecting with care the minutiae of the man’s relentlessly cultivated “brand.” From the jaunty tunes — lit up by the magic fingers of Jason Schwartzman’s clarinetist Mickey Pizzazz — to the Polish knick-knacks sold at Levan’s gift shop, one expects a certain level of humor at the expense of the small town and the small time.

Happily, however, Forbes manages to guide her performers to big, bold interpretations that skip mean-spirited ridicule for a more sympathetic look. Black is always center stage, but terrific assists from Schwartzman, Jenny Slate as Lewan’s beauty pageant spouse, and Jacki Weaver as Lewan’s skeptical mother-in-law substantially increase the appeal of the film. Along with a parade of elderly polka enthusiasts suckered by Lewan’s charisma into parting with huge retirement funds, nest eggs, and other savings, the assortment of wacky oddballs extends to a nice turn by J.B. Smoove as an overworked investigator sniffing around Lewan’s fragile “promissory note” house of cards.

Forbes maintains a tone of positivity that at times leads one to wonder how “The Polka King” might have played if some of Lewan’s tragedies, including the bloody razor attack he suffered while in prison, had been handled more candidly. For example, the tour bus crash that seriously injured Lewan’s son remains in the movie as a plot marker, but the von Brown and Mikulak doc includes a tearful interview with the band member who was behind the wheel, revealing that two members of the group died in the wreck — and as improbable as it sounds, that Lewan claimed his financial records were destroyed in the same road accident.

The premise of a Grammy-nominated bandleader convicted of fraud works favorably for the filmmakers and for Black, who has excelled at playing imposters, phonies, yarn-spinners and/or truth-stretchers both imaginary (Dewey Finn in “School of Rock,” Malcolm in “Margot at the Wedding”) and based on real people (Bernie Tiede in “Bernie,” R. L. Stine in “Goosebumps”). At first, Lewan’s fractured English — “You are such best audience!” — seems like a put-on, but footage of the real Lewan confirms the interpretation. Extrovert Lewan’s irrepressible “where’s the party?” attitude is right in Black’s wheelhouse, lending credibility to the otherwise farfetched — Lewan introducing his tourists to Lech Walesa doesn’t make the cut, but an audience with the pope most certainly does.    

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Now playing on Netflix instant watch, “Voyeur” is the curious story of strange bedfellows Gay Talese — the once influential and celebrated journalist — and Gerald Foos — a creepy peeper who spied on the guests at his hotel, chronicling their behavior, erotic and otherwise, in a quasi-scientific record book. Filmmakers Myles Kane and Josh Koury don’t entirely corral the lurid proceedings into a fully satisfying examination of any given one of their smorgasbord of themes, but the movie’s self-awareness stitches up several of the fraying edges.

Some of the film’s framework is provided by the print history of the weird Foos/Talese acquaintance. Entertaining talk show clips of Talese discussing “Thy Neighbor’s Wife,” his 1981 book on sexual practice and behavior in post-World War 2 America, connect the dots to Foos, who contacted the journalist in anticipation of the book’s publication to “confess” to his prurient and illegal proclivities looking at people without their knowledge or consent. Talese smelled a project, and following years of preparation, published “The Voyeur’s Motel” in the April 11, 2016 issue of “The New Yorker.”

Later, a full-length book expansion with the same title spectacularly backfired, as negative reviews and questions of basic fact-checking triggered Talese to disavow his own work (a position he later recanted) and conclude that things he wrote as fact could not necessarily be trusted. Kane and Koury, who enjoy complete access to Talese and Foos throughout their movie, even when the subjects appear to be on the outs with each other, depict the unlikely pairing of the impeccably dressed cosmopolitan and the wheezing baseball card collector as a marriage of opposites bound by a mutual affinity for the spotlight and a parallel penchant for out-of-bounds sexual thrills.

The directors film reconstructions of unwitting travelers observed through the custom-cut ceiling vents in the Manor House Hotel where Foos lurked in Aurora, Colorado. In one surreal vignette, Talese’s necktie dangles down through the gap, and all participants affirm that the writer did indeed join Foos in the act. The ethical questions on this point are not explored as thoroughly as hoped, and the later sections of the film turn to the fallout that strains the partnership, even though Kane and Koury maintain at least the illusion that for a time, Foos and Talese symbiotically fed on what the other could provide.

Had the directors doubled-down on mining the narcissism and outsized ego driving the subjects toward some kind of guaranteed mutual destruction, “Voyeur” might have moved beyond the intriguing but superficial jousting over just how much of Foos’ tale is true. At 85, Talese has now seen his once mighty reputation dismantled by the carelessness of his reporting on the Foos story, his sexist comments on women writers, and his utter lack of comprehension and sensitivity in statements regarding Kevin Spacey’s predatory behavior and history of sexual assault. “Voyeur” will not do anything to rehabilitate his image as a literary celebrity capable of bringing the reader into the orbits of Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, and others.