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.