Today we’ll consider five recent films—two documentaries and three features.

1. Minding the Gap is one of the best documentaries to emerge this year, when there are many good ones out. Bing Liu both directs the film and appears in it. It begins by showing teenage skateboarders in Rockford, Illinois. On one skateboard is written, “This device cures heartache.” Liu returns to Rockford a decade later and focuses his film on three people: Zack, who is white, Keire, who is black and several years younger, and Liu himself, who is Chinese-American. What unites all three of these young men, besides their love of skateboarding, is that they were all beaten by their fathers or stepfathers. The film takes an honest look at poverty and domestic violence but also shows the courage and strength of young people who face that head on. See my longer review at http://thirdway.com/minding-the-gap/
   
2. Crime + Punishment is a hard-hitting documentary about a landmark class-action lawsuit over illegal policing quotas in New York City. The filmmakers use footage recorded over the course of four years to chronicle the real lives and struggles of black and Latino NYPD officers who risk their careers to report how the NYPD promoted arbitrary arrests, particularly of young people of color, to make money for the department. Stephen Maing directed the film, which won this year’s U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Social Impact Filmmaking at the Sundance Film Festival.
   
3. Leave No Trace is an excellent film that not only tells a good story with complex characters but subtly confronts our way of life, so distant from nature. Will (Ben Foster) and his 13-year-old daughter, Tom (Thomasin McKenzie), are living in a Forest Park, a nature reserve near Portland, Oregon. We soon identify with this father and daughter, who clearly love each other. Will and Tom are discovered, taken away and separated by social services in order to determine if their relationship is abusive and what help they might need. While the film, directed by Debra Granik, moves slowly at times, her camera keeps us in the story, and we feel the beauty and the menace of nature. McKenzie especially shines in this film. Her calm, understated performance is riveting. See my longer review at http://thirdway.com/leave-no-trace/
   
4. Eighth Grade, directed by Bo Burnham, is a comedy that provides an inside look at 13-year-old Kayla (Elsie Fisher) during the last week of her last year of middle school. Fisher is heartbreakingly vulnerable as she shares her struggles and longings. She basically lives on social media, while her single-parent father desperately tries to shore up her self-esteem. The film is full of compassion for this awkward, sometimes traumatic period of life and is well worth seeing.
   
5. BlacKkKlansman, directed by Spike Lee, presents a story that seems incredible but is largely true. In the early 1970s, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) is the first African-American detective to serve in the Colorado Springs Police Department. Assigned to undercover work, he answers an ad in the paper recruiting people to the local Ku Klux Klan. On the phone he pretends to be racist but uses his real name. His colleague, Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), agrees to visit the group and soon joins. While the film adds dramatic elements that go beyond what really happened, Stallworth and Zimmerman did infiltrate the Klan and helped arrest some of its members. Lee, in his inimitable style, creates a humorous and timely film that speaks to the Trump era, in which white supremacist groups are on the rise.
   

Gordon Houser is editor of The Mennonite magazine.