Lisa Kennedy

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.

In a nice bit of journalistic even-handedness, several of Blow’s interviewees are not entirely convinced by his thesis, or they believe there are other paths to political gains.

“Lost on a Mountain” never fully achieves its complicated halcyon aims.

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.

What’s not convincingly nailed by the film’s moody bravado is the grief propelling its flirtatious and fraught quartet toward presumptive tragedy.

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

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.