As awards contenders go, the Avengers of historical African American icons seems like the easiest sell in the universe, and that’s absolutely what Regina King delivers with her latest directorial effort, One Night in Miami.

In it, an evening in the aftermath of Cassius Clay’s victory over Sonny Liston sees the newly anointed heavyweight enjoy a night of revelry and pontification with peers Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, and Malcolm X. And boy does it deliver on that potential.

It’s effectively The Boys in The Band, if said boys were all bona fide titans of 20th century black history. It takes liberties, sure, but it makes for some incredible exploration of the black experience of the day – a testament to King’s studies of previous directors such as Barry Jenkins.

You’d be remiss in thinking, meanwhile, that the creation and evolution of Nike’s Air Jordan brand wouldn’t be fertile ground for a compelling look at race in US, but director Yemi Bamiro will soon put paid to that with his blinder of a sneaker doc, One Man and His Shoes.

Pulling in disparate elements ranging from Len Bias to Spike Lee, the legendary kicks are just for jumping off on this fascinating journey through Jordan’s first-of-its-kind sponsorship deal that would snowball over the course of decades to become a defining element of the sports branding industry.

It’s a journey with some powerful stops along the way - including Jordan’s own representation and oft-debated responsibility to Black America, Nike’s motivations for being perceived to be on the right side of history, and the enduring wave of crimes befalling customers of the legendary footwear line for now more than 30 years.

Jordan and Nike themselves stay conspicuously absent from interviews, yet Bamiro’s film remains steadfast in maintaining a measured and level-headed look at its subject regardless.

There’s a delicate balancing act in play, but it’s to the young British helmer’s credit that he can transport his audience so deftly from amusement to emotional wrenching under the auspices of nothing more than the effect a pair of sneakers have had on those depicted and discussed.

Wrapped up in an energetically engaging and ever-evolving style of street art and hip-hop trappings, One Man and His Shoes effortlessly sidesteps the pitfalls of the now bog-standard sports-adjacent ESPN off-season broadcast destination – proving itself essential viewing for sneaker acolytes and Jordan fans in equal measure, but, more importantly, an insightful look into a towering work of contemporary branding and its rarely considered responsibility to our culture.

Not leaving out our side of the pond, the ever-festering culture of institutional police racism is the focus of Ultraviolence, fellow British director Ken Fero’s harrowing follow-up to 2002’s Injustice in which he again explores the struggle of families whose loved ones have died in police custody – the common element in each case being the specific ethnicity of those so brutally killed.

It’s raggedly put together, visually evoking the protest spirit it embodies as it lays out a multitude of terrifying CCTV recordings that can never be unseen, each depicting yet another horrifying death of a Black man whose family cry out for nothing more than the basic courtesy of justice.

These families’ words will haunt you, as indeed will Fero’s message that we as a society have come simply to accept their plight as the by-product of everyday policing – news reports of their crimes simply background noise to us in stark contrast to the manner in which Vietnamese children attacked with white phosphorus affected an entire generation half a century previously.

It’s not for the faint-hearted, but it’s a tremendous call to arms for institutional reform.