Lisa Kennedy

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.”

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

That this movie — directed by the Canadian filmmaker Stephen Williams and written by Stefani Robinson — leans too mightily on romance to the detriment of exploring more fully his genius feels like a missed opportunity.

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.

Katrina Babies is deeply personal and thoughtfully political.

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

With a trove of archival performance footage, much of it from the television show TV Gospel Time, and the wisdom to let those images breathe, the film leans into the maxim about showing not telling.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

It’s a good thing that Jagannathan and Brown have training in the theater: They imbue Priya and Nic’s densely verbal jousts, dodges and truths with compelling chiaroscuro hues.

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.

“Aisha” resists tidy answers through the gentle force of its performances and by staying on the rebuffs and uncertainty Aisha suffers.

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.

The movie sticks to the shallow end.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Apart from some deadpan exchanges between the Mother and Zoe, Lopez plays the role fierce. Even so, it isn’t always clear which gestures in the film should be taken seriously, and which make sport of the genre’s masculine posturing while offering an allegory about a birth mother’s sacrifice.

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

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.

[A] haunting, revelatory documentary.

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

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

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.

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.

One gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.

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

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

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

The melancholy result is that the painter with the spectacularly lulling voice, the hallmark ’fro and the liberating kindness remains a mystery; not the brand that’s made millions but the guy who touched millions.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Tannenbaum’s fondness for his store and its wares is a beautiful thing to behold, even at its most vulnerable.

So many details in this comedy-drama (a characterization worth quibbling with) are meant to provoke. And Our Hero, Balthazar teases with the promise of a darkly intelligent film. Not unlike its protagonist’s tears, the effect is dismayingly performative.

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?

In the future, audiences may tire of movies about COVID-19. For the moment, however, 7 Days arrives as a funny, modest charmer.

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.

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

More touching than riotous, Definition Please proves to be impressively nuanced once it begins revealing why Monica is so prickly around Sonny.

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

It’s 1990 and a summer that initially smacks of exile and punishment becomes one of discovery — self-discovery to be sure, but also cultural and familial.

Fauci is at its best when it draws parallels between the pandemics that define Dr. Fauci’s career. It vexes when it leans on straightforward biography

In a star’s turn, Skerritt reveals the tiniest fissures of vulnerability in his unfaltering portrayal of a cardiologist who is ailing and grieving — and fed up with both.

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.

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.

Learn to Swim is lovely to behold, but the sullen artist at the center feels too often like he’s drowning in melancholia and might take us down with him.

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

The Oakland students — and director Nicks — rise to the demands of overlapping crises. With its vibrant if abbreviated portraits and final scenes of burgeoning activism, Homeroom suggest that kids may not be alright, but they are very much on the case.

“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.

The film’s through-line of woundedness is by turns touching, irritating and occasionally illuminating.

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.

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.

Another Body is most persuasive when experts weigh in on the reality-upending aspects of deepfake technology and image-based sex abuse.

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.

The images here are often dizzying and dazzling.

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.

The Inventor is rife with somewhat didactic lessons — about power, innovation, curiosity — yet a presumably unintended one might be that lessons themselves, however insightful, are not always captivating.

[An] affecting debut feature.

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

With playful visual flourishes, a willfully garish palette and winks galore (including one to the French feminist writer Monique Wittig), Langlois’s debut has stylistic ambition for days. But it’s not as genre-fluent as “Love Lies Bleeding” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” or as swoon inducing as its volatile couple deserves.

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.

In this triangulated love story there is more roiling it than just desire. Although the central characters reflect the vast array of LGBTQ folk, the movie isn’t a coming-out tale. . . . These characters are in the midst of their lives, with many of the duties and emotions that come with that.

“Civil” yields fewer insights than hoped. At times, the neat documentary feels nearly as tailored as Crump’s suits.