In “Camera Man,” the critic Dana Stevens uses the biography of the great silent film clown as a lens to explore the early days of movies, the cultural forces that gave them birth and the social upheavals they in turn engendered.

The Oscar nominee “Drive My Car” is a three-hour elegy whose quiet intensity intimates an emotional storm beneath the surface.

“As a Deaf person, I am exhausted at yet another mainstream story that pretends to be about my identity filtered through the eyes of the hearing other,” writes Garrett Zuercher.

Give us a magic trick, but not a miracle.

If we become numb to the suffering of others, even the Kims and Kanyes of the world who may seem beyond our sympathetic reach, we may also be numbing ourselves to the suffering of people in our own lives.

Sigrid Undset wrote the famous “Kristin Lavransdatter” trilogy and won the Nobel Prize. She also was a sometime contributor to America during the Second World War after the Nazi invasion of Norway had forced her into exile.