From teenage model to upper-crust caterer to domestic doyenne to media-spanning billionaire to scapegoated convict to octogenarian thirst trap enthusiast and Snoop Dogg chum, Martha Stewart has had a life that defies belief, or at least congruity.

It’s an unlikely journey that has been carried out largely in the public eye, which gives R.J. Cutler a particular challenge with his new Netflix documentary, Martha. Maybe there are young viewers who don’t know what Martha Stewart‘s life was before she hosted dinner parties with Snoop. Perhaps there are older audiences who thought that after spending time at the prison misleadingly known as Camp Cupcake, Martha Stewart slunk off into embarrassed obscurity.

Those are probably the 115-minute documentary’s target audiences — people impressed enough to be interested in Martha Stewart, but not curious enough to have traced her course actively. It’s a very, very straightforward and linear documentary in which the actual revelations are limited more by your awareness than anything else.

In lieu of revelations, though, what keeps Martha engaging is watching Cutler thrust and parry with his subject. The prolific documentarian has done films on the likes of Anna Wintour and Dick Cheney, so he knows from prickly stars, and in Martha Stewart he has a heroine with enough power and well-earned don’t-give-a-f**k that she’ll only say exactly what she wants to say in the context that she wants to say it. Icy when she wants to be, selectively candid when it suits her purposes, Stewart makes Martha into almost a collaboration: half the story she wants to tell and half the degree to which Cutler buys that story. And the latter, much more than the completely bland biographical trappings and rote formal approach, is entertaining.

Cutler has pushed the spotlight exclusively onto Stewart. Although he’s conducted many new interviews for the documentary, with friends and co-workers and family and even a few adversaries, only Stewart gets the on-screen talking head treatment. Everybody else gets to give their feedback in audio-only conversations that have to take their place behind footage of Martha through the years, as well as the current access Stewart gave production to what seems to have been mostly her lavish Turkey Hill farmhouse.

Those “access” scenes, in which Stewart goes about her business without acknowledging the camera, illustrate her general approach to the documentary, which I could sum up as “I’m prepared to give you my time, but mostly as it’s convenient to me.”

At 83 and still busier than almost any human on the globe, Stewart needs this documentary less than the documentary needs her, and she absolutely knows it. Cutler tries to draw her out and includes himself pushing Stewart on certain points, like the difference between her husband’s affair, which still angers her, and her own contemporaneous infidelity. Whenever possible, Stewart tries to absent herself from being an active part of the stickier conversations by handing off correspondences and her diary from prison, letting Cutler do what he wants with those semi-revealing documents.

“Take it out of the letters,” she instructs him after the dead-ended chat about the end of her marriage, adding that she simply doesn’t revel in self-pity.

And Cutler tries, getting a voiceover actor to read those letters and diary entries and filling in visual gaps with unremarkable still illustrations.

Just as Stewart makes Cutler fill in certain gaps, the director makes viewers read between the lines frequently. In the back-and-forth about their affairs, he mentions speaking with Andy, her ex, but Andy is never heard in the documentary. Take it as you will. And take it as you will that she blames prducer Mark Burnett for not understanding her brand in her post-prison daytime show — which may or may not explain Burnett’s absence, as well as the decision to treat The Martha Stewart Show as a fleeting disaster (it actually ran 1,162 episodes over seven seasons) and to pretend that The Apprentice: Martha Stewart never existed. The gaps and exclusions are particularly visible in the post-prison part of her life, which can be summed up as, “Everything was bad and then she roasted Justin Bieber and everything was good.”

Occasionally, Stewart gives the impression that she’s let her protective veneer slip, like when she says of the New York Post reporter covering her trial: “She’s dead now, thank goodness. Nobody has to put up with that crap that she was writing.” But that’s not letting anything slip. It’s pure and calculated and utterly cutthroat. More frequently when Stewart wants to show contempt, she rolls her eyes or stares in Cutler’s direction waiting for him to move on. That’s evisceration enough.

