Lisa Kennedy

If you’ve ever wondered what “holding space” looks like in practice, the director Margaret Brown’s deeply attentive documentary Descendant provides moving examples.

Exquisite use of close-ups, fluid editing and a deeply observant sound design renders Mack’s story tactile but also poetic, making plain that the salt here is the stuff of tears, the stuff of sorrows and of joys.

Simon’s belief in the interconnectedness yet singularity of the varied patients is palpable. She rewards our patience with a deeper understanding of our bodies and ourselves.

The light here emanates from Morton. His curiosity about art, about his place in the world after his incarceration, makes visible the darkness he’s experienced.

[A] haunting, revelatory documentary.

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.

What We Leave Behind insists upon power in stillness, and the poignancy in staying — and leaving.

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.

The optimism here resides in the filmmaker’s trusting his audience to grapple with the entwined fates of the seafloor, its inhabitants and humankind.

Many of the archival images Porter so fluidly employs will be familiar, but they gain fresh energy and timely urgency from Johnson’s absorbing narration and her often stirring observations about Lyndon Johnson, their political partnership, the environment and the two events she so presciently knew would shape us for decades to come: the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War.

For all its playful color-block hues and deceptively casual illustrations, the movie delivers a sharp mix of pathos and humor.

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.

Castro’s debut feature deals with heartache and vulnerability but also shimmers with joy and genuine insight.

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.

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

The cinematography (by Pat Scola) does its own cagey and elegant work, giving Sing Sing an undercurrent shine while evoking the rougher intimacy of a documentary. The movie’s casting — more than 85 percent of the cast participated in Sing Sing’s R.T.A. program — achieves something similar.

Although The Quiet Girl — Ireland’s entry for the best international feature Oscar — is not holiday fare, there may not be a movie more expressive of the season’s benevolent ethos than this hushed work about kith and kindness.

The tried and true way to break viewers’ hearts is to make them care deeply. Aftershock wastes no time in doing just that.

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.

Forgiveness may not be about making nice. Filling in a painful gap may not lead to tidy reconciliation. Still, something true will appear. Kaphar may be new to feature filmmaking, but that’s some grown wisdom.

The sequel provides an ever-maturing understanding of the tension between labels and identities, between a changing self, an expanding queer “community” and the broader society.

[An] insightful, chilling, often elegant documentary.

The result is an elegantly wrought documentary that pulls off the trick of leaving viewers sated yet also craving more.

In 2017, JR was half of the delightful tag-team of “Faces Places,” the Oscar-nominated documentary he and the groundbreaking director Agnès Varda made in the French countryside. Paper & Glue, while not as tender a romp, is a sequel in spirit. Faces and their places continue to matter.

In this painstakingly muted, luminously photographed testimony to connection, nothing much and everything happens — or could.

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.”

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.

The film is not merely playback or payback on behalf of one Black artist by another. Rewind & Play dazzles because it is and will remain a wonder to witness Monk seemingly discovering his compositions again and again, his fingers conjuring, his right foot etching rhythms.

The film is rife with visually lyrical moments that connect viewers with the young ones’ sorrows, fears, insights and hopes.

More than a journeyman rockumentary, “Poly Styrene” is a thoughtfully finessed filial reckoning: a daughter’s journey toward understanding her mother as a young artist and as a young woman of color.

Not unlike its subject, the documentary’s power, beauty and complexity lie in Harper’s use of rhetoric and lyricism.

What this spare drama truly offers is a new category. Call it “deep fidelity,” in which the filmmaker captures without flash or pretense the material, emotional and even spiritual lives of his protagonists. Charles Burnett’s classic “Killer of Sheep,” or far more recently Garrett Bradley’s documentary “Time,” come to mind as analogues.

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.

The director-writer Kelly Fremon Craig’s rendering of the book about puberty, family and nascent spirituality offers lessons in how a cherished object, when treated with tender and thoughtful regard, needn’t turn precious.

In widening its aperture — from the ascents to visits to Purja’s childhood home as well as brief dives into Nepal’s history — “14 Peaks” expands a genre often focused on the feats of individuals to celebrate lessons about vast dreams and communal bonds.

With shimmer, shadow and verve, Stress Positions . . . captures the often hallucinatory pandemonium wrought by that “long-ago” moment.

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

Although she died in 1985 at the age of 74, the human rights activist, lawyer, poet, professor and first Black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest owns this journey.

"Going to Mars” responds creatively to the call of its ingenious subject thanks to the directors’ soulful grasp of her work, and Terra Long and Lawrence Jackman’s skillful editing.

The film’s seven protagonists are the result of McBaine and Moss’s broad and deep interview process. Demographically diverse, the women are immensely watchable and touchingly articulate.

Luminously photographed and nimbly edited, The Worst Ones — which won the Un Certain Regard competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022 — offers a provocative critique of filmmaking practices. It also presents a subtle defense of the onscreen miracles revealed by the young and the raw.

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.

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.

A film that skillfully navigates vulnerability, brainy insights and artistry.

“I’m Fine” teases the structure of comedies in which something must be achieved in too short a span. Only, instead of ha-ha challenges, Danny encounters the poignant, the frustrating, even the perilous.

It is the siblings — their anguish and their anger, as well as the compassion they extend to one another — that drive the narrative.

It is a tribute, a grappling with mortality, an exercise in self-surveillance, a messy home movie, a brief account of aviation history and a lesson in letting go and grief.

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.

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

Densely thoughtful, Prism has beautiful and poignant moments.

“Leo Grande” proves to be a tart and tender probe into sex and intimacy, power dynamics and human connection.

