(1) Blind Lemon Jefferson in Lore, directed by Cate Shortland, written by Shortland and Robin Mukherjee (2012, Music Box Films). Germany, 1945, immediately after the surrender: the older sister in a Nazi family tries to lead her siblings to safety. At an American checkpoint, a scratchy old song that in the next years will be recorded by Carl Perkins and then the Beatles is playing on a portable phonograph; the sound rises, then seems to fragment in the air. It’s “Matchbox Blues,” from 1927. Whatever the idea behind its use in the film—literally, working as a refugee song: “Standing here wondering, will a matchbox hold my clothes”—it waits on the screen as a harbinger of the postwar world these children will be entering. The sound is archaic, the specter is modern.

(2) Nomi Kane, Jingle Bell Rock, SXSW 2010, and Namaste, Home Is Where the Boss Is in Wings for Wheels and Sugar Baby (brewforbreakfast.com). Kane is an autobiographical Berkeley comix artist. Her thin, plain lines and utter refusal of caricature or exaggeration produce a pathos and sweetness that capture the pain of children that parents can’t touch. That’s true even when the child and the adult who can’t save her turn out to be the same person—as with Home Is Where the Boss Is, the chronicle of an entire life, from five or six (“For a time I was convinced Bruce and the Big Man lived behind the speaker grate in my Dad’s Honda hatchback”) to adulthood. And there is Sugar Baby, the diary of a little girl diagnosed as diabetic. Her doctor gives her “an old friend to help [her] practice injections”; it looks like a Raggedy Ann inflatable sex doll. In “Family Restaurants,” the girl goes into the restroom to inject herself in the stomach; two older girls come in, see the needle, and walk right back out. “This place has really gone downhill,” one of them says.

(3) Hollis Brown, Ride on the Train (Alive). Presumably named for the Bob Dylan song about a South Dakota farmer who kills his five children, his wife, and himself, this four-piece guitar band from Brooklyn is keeping forgotten Lynyrd Skynyrd [promises. The title song, the first track, goes far enough, but with “Walk on Water,” near the end, the stops come out, the rivers are crossed, and you can see all the way to the Pacific.

(4) Phil Spector, written and directed by David Mamet (HBO). This isn’t about Phil Spector. It’s about Al Pacino, and the way actors carry their roles with them all...