Lisa Kennedy

If there were lingering doubts about the nation’s first female space shuttle pilot and commander’s rock-steady demeanor, the writer-director Hanna Berryman’s documentary jettisons them.

Ghost Elephants resides in the intersection of science and lyrical reverie — Herzog’s treasured terrain.

The viewer might think, Ah, it’s going to be one of those films where the hero’s resistance softens as she meets a quirky collection of fellow residents. It is not. The Moroccan director Maryam Touzani and her husband, Nabil Ayouch (“The Blue Caftan”), who wrote the script with her, have something more delicate in mind.

This is not an autobiography. Take Me Home is instead a deeply felt examination of the challenges so many face when familial love is swamped by economic reality. The director puts a lot on her characters’ shoulders to illustrate how unsupported and isolated illness and disability can be.

[A] haunting, revelatory documentary.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a vivid and layered time capsule in which oral history is just part of this excursion into what journalist and social commentator George Schuyler describes as less a renaissance than an “awakening.”

There’s a refreshing willfulness here to leave some quandaries lingering, and like the rough beauty of the volcanic island the movie is set on, Islands beckons and rebukes and beckons some more.

In depicting scenes of dispossession and fraught encounters with soldiers, the filmmaker offers a saga of trauma that has antecedents in dramas set during previous mass conflicts like Apartheid as well as in the Jim Crow South. If that strikes you as pointed, it is.

As with the play (and its 1967 film adaptation), the sexual politics here are messy. What isn’t is the filmmakers’ bold dive into the archives of the nascent Black Arts Movement for a throughline.

In its march toward resolution, “Rosemead” never falters in its compassion, and asks the same of us.

The director Simon Cellan Jones and the writer David Coggeshall return for this better executed, equally goofball follow-up.

Come See Me in the Good Light, is very good on the existential. But Gibson and Falley are even more generous in sharing their journey through the medical morass.

One could surmise that it takes a village of women to save a stubbornly reticent man. But the lesson of Rebuilding is gentler, broader and timelier: Accepting help is a necessary step toward offering it to others in lasting ways.

This fierce contest of genres — in this corner, sports-saga triumph; in this corner, too-real female endangerment — is the director David Michôd’s point.

Scanning the elder woman’s weathered visage and the grandchild’s open face as well as giving the island’s rocky, forested, mossy and watery environs their many close-ups, The Summer Book offers a loving portrait of budding and fading.

Sora deftly calibrates the angst of his young characters — and the collective edginess of a nation, while nodding to the joys of the teen genre.

Gayles has crafted a film that refuses to tidy the conflicted feelings its subjects share — or those feelings it stirs in us.

Architecton is as gorgeous as it is grave. The score (by Evgueni Galperine) and sound design (by Aleksandr Dudarev) contribute mightily to the film’s heavy lifting.

A music journalist-turned-filmmaker, Jenkins had the hip-hop bona fides to guarantee “Sunday Best” would not be a white savior tale. Instead, his film reveals the authentic amity and steadfast values of an ally.

While Ride and O’ Shaughnessy never wed. Her candor here marries a spectacular professional saga with the personal love story convincingly.

With its rough-hewed realism, “Will” is remarkable not so much for its craft as for its philosophical depth in portraying the tensions between a struggling individual and his community, which can be both supportive and enabling.

The ending is perhaps too twisting for its own good. But Henson — so deeply committed to her character’s emotional cratering — still makes us care.

Quy treats the love affair between Viet and Nam with exquisite tenderness.

This tale — inspired by the 2008 documentary “Supermen of Malegaon” — succeeds most as a touching tribute to friendship.

Compensation brims with insights and ideas.

Although there are urgent economic and political challenges facing these families, this isn’t muckraking cinema. Instead, the filmmaker hews to the quotidian, the weekly, the annual. Shot in black and white, this portrait of a people is affecting and achy.

Filmmaker Kim A. Snyder’s illuminating documentary — premiering at the Sundance Film Festival — offers a rattling look at coordinated efforts to ban books. More importantly, it introduces viewers to the everyday and increasingly vital heroes pushing back: the librarians who sound the alarm to both legislative and grassroots attempts to pull books from school and public libraries.

Directed by Shoshannah Stern, who is hearing impaired, the documentary — made for the “American Masters” series and premiering at Sundance — is both straightforward and subtle.