Though her production company is ominously named Message Pictures, Geeta Gandbhir’s The Perfect Neighbor is the first good movie (of two) from the 11 I’ve seen so far. Assembled primarily from bodycam and interrogation room footage, Neighbor tells the two-year-story of tensions between Susan Lorincz, a white woman, and her majority Black neighbors, which led to the former fatally shooting a Black woman in a case so open-and-shut that she was convicted in Florida by an all-white jury. Choosing a case whose merits aren’t up for debate (as opposed to e.g. the pernicious rightwing celebration of Lorincz’s fellow Florida alum George Zimmerman or subway killer Daniel Penny) is one of the first smart moves in this ideologically airtight presentation, which reappropriates footage automatically recorded for entirely different purposes in service of, among other things, an unexpectedly slow-burn neighborhood portrait.

Sundance.