GO THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF PHIL SPECTOR A portrait of a pop music genius as (pre-)convicted murderer, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector lives up to its grandiose title. Vikram Jayanti's BBC production is culled from 50 hours of interviews made during the reclusive Spector's first trial — he was accused of sticking one of his many guns in actress Lana Clarkson's mouth and blowing out her brains — but it's less a documentary than a Top 40 opera. The Agony begins with Spector bitching about the jury and the judge (not fair that he keeps reminding the court that somebody died). Then Jayanti segues — bang! — to a vintage kinescope of the Ronettes performing songwriter Spector's infectiously plaintive "Be My Baby." Pure ecstasy! And so it goes for the next 100 minutes, as Spector's discourse is interwoven with his greatest hits, often played in their glorious entirety. Spector's rage is constant, his grudges are boundless (Tony Bennett seems to be a particular bête noire), and his paranoia (persecuted because he created the '60s) is indistinguishable from his self-importance. The artist refers to his early-'60s hits as "little symphonies for the kids" — hardly an exaggeration. To have been in junior high school when rhapsodic fugues of yearning like "Uptown" or "Be My Baby" first poured from the radio is to have a sensibility, if not a fantasy life, in some way molded by this monster of self-absorption. To see The Agony and the Ecstasy is to be haunted by the specter of that long-ago innocence. (J. Hoberman) (Egyptian Theater)
GO BROTHERHOOD The Dutch film Brotherhood, which won last year's Rome International Film Festival, arrives with a scenario that makes it easy to dismiss: Two young men, both members of a neo-Nazi street gang, fall in love. Sounds trashy, sounds silly, but first-time director Nicolo Donato, who wrote the screenplay with Rasmus Birch, and a superb ensemble refuse to wink, resulting in a film that constantly subverts expectation. Recently dismissed from the Dutch army, 22-year-old Lars (Thure Lindhardt) falls in with a small gang of ultranationalist thugs whose leader (Nicolas Bro) sees potential in the smart, literate Lars. Eventually, Lars is sent to live with Jimmy (David Dencik), the leader's brooding second-in-command, in a small house he's remodeling for one of the group's rich patrons. And there, as promised, the two men slowly fall in love. This still sounds like a potboiler, but here's the thing: What lingers in the mind about Brotherhood isn't the details of plot but the soulful tension between Lars and Jimmy, whose merest glance at one another is a complex mix of passion, need and fear. These guys are bigoted and violent, and don't in any way deserve redemption, but you may find yourself hoping that they find it anyway. (Chuck Wilson) (Sunset 5)
GO A FILM UNFINISHED Does it matter that a young Israeli filmmaker's imaginative reconstruction of an abandoned Nazi propaganda film about the Warsaw ghetto is not, strictly speaking, a documentary? Not if it sets a crucial historical record straight. Discovered by East German archivists after World War II and accepted for decades as one of the few visual documents of life inside the ghetto, the 1942 film — in which rich Jews lived the high life in the ghetto, while ignoring or exploiting the suffering of the poor Jews — was revealed as manipulative distortion once a British film researcher uncovered a fifth reel of outtakes in 1998. Mixing staged scenes with documentary footage of starving or dying Jews, the new footage made clear that the Nazis forced more prosperous-looking Jews into service as actors in order to portray the ghetto as a place of unpalatable extremes they created themselves. Filmmaker Yael Hersonski, herself the granddaughter of a Warsaw ghetto survivor, rebuilt the rough cuts into A Film Unfinished, adding commentary from nine survivors as they watch, as well as excerpts from ghetto documents and testimony from the only identified Nazi cameraman on the project. The most wrenching testimony comes from an elderly Israeli survivor of the ghetto, who, watching the film, covers her eyes, then finds solace in the fact that she has recovered enough humanity to find her past unbearable. (Ella Taylor) (Royal, Town Center)
GO JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT: THE RADIANT CHILD An international art star by 23 and dead from a heroin overdose at 27, Jean-Michel Basquiat was drawn, in the words of one curator, to "the romance of the person whose life is so intense, it's more than he can bear." In her elegiac tribute, Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, Tamra Davis, who became friends with the painter in 1983, mercifully avoids much of the gassy nostalgia that typifies documentaries made about artists in New York in the late '70s and '80s; only one interviewee gushes that "everybody did everything then." Instead of the platitudes and fatuous art-world rhetoric that defined the 1996 biopic Basquiat by Julian Schnabel (a blustery talking head here), Davis focuses on fascinating specifics to illuminate the life and work of the man who took, in the words of Yale professor Robert Farris Thompson, "all the street energies and translated them into high art." Centering her film around an interview she shot of the then-25-year-old Basquiat — beautiful, slightly bemused — in 1985, Davis uses that footage to provide emotional heft. Though marred by erratic production values (the audio is especially crummy), Davis' homage — tender, never hagiographic — also contains some biting analysis of the racism, both overt and insidious, that Basquiat was up against. (Melissa Anderson) (Nuart)