Stewart isn’t a producer on Martha, and I’m sure there are things here she probably would have preferred not to bother with again at all. But at the same time, you can sense that either she’s steering the theme of the documentary or she’s giving Cutler what he needs for his own clear theme. Throughout the first half, her desire for perfection is mentioned over and over again and, by the end, she pauses and summarizes her life’s course with, “I think imperfection is something that you can deal with.”

Seeing her interact with Cutler and with her staff, there’s no indication that she has set aside her exacting standards. Instead, she’s found a calculatedly imperfect version of herself that people like, and she’s perfected that. It is, as she might put it, a good thing.

The first feature that Victor Erice directed, 1973’s “The Spirit of the Beehive,” begins in the 1940s, when a traveling cinema arrives in a small rural town in Spain to project “Frankenstein.” In the crowd of moviegoers, a child with eager eyes stands out, Ana (Ana Torrent), whose sister will later reassure her that in cinema nobody dies and everything is but a trick. Still, what Ana sees on screen will slowly seep into her reality, blurring the division between the fate of the misunderstood monster of make-believe, and the actions of those near to her.

In 1983’s “El Sur,” a project never finished to Erice’s liking but released nonetheless, another young girl finds in the movies a crucial piece of information to decipher her father’s unspoken anguish. To opens one’s eyes, Erice suggests, is to come to terms with how little we understand about the pain of others, even those we deeply love. For Erice, a master, cinema works as a revelatory force that can illuminate our truest feelings and yearnings, despite the efforts of some of his characters to escape their torturous pasts.

One gets the sense that Erice, who counts famed directors such as Pedro Almdóvar and Guillermo del Toro among his admirers, has been eulogizing cinema ever since he started making his sporadic but delicately profound movies.

Against all prognostications, Erice has returned three decades after his last effort (a 1992 documentary called “Dream of Light”), as if to have a final say about his own artistic legacy. The themes that have recurrently consumed the 84-year-old — the specter of the Spanish Civil War, daughters estranged from fathers with peculiar histories, the merciless march of time — coalesce into the unhurried, poetically rewarding “Close Your Eyes,” his fourth film in 50 years and likely his last.

Interpreted as the auteur’s confession through surrogate filmmaker character Miguel (Manolo Solo), “Close Your Eyes” acquires a layered, contemplative quality. Can we truly learn about an artist through their work or is creation just another mask? Miguel’s career aspirations died when his best friend and renowned actor Julio Arias (a marvelous José Coronado in a sort of dual role) vanished without a trace while they filmed a period piece titled “The Farewell Gaze,” a movie within the movie about a mysterious idealist entrusted with finding a wealthy man’s long-lost daughter. Only two pivotal scenes from that uncompleted venture were finished, the opening and its poignant ending.

Miguel dives back into that chapter of his life when a television program focused on unresolved cases seeks to unearth whether Julio, a womanizer afraid of getting older, died in an accident or by suicide, or if a mental breakdown allowed him to start over without a single memory of the man he once was. A partial answer does surface halfway through “Close Your Eyes,” but that’s just another door Erice entices us to walk through — not, by any means, a neat resolution.

Using a style of elegant lyricism, which enshrines tiny moments into glisteningly miraculous turning points, Erice lets the exchanges between the people he’s conceived play out without the need to advance the plot. His purpose, if there is one explicitly, is to enrich our minimal comprehension of the lives unfolding in his truthful fictions; a substantial segment in “Close Your Eyes” is dedicated to Miguel’s simple existence by the shore, fishing. We also learn about his own romantic regrets, his enduring friendship with a celluloid-devoted film editor and the unbearable loss of a child.

Obsessed with his actors’ power and symbolism, Erice appears to cast them based on their eyes, more specifically their incandescent expressiveness. That certainly appears the case with Solo. You will also recognize the inquisitive gaze of the child protagonist from “Beehive” in Torrent, now appearing in “Close Your Eyes” as Julio’s daughter, a woman in her 50s. Torrent is older now than Erice was when they made their first movie, and it serves as a moving reminder both of the years that have passed and how a person’s inherent essence is immutable across time. Cinema holds the frozen memory of Torrent as a kid, but reality has moved on.

