Movies: Historical documentary

A century after Shackleton's Endurance sank beneath the ice, explorers uncover the legendary shipwreck and an amazing tale of survival....

Working from the text of James Baldwin’s unfinished final novel, director Raoul Peck creates a meditation on what it means to be Black in the United States....

In 1968, art students Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell made a trippy photo collage for their musician friends Syd, David and Roger. The resulting album and album cover, A Saucerful of Secrets, helped launch two careers: that of Pink Floyd, one...

Using archival footage, cabinet conversation recordings, and an interview of the 85-year-old Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts his life, from working as a WWII whiz-kid military officer, to being the Ford Motor Company's president, to managing ...

Thirty years after the release of his film JFK (1991), filmmaker Oliver Stone reviews recently declassified evidence related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which took place in Dallas on November 22, 1963....

A keen chronicle of the unlikely rise to power of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) and a dissection of the Third Reich (1933-1945), but also an analysis of mass psychology and how the desperate crowd can be deceived and shepherded to the slaughterhouse....

Archival footage, animation and music are used to look back at the eight anti-war protesters who were put on trial following the 1968 Democratic National Convention....

On January 6, 2021, Americans witnessed an attack on the U.S. Capitol without precedent in our history. Armed militiamen and QAnon followers made headlines, but among them were a sea of crosses and Christian flags, rosaries and "Jesus Saves" signs. W...

The director’s mother, Mirka Mora, avoided Auschwitz by one day. On his father’s side many perished in the Holocaust. These facts triggered three visits to Auschwitz by Mora from 2010 to 2014 in an effort to understand and remember....

Director Claude Lanzmann spent 11 years on this sprawling documentary about the Holocaust, conducting his own interviews and refusing to use a single frame of archival footage. Dividing Holocaust witnesses into three categories – survivors, bystander...

Tells the story of the greatest natural disaster of the ancient world, an event that experts believe inspired the legend of Atlantis....

The world's greatest pin-up model and cult icon, Bettie Page, recounts the true story of how her free expression overcame government witch-hunts to help launch America's sexual revolution. When she saw the film The Notorious Bettie Page, produced by...

In the 17th century, the Netherlands experienced an unprecedented artistic explosion: painters such as Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals were so prolific that they were able to make a living from their talent alone; so much so that, within a prosperous soc...

Working largely uncredited in the Hollywood system, storyboard artist Harold and film researcher Lillian left an indelible mark on classics by Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg, Mel Brooks, Stanley Kubrick, Roman Polanski and many more....

In 2001, Jimmy Wales published the first article on Wikipedia, a collaborative effort that began with a promise: to democratize the spreading of knowledge, monopolized by the elites for centuries. But is Wikipedia really a utopia come true?...

Gdańsk, Poland, September 1980. Lech Wałęsa and other Lenin shipyard workers found Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. The long and hard battle to bring down communist dictatorship has begun....

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What happened after Einstein fled Nazi Germany? Using archival footage and his own words, this docudrama dives into the mind of a tortured genius....

A collection of restored prints from the Lumière Brothers....

We love rock ’n’ roll: well, it’s hard not to, with its sexy, totally exhilarating back story, and the way it continues to evolve and remain relevant. Almost 70 years after it burst onto the scene in the United States, the jury’s still out on who act...