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Pixar’s “Wall-e,” “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” and “Selena” have been selected for preservation by the National Film Registry.

Each year, the Librarian of Congress names 25 motion pictures that are “culturally, historically or aesthetically” significant. Under the terms of the National Film Preservation Act, the movies have to be at least 10 years old.

Other titles added to the National Film Registry in 2021 include “Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Pink Flamingos,” “Who Killed Vincent Chin?,” “Richard Pryor: Live in Concert,” “Cooley High” and “Sounder.”

This year’s lineup brings the number of films in the registry to 825, a small portion of the 1.7 million movies in the Library’s collection. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, says the recent assemblage represents one of the most diverse classes of films to enter the registry, with movies dating back nearly 120 years and representing Hollywood studios,...

In trying to explain why 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long would walk into three Atlanta-area massage spas on March 16 and shoot eight people, including six women of Asian descent, law enforcement officials cited the shooter’s self-reported motivation as “sexual addiction,” not one of racial hatred. But amid a yearlong backdrop of anti-Asian sentiment fueled by the Covid-19 pandemic, on top of decades of fetishism of Asian women, skepticism quickly mounted in the Asian American community.

For Renee Tajima-Peña, one of the Academy Award-nominated filmmakers behind the documentary “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” — about the 1982 killing of a Chinese American by two white autoworkers who called Chin racial slurs and beat him to death with a baseball bat— the violence seemed inescapably entangled in the cultural objectification of Asians.

“I think when Asian Americans looked at this murder in Atlanta, [they see] he targeted three Asian American businesses, he killed six Asian American women,...