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When activist and artist Cecilia Gentili died in February at the age of 52, it was instantly apparent in New York City and on global social media how much she meant to the communities that called her Mother. Queer celebrities and grassroots organizers of all kinds had personal pictures to post, depicting them embracing a grinning Cecilia on stages and at political protests. Costume designer Qween Jean spoke for many trans people of color when she posted, “Our chosen family is powerful and we now have a radical ancestor protecting us.

It can be so easy, in a serial killer story, to lose sight of all but the nastiest details. Understandably so: The murders are of course shocking, the details sensational, the killer inherently bizarre and the race to find them urgent. But amid all that horrified leering, the lives destroyed can get erased a second time. They’re turned into sidenotes and details, objects to be acted upon rather than worthy subjects in their own right.

The triumph of HBO’s Last Call: When a Serial Killer Stalked Queer New York is how deftly it flips that balance. It’s a rare true-crime docuseries whose attention is turned not toward death but toward life — that cares more about who the victims were, the people who cherished them, the communities that embraced them and the histories that claimed them, than about how they were snuffed out. This line of inquiry yields...

Queer history is an act of excavation. Telling stories about the LGBTQ community — and of transgender people in particular — necessarily requires sifting through archives that are outright hostile to those they document. In “The Stroll,” a new HBO documentary directed by Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker, the filmmakers excavate decades’ worth of images to tell the story of trans sex workers in the Meatpacking District of New York City. Ostensibly a slice of local history of an increasingly gentrified city that sees marginalized folks as handily disposable, “The Stroll” is an empathetic portrait of a community still fighting for its own survival.

The film opens on footage of a young Lovell, taken from the 2007 doc “Queer Streets,” in which she speaks about how she first turned to sex work to make money — more money, in fact, than what she made at her day job. Her eyes are a bit glazed...

You’d never know it from the sleek glass Apple store and velvet rope hotel clubs that stand there now, but New York’s Meatpacking District was once a hub for Black and brown trans women to earn an honest living. Even if you know your history, it can be hard to conjure an image of fabulous heeled goddesses walking the cobblestone streets now littered with luxury retail stores. For the ones who lived it, the experience is even more disorienting. That’s one of the bittersweet revelations present in “The Stroll,” a hauntingly poignant documentary that attempts to excavate and preserve that fractured history — while those who lived it are still here.

Directed by Kristen Lovell and Zackary Drucker, “The Stroll” is The film takes its title from the block of 14th street between Ninth Avenue and the Hudson River where many once found their trade, which the gals called The Stroll.

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Apple TV+’s Gutsy is nothing if not wholesome. Hillary Clinton and Chelsea Clinton are plainly aiming for inspiration and edification with their docuseries interviewing heroes and luminaries from all walks of life, and they tend to find it whether they’re speaking with academics, activists or firefighters. The causes they highlight are largely unobjectionable, at least if your politics roughly align with the Clintons’; their subjects plainly admirable; their stories insistently empowering.

For a certain type of viewer — say, a devoted Clinton fan or a budding feminist in search of role models — it might make for a decent primer on the broad spectrum of issues affecting Americans today, from motherhood to environmentalism to the fight for LGBTQ rights. And its omnivorous interests and impressive access ensure that just about any viewer will be likely to find some segment they’ll connect with over its eight 40-minute episodes.

There have been many documentaries about the gay liberation movement, equal rights and same-sex liberties for the queer community and the underrepresented and often obscured plight of transgender individuals, many of them tied to the decades-long AIDS crisis. But there has never been a doc that encapsulates all of them at once that also manages to be uplifting and non-foreboding as well — until “Pride.”

FX’s six-episode nonfiction series “Pride” covers these issues and much more. Beginning with the 1950s through current day, it often eschews a standard talking-heads approach (all well worth hearing) to narrow down its narrative, sometimes even framing people in side-view versus head-on, to create an extra sense of vulnerability.

“Everybody had the desire and the goal to give voice to people who hadn’t normally been spotlighted in these films,” says editor Rosella Tursi, who worked on the back three episodes, which cover the ’80s to 2020s.