Stamped from the Beginning (Roger Ross Williams, 2023). Somewhat adapted from and somewhat inspired by Ibram X Kendi’s book of the same name, this documentary by Roger Ross Williams pointedly traces the creation and enforcement of racial identity as a means of having an oppressed group always at the ready to allow for a variety of insidious social manipulations, especially in U.S. culture. Williams tries to spruce up the standard documentary formula with the use of dramatizations of historical figures and incidents in a variety of visual styles, but those bits distract from rather than enhance the film’s core message. Stamped from the Beginning is at its most effective when it goes conventional, pointing the camera at impassioned, deeply knowledgeable people and letting them speak hard, uncomfortable truth. Angela Davis, Lynae Vanee, and the others interview subjects in the film don’t need fortification from cinematic tricks. Their ideas and words already carry a swinging sledgehammer’s formidable weight.

Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958). Bell, Book and Candle is full of wooly witchcraft, and yet the brashest implausibility is that twenty-something Kim Novak would require a spell to get a middle-aged neighbor to fall for her. Novak actually seems a little blunted in the role of modern witch living in New York City. She only comes alive in later scenes when she’s able to uncork some rage at her quarry, a book publisher played by James Stewart. This was released the same year as Vertigo, and while the pairing of Stewart and Novak fits the plot in the Hitchcock classic, here Stewart is distractingly fifteen to twenty years too old for the role. Director Richard Quine keeps the film bustling enough to just nudge it past its flaws. In that effort, he’s helped greatly by the pop of the supporting performances, notably Jack Lemmon as a squirrelly warlock and Ernie Kovacs as a boozy author who peddles pulpy nonfiction about the many wielders of magic who live secretly among the rest of the populace. The cinematography, by the great James Wong Howe, is ravishing.

Rustin (George C. Wolfe, 2023). The filmmakers behind this biopic of civil rights leader Bayard Rustin shrewdly center the narrative on his contribution that is most in need of retrieval from the discards of the nation’s collective memory, his central contribution in organizing the March on Washington. As played charismatically, forcefully, and with deep wells of emotion by Colman Domingo, there’s little doubt as to why Rustin was seen as irreplaceable by his closest allies, even when his flares of stubborn certainty made him difficult to work with or at least the most undiplomatic person in a room where diplomacy was sorely needed. The screenplay, co-credited to Julian Breece and Dustin Lance Black is often clunky, but it’s also packed with details that smartly illustrate Rustin’s organizational prowess. George C. Wolfe’s direction is sound if somewhat lacking in cinematic personality. As luck would have it, that approach suits the material.