The concision of its story and the elasticity of its themes are crucial to its peculiar potency: Operating within tight narrative and budgetary confines, Seimetz seeks to reshuffle our perceptions, to alter our sense of how movies can represent the unrepresentable.

It gestures toward controversial ideas but always swerves back to a simple but profound message of togetherness and family, and the personal importance of honoring tradition and memory.

The message — explore and embrace the rich legacy of your ancestors because it’s part of you — may sound simple, but in Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s hands, it’s hardly a rudimentary platitude. With Black Is King, she creates a pageant of sight and sound honoring the Black diaspora, weaving a collection of vibrant, profound and defiantly creative scenarios into one abstract and mostly cohesive narrative.

The documentary, based on Cooper’s self-published memoir (he connected with Mazzio on Twitter after she’d read it), illustrates the differences that can be made through the efforts of a few and draws attention to the high levels of trauma experienced by residents in our poorest neighborhoods.

It’s competent filmmaking in the service of lousy storytelling.

While the filmmaker keeps his eyes peeled for every possible shred of good news in the wake of disaster, he has little interest in peddling easy inspiration; the stakes are too colossal, the devastation too raw.

Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind is a thoroughly engaging retrospective of a hard-working, hard-living performer who survived to tell the tale.

While the performances ensure that the movie is always watchable, the hesitant storytelling makes it far from compelling, a bad trip about a bummer vacation.

It starts throwing details at you almost immediately, each one building on yet also undermining the last, as if it were deliberately trying to confound your sense of what kind of movie you’re watching.

Maine’s film captures something indelible about adolescent female desire, without condescending or objectifying, because she understands, subjectively, what that looks and feels like: all the confusion and shame, but yes, also the pleasure to be found there. She beautifully depicts something that has been rarely seen on film: the lustful gaze of an adolescent woman (as opposed to the lustful gaze being directed at her).

A breezy, energizing and fun look at the hip-hop and improv theater collective

Father Soldier Son is a demanding film, a sometimes brutal story told with immense empathy. There is sorrow and joy; success and failure; marriage, birth and death. The Eisches are a tough crew, absorbing the challenges and even tragedy with a fragile resilience.

The pummeling, totalizing horror of The Painted Bird ultimately proves its undoing.

Nothing here is especially revealing or deep; but the doc is pleasantly positive, and it does have something to say about how the expectations for dads today are higher than ever.

What emerges is a chilling portrait of what happens when people in power just ignore sociopolitical norms and behave as though the rules don’t apply to them.

The story of that one miserable shoot is still a useful way to consider both the brilliance of Sellers and the damage he wrought, as well as demonstrating the ludicrous leeway granted to celebrities and the ways that obvious warning signs of possible mental illness often went unheeded.

Like a lot of recent documentaries about the overdue reckoning for sexual predators in positions of power, Athlete A is a reminder that the rot is sometimes within the system itself, not just within the criminals it benefits.

The whole point of this illuminating and often moving film is that all of these people have a tale to tell — and one that’s not as simple as Hollywood would have it.

Without a more probing look into her artistry, it’s hard to think of Olympia as a definitive Dukakis profile — though it’s certainly an unusual celebrity documentary.

Perhaps, despite its lack of structure, the film will inspire a new generation to investigate this funny lady who could sing the lights out.

The most important thing is that it is genuinely great, a singular and moving glimpse of loneliness, community and finding the strength to face another day.

For most of its running time, Relic feels more like a chamber piece than a full-fledged horror outing, but a nail-biting third act ups the ante.

For a movie this fleet and funny (it’s a snap at 90 minutes), Palm Springs is surprisingly ripe for metaphorical plucking.

It’s the rare superhero movie in 2020 that can leave you wanting to see more, closing-credits kicker and all.

While the documentary recounts the arc of the astrologer’s life, with vintage video that is a veritable feast of over-the-top Mercado-ian aesthetics, it focuses — most compellingly — on his final years.

Schneider’s direction is taut, limiting much of the action to the confined spaces of the ship’s bridge and its vantage points. The close quarters ratchet up the tension and intimacy of a space where everyone can see you sweat.

In the final act, the film embraces some of those larger points, and Herzog ends with a striking final image leaving us to contemplate the transactional nature and true cost of all human relationships.

Kore-eda furthers his storied reputation as an artist humanely attuned to what transpires between those who know each other all too well.