Best movies like Chicago at the Crossroad

The role of African Americans in the recovery years of the Great Depression is the subject of this informational short, which offers an idealized depiction of life in a segregated society. The highlight, by far, is rare footage of Orson Welles’s “Voodoo Macbeth,” produced in 1935 for the New York Negro Unit of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project.

Dreams can make a life worth living, but they can also be dashed by bad decisions. This is the crossroads whare the Younger family find themselves when their father passes away and leaves them with $10,000 in life insurance money. Should they buy a new home for the family? Perhaps a liquor store? While no choice is easy, life on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s is even harder.

Chantel Mitchell, a hip, articulate, black high-school girl in Brooklyn, is determined not to become "just another girl on the IRT" (the IRT is one of NYC's subway lines). She dreams of medical school, a family, and an escape from the generational poverty and street-corner life her friends seem to have accepted as their lot. But personal and sexual challenges confront Chantel on her way to fulfilling these dreams.

A teen gang in a South London housing estate must team up with the other residents to protect their neighbourhood from a terrifying alien invasion.

The continuing adventures of the barbers at Calvin's Barbershop. Gina, a stylist at the beauty shop next door, is now trying to cut in on his business. Calvin is again struggling to keep his father's shop and traditions alive--this time against urban developers looking to replace mom & pop establishments with name-brand chains. The world changes, but some things never go out of style--from current events and politics to relationships and love, you can still say anything you want at the barbershop.

An aspiring dancer and her two wicked sisters resent their mother's love for a foster daughter.

This is not a film about gun control. It is a film about the fearful heart and soul of the United States, and the 280 million Americans lucky enough to have the right to a constitutionally protected Uzi. From a look at the Columbine High School security camera tapes to the home of Oscar-winning NRA President Charlton Heston, from a young man who makes homemade napalm with The Anarchist's Cookbook to the murder of a six-year-old girl by another six-year-old. Bowling for Columbine is a journey through the US, through our past, hoping to discover why our pursuit of happiness is so riddled with violence.

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.

A chronicle which provides a rare window into the international perception of the Iraq War, courtesy of Al Jazeera, the Arab world's most popular news outlet. Roundly criticized by Cabinet members and Pentagon officials for reporting with a pro-Iraqi bias, and strongly condemned for frequently airing civilian causalities as well as footage of American POWs, the station has revealed (and continues to show the world) everything about the Iraq War that the Bush administration did not want it to see.

In the mid-1960s, a group of high school friends who live on the Near North Side of Chicago enjoy life to the fullest...parties, hanging out, meeting new friends. Then life changes for two of the guys when they are falsely arrested in connection with stealing a Cadillac. We follow their lives through to the dramatic end of high school.

To push the crime rate below one percent for the rest of the year, the New Founding Fathers of America test a sociological theory that vents aggression for one night in one isolated community. But when the violence of oppressors meets the rage of the others, the contagion will explode from the trial-city borders and spread across the nation.

In Lincoln City, some inhabitants have extraordinary abilities. Most live below the poverty line, under the close surveillance of a heavily militarized police force. Connor, a construction worker with powers, involves with a criminal gang to help his ailing mother. (Based on the short film “Code 8,” 2016.)

Walter Lee Younger is a young man struggling with his station in life. Sharing a tiny apartment with his wife, son, sister and mother, he seems like an imprisoned man. Until, that is, the family gets an unexpected financial windfall.

A cinematic portrait of the homeless population who live permanently in the underground tunnels of New York City.

New York City, 1957. Lionel Essrog, a private detective living with Tourette syndrome, tries to solve the murder of his mentor and best friend, armed only with vague clues and the strength of his obsessive mind.

In 1920s New York City, a Black woman finds her world upended when her life becomes intertwined with a former childhood friend who's passing as white.

Anthony and his partner move into a loft in the now gentrified Cabrini-Green. After a chance encounter with an old-timer exposes Anthony to the true story behind Candyman, he unknowingly opens a door to a complex past that unravels his own sanity and unleashes a terrifying wave of violence.

A young man tries to escape the South Side of 1920s Chicago.

Nearly a decade after occupation by an extraterrestrial force, the lives of a Chicago neighborhood on both sides of the conflict are explored. In a working-class Chicago neighborhood occupied by an alien force for nine years, increased surveillance and the restriction of civil rights have given rise to an authoritarian system -- and dissent among the populace.

