Higher Ground
Vera Farmiga’s sharp directorial debut, an adaptation of Carolyn S. Briggs’ memoir about her uneasy attempt to find a state of grace in a 1970s spiritual community, is wise enough to realize that life doesn’t always offer closure, but instead sometimes continues tormenting like an open wound. Corinne (played as an adult by Farmiga) comes from a broken home, gets pregnant young, and tries to live within a traditional Christian community that expects subservience from women. Over time, her relationship with her husband and neighbors falter, but it’s Corinne’s skittish relationship with God that founders the most after her best friend becomes desperately ill. A large cast provides uniformly excellent performances, but it’s Farmiga herself who ultimately devastates with an impassioned, confused speech to the flock near film’s end. Watch trailer.

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The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
An invaluable document from the militant stage of the American Civil Rights movement, Göran Olsson’s documentary collects footage shot by a group of Swedish journalists who visited America trying to figure out what the hell was going on. And they weren’t the only confused ones. As footage unfolds in chronological order, we see incredibly intelligent and desperate young Americans of color trying to make a place for themselves by (almost) any means necessary. Especially poignant is a passage in which a flummoxed Angela Davis, in prison awaiting trial, explains the obvious: that most violence in America wasn’t perpetrated by people with black skin. No matter how familiar you are with the era, much of the footage startles, often revealing what wasn’t apparent to American eyes at the time, perhaps not even to Swedish eyes–just how innocent, fragile, and, yes, even frightened, these supposedly scary people looked. Watch trailer.

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Senna
From go-karts to Formula One, Brazilian race car driver Ayrton Senna lived for speed, willing to risk his life for the glory of the checkered flag. Senna wasn’t using auto racing to flee a favela, wasn’t leaving behind an illicit past, like Junior Johnson outpacing the bootlegger’s life. He was the son of privilege, a good Christian, who for some reason simply needed to drive faster than anyone in the world. Asif Kapadia, the documentary’s director, wisely doesn’t try to explain why–some things are innate and unknowable–but instead follows the arc of Senna’s dramatic story as his subject becomes a three-time world champion during the ’80s and ’90s and a huge idol in his struggling homeland, as industry politics, countless crashes and technological changes hound him at every turn. If you listen closely as he navigates those unforgiving angles, you soon begin to notice that screeching tires sound a lot like ambulance sirens. Watch trailer.

See also:

More recent films I liked: Certified Copy, Another Earth, The Arbor.