ONCE IN A LIFETIME: THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF THE NEW YORK COSMOS
PG-13, 97 minutes

“Once in a Lifetime” recalls the precipitous rise and fall of the New York Cosmos, once America’s most celebrated soccer team. Over the course of the 1970s, the Cosmos were transformed from a semiprofessional squad that played on a glass-strewn pitch on Randall’s Island into a dream team of aging international superstars like Pelé, Giorgio Chinaglia, and Franz Beckenbauer who could sell out Giants Stadium and had a permanently reserved table at Studio 54. The team’s collapse was just as sudden. By 1985, the Cosmos were bankrupt and their league, the NASL, was defunct.

The saga of the Cosmos is a monster epic, plenty for a documentary to chew on, but this overambitious film cannot help but dip into two related stories, with the unfortunate result that nothing is fleshed out fully. Bookending the film are meditations on America’s ongoing flirtation with the world’s most beloved sport, a fascinating subject, but one to which this movie has little to offer, other than exaggerating the team’s impact. Elsewhere, the film takes the opposite approach, focusing on the more local drama surrounding the theatrical, Machiavellian egomaniac Mr. Chinaglia, who either made or undid the Cosmos, depending on whom you ask.

“Once in a Lifetime” is at its best when it leaves behind grand narratives and takes itself less seriously. Several talking heads offer conflicting memories of just how much money Pelé signed for. The filmmakers wisely refuse to clarify the confusion, resulting in a charming uncertainty that uncovers a deeper truth about the fundamental unseriousness of the entire affair.

The movie has other moments of levity, and certain talking heads, like the eversunny Beckenbauer and the team’s colorful goalie, Shep Messing (who garnered the Cosmos’ most significant pre-Pele press when he posed for a nudie magazine) seem to bask in the improbability of it all. But too often the film strays from this playful vein, its filmmakers falling victim to the same delusions of grandeur that made the Cosmos a brief success yet doomed them to ultimate failure.

– David Grosz

HEADING SOUTH
R, 105 minutes

In Laurence Cantet’s latest look at work and power dynamics, white middle-aged women come to Haiti for the surf but stay for the hot disadvantaged locals. Charlotte Rampling rules over the cabana gigolo scene as imperious Ellen, a Wellesley professor on break. She tut-tuts newcomer Brenda (Karen Young), a Georgia gal who’s fallen hard for her boy toy, Legba (Ménothy Cesar). Danger looms, not least because the movie is set in the country’s 1970s-era dictatorship.

If the story sounds like some niche-filling historical romance, that’s no accident. Besides the race and exploitation angles, Mr. Cantet tries to seriously present female desire at an age that is rarely depicted. Ellen and Brenda’s fantasies of attentive and submissive men are fulfilled unspectacularly, expressed more through the company of their lap dogs than their sexual calisthenics. The camera doesn’t shy though from biceps and buttocks (and pointedly less of the women’s bodies).

Despite, or maybe because of, Mr. Cantet’s clear-eyed intentions, the movie becomes precisely what it shouldn’t — stiff and unconvincing. His judicious reserve with the movie’s flow only partially conceals its ultimate trite shape and convenient character tacking and zagging. The script has the impatient literal-mindedness of lesser Breillat (“His body fascinated me”). Ms. Young does more with her romantically supercharged character partly because Ms. Rampling’s pungent delivery tends to underline Mr. Cantet’s tin ear.

“Heading South” (the regettable English translation of the original “Vers la Sud”) is a missed opportunity, but not the disaster that it may seem. There are the outlines of an involved formal thesis when Mr. Cantet rolls out periodic monologues addressed directly to camera. Most come across as point-scoring for students of subjectivity, but a speech by the older, black beachhouse proprietor Albert (Lys Ambroise) carries an effortless sting — something the rest of the movie could use.

– Nicolas Rapold

URBANSCAPES
unrated, 90 minutes

Joyce once wrote that Rome was like “a man who lives by exhibiting to travellers his grandmother’s corpse.” In America, aging cities could use the attention, since they’re more likely to be ignored into oblivion. “Urbanscapes,” by Italian-born filmmakers Lorena Luciano and Filippo Piscopo, shines a light on four such examples of urban decay in Chicago, Detroit, Newark, and our own South Bronx. Glimpses of Dresden-caliber ruin reel by with sometimes poignant narration, but this too desultory elegy comes to feel progressively inadequate and vague.

The Detroit segment is the best, laying out the city’s hallmarks of blight: planned neglect, relocated and abandoned black populations, and the burnt-out, boardedup hulks that make a neighborhood look like a 100-foot tall graveyard. Our guide, autoworker General Gordon Baker, recalls a city humming with industry and claiming record rates of single-family home ownership. These days he and his wife drive miles past shuttered blocks to get to stores, and the neighborhood’s fires are put out by trucks summoned from another municipality. At one point they park their car in a garage hollowed out of a former movie palace.

We also join charming South Bronx native Mel Rosenthal as he revisits his old street. Remembering the smoking wreckage and packs of wild dogs that stunned him in the 1970s, he shares our disbelief that it ever got as bad as it did.

Photographer Camilo Vergara, who covers Chicago and Newark, gets some good mileage out of his time-lapse photos of the same building lots. In an ideal world, “Urbanscapes” would consist solely of these series: On one block, three adjacent buildings drop away one by one, succeeded by rubble, grass, trees, and the inevitable flood-lit parking lot. On another, a sprawling church yields eventually to its afterlife, a cookie-cutter development.

– N.R.