A documentary of the decline of America. Featuring footage (most exclusive to this film) from race riots to serial killers and much, much more.

Every school day, African-American teenagers William Gates and Arthur Agee travel 90 minutes each way from inner-city Chicago to St. Joseph High School in Westchester, Illinois, a predominately white suburban school well-known for the excellence of its basketball program. Gates and Agee dream of NBA stardom, and with the support of their close-knit families, they battle the social and physical obstacles that stand in their way. This acclaimed documentary was shot over the course of five years.

In the past 40 years, the War on Drugs has accounted for 45 million arrests, made America the world's largest jailer, and destroyed impoverished communities at home and abroad. Yet drugs are cheaper, purer, and more available today than ever. Where did we go wrong?

How does retired cop Joshua Burke (James Earl Jones) get two career criminals, Manny Durrell (Sidney Poitier) and Dave Anderson (Bill Cosby), to follow the straight and narrow? Con them into helping juvenile delinquents turn over a new leaf. But how? Burke has never been able to nail the duo, but he uses what he knows of their seedy past to blackmail them into volunteering.

SACCO AND VANZETTI is an 80-minute-long documentary that tells the story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrant anarchists who were accused of a murder in 1920, and executed in Boston in 1927 after a notoriously prejudiced trial. It is the first major documentary film about this landmark story.

Successful New York attorney Sam Leibowitz travels to the South in 1933 to defend nine young black men accused of raping two women on an Alabama freight train.

After thirty years teaching in London, Mark Thackeray retires and returns to Chicago. There, however, the challenge of teaching kids in an inner city school proves to be too much to resist.

Clark (Tanya Dempsey), a young Mathematics major at University, thinks she's found the best deal for student housing: a group of squatters who live in an abandoned hospital secretly. The quirky residents let her into their community provided she follow the rules, including not telling anyone about her living arrangements. All seems wonderful, until she discovers that the reason that the hospital was abandoned was a series of murders in the 1940s by a strange "shrieking killer" who was never captured - and the discovery that someone who's living in the hospital is using occult means to bring back the demonic "Shrieker".

There's No Place Like This Place, Anyplace looks at the transformation of an iconic Toronto block - where the world famous Honest Ed's store once lived - through the stories of its community members as they reconcile their history with the future, all while facing the biggest housing crisis the city has ever seen.

A look at how the community of Newtown, Connecticut came together in the aftermath of the largest mass shooting of schoolchildren in American history.

An architect engages in conflict with an activist who lives in a dangerous complex the architect designed.

This documentary attempts to go beyond the sensationalized media coverage and the stereotypes to examine several key conflicts from the point of view of both Black and Jewish activists.

Having served 12 years in prison for assaulting a corrections officer, Terry Griff is let out of prison early and embarks on a downward spiral.

An insurance salesman inadvertently gets trapped after dark in an apartment building that is terrorized by a street gang called "The Vampires."

WELFARE shows the nature and complexity of the welfare system in sequences illustrating the staggering diversity of problems that constitute welfare: housing, unemployment, divorce, medical and psychiatric problems, abandoned and abused children, and the elderly. These issues are presented in a context where welfare workers as well as clients struggle to cope with and interpret the laws and regulations that govern their work and life.

Across walls, fences, and alleys, rats not only expose our boundaries of separation but make homes in them. "Rat Film" is a feature-length documentary that uses the rat—as well as the humans that love them, live with them, and kill them--to explore the history of Baltimore.

The Interrupters tells the moving and surprising stories of three Violence Interrupters — former gang members who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they once caused.

A historical account of military policy regarding homosexuality during World War II. The documentary includes interviews with several homosexual WWII veterans.

This documentary about serial killers and FBI Behavioral Sciences profilers features interviews with Ed Kemper and Ted Bundy as well as crime victims and law enforcement officials. The film includes some dramatic recreations.

