The Perfect Neighbor (Geeta Gandbhir, 2025). Just as the filmmakers intend it to be, this documentary is infuriating. The Perfect Neighbor traces the escalation of a conflict in a Florida neighborhood that’s stirred by a woman’s animosity towards the kids being kids all around her. She progresses from a tedious crank — there’s a discernible weariness to the police who regularly respond to her complaint calls — to a more worrisome menace, all of it culminating in a needless death on the street. Director Geeta Gandbhir sticks hard to the facts, almost exclusively using footage culled from law enforcement body cameras, ring cams and other household security devices, local news coverage, and interrogation room video documentation. Watching it all play out in the plainest fashion is damning enough, no angry or tearful statements to the filmmakers’ camera required. The stunning amount of footage Gandbhir is able to assemble means that her documentary is also a semi-alarming testament to how much of current existence is captured on various forms of surveillance video.

Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (Leslie Harris, 1992). Chantel (Ariyan A. Johnson) is a high school student in Brooklyn, back before gentrification gave the borough a hipster makeover. She’s an opinionated handful in class and among her friend group, bristling with the confidence of a young person who’s certain she’s meant for bigger and better experiences than her inherited station in society implies. There’s a joyful energy to this coming-of-age film. Much of that comes from the vibrant performance by lead Johnson. In addition to effortlessly developing crackling chemistry with every fellow cast member, Johnson regularly addresses the camera directly. She’s magnetic in these moments. Writer-director Leslie Harris’s filmmaking is similarly lively, recalling the freewheeling energy of early Spike Lee. One misstep in Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. comes when Harris introduces an especially bleak plot turn late in the third act and then tries to pivot back from it, a couple hard swerves she doesn’t quite pull off.

The Nightingale (Jennifer Kent, 2018). Director Jennifer Kent’s second feature is brutal, sometimes arguably too much so. Enough agonies are heaped upon the lead character that the plot doesn’t always feel plausibly tethered to her experiences. In the harsh Australian hinterlands of the eighteen-hundreds, Clare Carroll (Aisling Franciosi) is an Irishwoman serving out a criminal sentence as the indentured servant — and routinely pawed lust object — of a loathsome military man (Sam Claflin). After an especially horrible incident in her roughshod quarters, Clare sets off on a revenge quest against her persecutor, soon enlisting the aid of an Aboriginal man (Baykali Ganambarr) who provides invaluable guidance through the treacherous terrain. Kent brings the same intensity and skilled command of cinematic technique that distinguished her tremendous debut, The Babadook. Despite the skill on display, The Nightingale is ultimately a disappointment. It’s so relentless that it becomes numbing, a little like one of Darren Aronofsky’s exercises in screen sadism. Also, the dream sequences really don’t work, because dream sequences almost never work.