That Torrent returned to collaborate with Erice after five decades — again playing a movie lover searching for answers — reads beautifully self-referential. That’s the crux of “Close of Your Eyes,” and of Erice’s concise body of work: Cinema crystallizes something that reality alone can’t, convincing us that perhaps what we need exists somewhere outside of ourselves, somewhere we can only access through the screen. It’s a reflection and an illusion at once.

Though film can trigger a memory-induced epiphany, it’s not the remedy itself, but an invitation to look inward, to close one’s eyes and find what’s inalienable about yourself.

In the monumental final frame of “Close Your Eyes,” the most soul-stirring ending of the year, Erice’s camera shuts its eyelids one last time, a humble sign of acceptance. Even within their limitations, the movies do see us.

Reagan is pure hagiography, but it’s not even one of those convincing hagiographies that pummel you into submission with compelling scenes that reinforce their subject’s greatness. Sean McNamara’s film has slick surfaces, but it’s so shallow and one-note that it actually does Ronald Reagan a disservice. The picture attempts to take in the full arc of the President’s life, following him from childhood right through to his 1994 announcement at the age of 83 that he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. But you’d never guess that this man was at all complex, complicated, conflicted — in other words, human. He might as well be one of those animatronic robots at Disney World, mouthing lines from his famous speeches.

Dennis Quaid, a very good actor who can usually work hints of sadness into his manic machismo, is hamstrung here by the need to impersonate. He gets the voice down well (and he certainly says “Well” a lot) and he tries to do what he can with Reagan’s occasional political or career setbacks, but gone is that unpredictable glint in the actor’s eye. This Reagan doesn’t seem to have much of an interior life. Everything he thinks or feels, he says — which is maybe an admirable trait in a politician, but makes for boring art.

The film’s arc is wide and its focus is narrow. Reagan is mainly about its subject’s lifelong opposition to Communism, carrying him through his battles against labor organizers as president of the Screen Actors Guild and eventually to higher public office. The movie is narrated by a retired Soviet intelligence official (Jon Voight) in the present day, answering a younger counterpart’s questions about how the Russian empire was destroyed. He calls Reagan “the Crusader” and the moniker is meant to be both combative and respectful: He admires Reagan’s single-minded dedication to fighting the Soviets. They, after all, were single-minded in their dedication to fighting the U.S., and the agent has a ton of folders and films proving that the KGB had been watching Reagan for a long, long time.

By the way, you did read that correctly. Jon Voight plays a KGB officer in this picture, complete with a super-thick Russian accent. There’s a lot of dress-up going on — it’s like Basquiat for Republicans, even though the cast is certainly not all Republicans — and there’s some campy fun to be had here. Much has been made of Creed’s Scott Stapp doing a very flamboyant Frank Sinatra, though I regret to announce that he’s only onscreen for a few seconds. Robert Davi gets more screentime as Leonid Brezhnev, as does Kevin Dillon as Jack Warner. Xander Berkeley puts in fine work as George Schultz, and a game Mena Suvari shows up as an intriguingly pissy Jane Wyman, Reagan’s first wife. As Margaret Thatcher, Lesley-Anne Down gets to utter an orgasmic “Well done, cowboy!” when she sees Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” speech on TV. And my ’80s-kid brain is still processing C. Thomas Howell being cast as Caspar Weinberger.

To be fair, a lot of historians give Reagan credit for helping bring about both the Gorbachev revolution and the eventual downfall of the U.S.S.R. and its satellites, so the film’s focus is not in and of itself a misguided one. There are stories to be told within that scope — interesting ones, controversial ones, the kind that could get audiences talking and arguing, and even ones that could help breathe life into the moribund state of conservative filmmaking. But without any lifelike characters, it’s hard to find oneself caring, and thus, Reagan’s dedication to such narrow themes proves limiting. We get little mention of his family life (aside from his non-stop devotion to Nancy, played by Penelope Ann Miller, and vice versa). Other issues of the day are breezed through with a couple of quick montages. All of this could have given some texture to the story and lent dimensionality to such an enormously consequential figure. But then again, if the only character flaw you could find in Ronald Reagan was that he was too honest, then maybe you weren’t very serious about depicting him as a human being to begin with.