THE CITY DARK is a feature documentary about the loss of night. After moving to NYC from rural Maine, filmmaker Ian Cheney asks a simple question - do we need the stars? - taking him from Brooklyn to Mauna Kea, Paris, and beyond. Exploring the threat of killer asteroids in Hawaii, tracking hatching turtles along the Florida coast, and rescuing injured birds on Chicago streets, Cheney unravels the myriad implications of a globe glittering with lights - including increased breast cancer rates from exposure to light at night, and a generation of kids without a glimpse of the universe above. Featuring stunning astrophotography and a cast of eclectic scientists, THE CITY DARK is the definitive story of light pollution and the disappearing stars. Written by Wicked Delicate Films

Marcus Garvey: Look for me in the Whirlwind uses a wealth of archival film, photographs and documents to uncover the story of this Jamaican immigrant, who between 1916 and 1921 built the largest black mass movement in world history. It explores Garvey’s dramatic successes and failures before his fall into obscurity. Among the film’s most powerful sequences are interviews with people who were part of the Garvey movement decades ago. These interviews communicate the appeal of Garvey’s revolutionary ideas to a generation of African Americans, and reveal how he invested hundreds and thousands of black men and women with a newfound sense of pride.

A made-for-cable-TV docudrama about the trial of the men accused of conspiring to cause protesters to riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Combines in an innovative manner dramatic recreations (largely faithful to the actual trial transcripts) with documentary footage and interviews with the actual defendants.

In this deeply personal film, director Roger Ross Williams sets out on a journey to understand the complex forces of racism and greed currently at work in America's prison system.

Blues Story presents an impressionistic history of one of the most lasting art forms America has ever produced - as told for the first time through the eyes of the artists who lived it. Combining exclusive interview and performance footage with vintage clips and the music of many Blues legends long gone, the history of this richly felt music is illuminated - from its African roots to its American urban expression - along with its profound place in our cultural heritage. The result is a rare, first-hand glimpse into the lives of these vanishing artists, and a moving, insightful and informative look into a music that continues to be loved by millions throughout the world.

The history of the East Lake Meadows public housing project in Atlanta and the people who lived there from 1970 to its demolition in 2000, with special emphasis on the activism of Eva Davis asserting the rights of the tenants.

Colorful, outspoken, a man of many contradictions, Ralph McGill emerged during the troubled years of the 1950s and '60s as a prominent and influential Southern white opponent of segregation and one of America's most revered newspaper editors. As he became convinced of the injustice of segregation and the inevitability of change, McGill used his front-page editorial column in the Atlanta Constitution as a Southern forum for his distinctive blend of moral outrage and pragmatic moderation. McGill's life is a touchstone for understanding the complex array of forces that dramatically reshaped the South and America in the quarter-century after World War II. These elements are blended with rare archival film, compelling contemporary images and a rich musical score to create an unusually moving and evocative film.

Americans know President Ronald Reagan s politics, his policies, and his oratorical prowess. But as we approach what would have been his 100th birthday in February 2011, the totality of the legacy of America s 40th president is still eclipsed by the myth. While some say he s a hero, and others call him an empty suit, one thing is for certain President Ronald Reagan made history. But what made him? Using rare archival footage and personal interviews with those who knew him best, REAGAN goes beyond the myth to reveal the epic story of an unforgettable man who, against all odds, rose to the pinnacle of power. A brand-new HISTORY special that uses rare archival footage and personal interviews to reveal the President Reagan that few of us knew.

A revealing one-off documentary that provides an inside view of how Tony Blair and former prime ministers - including Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher and John Major - have run their cabinet, the highest decision-making body in the land. Through candid interviews, rare archive footage and filming inside No 10, presenter Michael Cockerell opens the door to the Government's own chamber of secrets as he seeks the answer to the question: is the notion of cabinet government an obsolete concept?

Two young boys, best friends Malik and Eric, discover the joys and hardships of growing up in the sprawling Cabrini-Green public housing complex in 1992 Chicago.

The underseaa world is an unseen battleground. Join Dr. Robert Ballard, former naval intelligence officer and discoverer of the RMS Titanic, as he reveals how the race for global domination as eon from the deapest reaches of the ocean. Using rare archival footage and fully animated recreations, this fascinating documentary examines the technology behind Cold War nuclear subs along with other recently declassified defense systems, such as SOSUS, the U.S. Navy's top-secret sound survelliance network. Sea Spies also looks at the key historical developments that influenced twentieth century warfare and features interviews with marine experts as well as high-ranking military officials.

The triumphs and challenges of Negro League baseball in the early 20th century. Through rare footage and interviews with iconic players like Satchel Paige and Buck O'Neil, as well as Hall of Famers Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, the film highlights the league's pivotal role in Black communities and the impact of integration.