The first thing you’ll notice about “Pieces of April” is how it looks.

Shot on a handheld digital camera in 2002, the image quality is flat and noisy, like an old home movie. But once your eyes adjust, the film — which is streaming on the Criterion Channel this month — begins to work on you.

It takes place on a single Thanksgiving day on the Lower East Side, jumping between parallel stories of a New Jersey family piling into the car to visit their estranged daughter in the city, and the daughter frantically preparing to host them in her Suffolk Street walkup.

It’s both deeply of its time, and shockingly modern, with a cast as diverse as New York City that doesn’t tout its own diversity, and with takes on race and love and identity that feel like they came from a Gen Z filmmaker, and not

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