Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower (Joe Piscatella, 2017). Joe Piscatella’s documentary follows Joshua Wong, a student in Hong Kong who was a driving force behind a series of youth protests that were dubbed the Umbrella Movement. Wong and his young cohorts stood up against encroaching Chinese control of their education and communities, an act of staggering bravery given the demonstrated willingness of the government to viciously punish dissenting voices. The story is impressive and worth telling. It’s the execution of Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower that is wanting. It’s presented with the plodding, repetitively informative style of dashed-off CNN news feature. Piscatella has ample footage of these kids planning and protesting, and the film is most effective when it simply observes them in all the messiness of a movement, whether they’re enthusiastically drawing motivation from one another or feeling weary as they feel their progress stall. Unfortunately, too much time is given over to talking-head interviews with scholars, journalists, and other experts who explain what happened in the most bland, basic fashion.

Listen Up Philip (Alex Ross Perry, 2014). This seriocomic film mashes together the metropolitan-artist angst of Woody Allen, the hyper-educated chattiness of Whit Stillman, and the scruffy looseness of early Richard Linklater. Writer-director Alex Ross Perry adds in a few more flourishes, most notably with some brief but striking shifts in perspective. Philip Lewis Friedman (Jason Schwartzman) is a New York–based writer who is on the verge of publishing his long-awaited second novel. He’s dissatisfied with his place in the cultural ecosystem which reverberates out into irritating behavior that damages most of his relationships, including the one with his long-suffering girlfriend (Elisabeth Moss). Fueling both his self-involvement and feelings of inadequacy, Philips starts spending time with the acclaimed novelist Ike Zimmerman (Jonathan Pryce), a character who serves as a stand-in for the whole generation of American literary lions that counted Philip Roth and John Updike among their numbers. The whole cast is strong, clearly enjoying playing characters who are often defined by their most unlikable qualities. Perry’s writing is equally impressively, though there were a couple small stretches on the back half of Listen Up Philip where I wouldn’t have minded some tightening of the plot.

Daughters (Natalie Rae and Angela Patton, 2024). Girls For A Change is a Virginia nonprofit that organizes a set of programs designed to provide support to Black girls and their families. Documentarians Natalie Rae and Angela Patton put their focus on Date with Dad, which reunites girls and their incarcerated fathers for a dance that gives them an afternoon of normal bonding and a moment of dignity. This documentary touches lightly on the injustice of mass incarceration, but the emotional wallop of its payoff is argument enough that locking people away might not be the wisest approach to addressing societal crime, especially if rehabilitation is the actual goal. When the dance takes place, it’s emotionally rewarding and devastating in equal measure. Even so, Rae and Patton play fair. They don’t turn their camera away when the dance doesn’t have the intended transformational effect on the participants. Daughters is powerful precisely because it values truth over manipulation.