The title of Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI should be taken literally. This is a two-pronged investigation into a conspicuously fraught and, for the FBI, embarrassing moment in the American political establishment’s too-recent past. The documentary is primarily a study of the public and private selves of the men it names up …
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Dickens had the teeming streets of Victorian-era London, Balzac had Paris during the Bourbon Restoration period, and Steve James has 21st century Chicago. A key part of the team behind the groundbreaking Hoop Dreams, this veteran documentarian has dabbled over the years in everything from biopics (Prefontaine) to bigger-picture looks …
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“Harmony, harmony, harmony — no band, no nothing,” explains Charlie Thomas of the Drifters in director Brent Wilson’s Streetlight Harmonies, a new doc tracing the history of doo-wop (available on VOD). Doo-wop could be swoony and romantic, playful and mischievous. It was the sweet-voiced sibling to the insouciant rock & …
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In 1961, a plane crashed in Ndola, Rhodesia. One of the passengers who perished in the accident was Dag Hammarskjöld, the Secretary-General of the United Nations. He’d been negotiating a cease-fire between troops in the Republic of Katanga and U.N. forces. Hammarskjöld was 56 years old. These are facts. Mads …
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