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One should always be wary of tossing the term “masterpiece” around when talking about any cultural object, especially in the cinema, this enfant artform, which feels as if it may have exhausted its formal and rhetorical possibilities much too soon. The hothouse conditions of film festivals are especially bad places to get all ebullient with praise, as well do all over again next month in Utah, the following month in Germany, Texas the one after that. Best to take one’s time, reflect on what has been seen and heard, what its possible meanings and difficulties and structuring absences are, on what biases you brought into the cinema with you that day or evening. I’m a skeptic of much of what passes for American History and am generally willing to go to bat for a film that tries to represent the marginalized in aesthetically provocative and ideologically convoluted ways,...