Brainy, mannered, dryly amused, “The Inheritance” can appear willfully inexpert; the self-conscious acting feels both deliberate and the work of a director who hasn’t spent much time working with actors. But Asili dives confidently into big ideas — ideas as ideology, as wondrous inspiration, as both.

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.

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.

Katrina Babies is deeply personal and thoughtfully political.

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.

The Blackening comes with a horror movie’s requisite skittish and stalking camerawork, its creaks and breath-holding hushes, its gore and payback. But it is the friends’ flee, fight, freeze — or throw under the bus — banter that makes the film provocative fun.

Dear Mr. Brody invites timely thoughts about the wealthy and income disparity.

Riveting ... Kennedy not only builds a case against Boeing but offers an object lesson in the tragic consequences of corporate greed and hubris.

The images here are often dizzying and dazzling.

The movie does a compelling job laying out how vulnerable this relationship was, given their faith, given Ali’s ascendency in the nation and the Nation.

The film is a trove of Armstrong’s love of music and his labor. And because so many of those who lend their insights are now departed, it has the feel of a mausoleum worthy of a humble yet celebratory “Saints Go Marching In” second line.

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.

Hawa, a Palestinian actress, is commanding as a woman whose future and faith are buffeted by her narrowing options.

Regina Hall is a wonder as the woman who stands by her man for a mash-up of reasons, not least being the elevated position the title first lady confers.

It’s an often-touching time capsule of a harrowing moment in which rampant death and police brutality, white privilege and surging activism answered the call of so much grief.

The ensuing violence and its aftermath are chilling, woeful and utterly consistent with the tragedy that began long before a fateful afternoon in the woods.

If you need a refresher on what “systemic” looks like, these thinkers offer it.

Invisible Beauty will likely make you hungry for Hardison’s book. But in a twist, one might wonder, can it be as good as the movie?

“Lee” feeds the desire to seek out more of her images. Winslet’s performance demands that we consider the force behind the camera.

A first-rate raconteur, Johansen — wearing a pompadour, sunglasses and bespoke suit — brings the funk. The storied Café Carlyle delivers the chic.

While the young women harbor overlapping questions, Found makes it clear they also have yearnings unique to them.

“We’ve caused pain,” that inmate says, “primarily ’cause we were in pain.” Far from seeming like an excuse, in Since I Been Down, this observation sounds like a way toward reckoning and change.

The film’s gentle detours into the real-life stories remind us that it is the people met on the road that so often make the trip memorable.

Its early execution strains and wobbles some, but “Backspot” sticks its landing.

In a world hungering for depictions of national valor and compassion, the movie’s variations on heroism are a boon.

Beyond Giraud’s calculations about wind and cliff-edge-to-floor ratios, his thoughts about fear reflect a generous nature and should speak to decidedly earthbound yet unnerved folks. He wants people to dream big.

The documentary makes a strong case for just how remarkable a team they are. While LFG doesn’t divulge the elusive recipe, it ladles what one teammate called the group’s “special sauce.”

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

If likability is a trait you value, Love, Guaranteed delivers the undemanding pleasure of watching two fundamentally decent people tumble into fondness and then love.

Pakula’s work with actors or the resurgent meaning of his trilogy could have been documentaries unto themselves. But the viewer might not have gotten an adjacent set of insights from his family, particularly Hannah Pakula, his second wife. Her tender, incisive regard creates an ache even as it offers solace.

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

Jones — who wrote, directed and stars in the film — doesn’t treat the tensions between exploitation and empowerment, personal agency and systemic cruelties, as binaries. Instead, they are riveting, confounding and, as exchanges between Jones and her mother attest, personal.

A gay man of a younger generation, de Oliveira mourns the vulnerability of these characters’ bodies while paying tribute to their flourishes and fears.

Consider Beauty an elegy with an edge, one that touches on faith and financials, love and condemnation.

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.

A different actor than Rylance might have revealed the slight darker, impostor wrinkles of the tale. Instead, his character, an unflummoxed optimist, shares some of the same cheery qualities as Ted Lasso.

Kolodny handles his movie-as-documentary conceit with subtle flair and finesse. For a subgenre as crowded with movies as boxing has weight classes, The Featherweight isn’t a knockout. But it does land more than a glancing blow.

Still, there are moments of minor magic here. Deep friendship is among the most enchanting inventions after all. And Odette, Clarice and Barbara Jean show how to honor it.

The drama lands many of the beats of the Greatest Generation genre and its subgenre: Black service members battling on two fronts. But familiarity doesn’t halt it being illuminating and affecting.

The director Charles Shyer brings a journeyman’s ease to the screenplay (based on Richard Paul Evans’s novel by the same name): embracing holiday movie expectations here, gently deflecting them there.

This romp about three brothers trying to make their mother’s holiday wish a reality is festive and illuminating.

Amid the roiling neuroses of the adults, the young beloveds provide the film with a surprising emotional ballast.

Laurent has made an elegant if overheated melodrama that amplifies the villainy of Charcot and his colleagues (one proves particularly appalling) to underscore how male-centered the medical establishment was — and is.

The child of Ghanaian parents herself, Mensah traverses the polyglot turf well, infusing details with astute affection and understated laughs. Even the occasional slapstick proves more sweet than silly.

In a film brimming with visual gestures, these mini portraits of anti-racists are among its most memorable.

A Jazzman’s Blues is packed with outsize emotions, but also grand themes.

Thanks to some good filmmaking decisions, Emergency is rife with tart observations about campus life.