Best movies like Y Sŵn

An in-depth look at the prison system in the United States and how it reveals the nation's history of racial inequality.

On September 15, 1963, a bomb destroyed a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four young girls who were there for Sunday school. It was a crime that shocked the nation--and a defining moment in the history of the civil-rights movement. Spike Lee re-examines the full story of the bombing, including a revealing interview with former Alabama Governor George Wallace.

A comic, biting and revelatory documentary following a small group of prankster activists as they gain worldwide notoriety for impersonating the World Trade Organization (WTO) on television and at business conferences around the world.

A documentary on the Z Channel, one of the first pay cable stations in the US, and its programming chief, Jerry Harvey. Debuting in 1974, the LA-based channel's eclectic slate of movies became a prime example of the untapped power of cable television.

Government officials practice their response and decisions in a simulated escalation of nuclear threat.

Takes us inside the world of Anonymous, the radical "hacktivist" collective that has redefined civil disobedience for the digital age. The film explores early hacktivist groups like Cult of the Dead Cow and Electronic Disturbance Theater, then moves to Anonymous' raucous beginnings on the website 4chan. Through interviews with current members, people recently returned from prison or facing trial, writers, academics, activists and major players in various "raids," the documentary traces Anonymous’ evolution from merry pranksters to a full-blown movement with a global reach, the most transformative civil disobedience of our time.

With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women's Emergency Brigade is a 1979 documentary film directed by Lorraine Gray about the General Motors sit-down strike in 1936–1937 that focuses uniquely on the role of women using archival footage and interviews. It provides an inside look at women's roles in the strike. The film was one of the first to put together archival footage with contemporary interviews of participants and helped spur a series of films on left and labor history in the US utilizing this technique. The film was also important in helping bring into view the history of American women being active in the public sphere, particularly in union and labor actions. The film was, further, ground breaking because it was produced and directed by women. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Porky balks at learning the Pledge of Allegiance until Uncle Sam appears to him in a dream and gives him a lesson in American history.

This film was shot entirely at the Gettysburg National Military Park, where the decisive battle of the American Civil War was fought. Leslie Nielsen narrates the story while contemporary songs and the sounds of battle are heard in the background. The sites of the various engagements, the statues of the leaders of the Northern and Southern troops, and the battlefield cemetery are featured. President Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is read at the end.

After "The Poseidon Adventure", in which the ship got flipped over by a tidal wave, the ship drifts bottom-up in the sea. While the passengers are still on board waiting to be rescued, two rivaling salvage parties enter the ship on search for money, gold and a small amount of plutonium.

In order to become a member of a fraternity, the applicants have to go through initiation rituals to show their loyalty. Way back in the 1960s, someone played a nasty trick on the student Sidney Scheider: He had to take a bath in a tub filled with cornflakes and coffee grounds, vinegar and even more disgusting substances. Nothing unusual so far but someone had replaced the water with pure acid. Sidney was seriously wounded and died a horrible death. This year Acid Sid returns with a vengeance, killing everyone who comes his way. One by one is slaughtered and in the college hell breaks loose.

A television news chief courts his anchorwoman ex-wife with an eleventh-hour story.

The cavalry defend a small town from indians.

During the 1940s, Maurice Bendrix, a writer recently discharged from the armed service, falls in love with Sarah Miles, whom he interviews for a book. Sarah is married, but she and Maurice eventually give in to their mutual attraction, leading to an affair that lasts several months. Maurice's jealousy, along with the bombing of London by the Germans, seemingly leads to the end of their relationship. However, the reasons are later revealed to be more complex.

Desperate to find his missing daughter, a man tracks her last known whereabouts to a small desert town only to discover that the head of a deeply funded security firm and his vicious younger sister are protecting a family secret that could potentially derail a billion dollar water deal between his boss and the US government.

An escaped clone tries to expose a government plot to clone everyone and make a perfect society.

A group of Welsh rugby fans go over to see Wales play France in the final match of the Six Nations rugby tournament. Caradog Evans goes there also to seek an old flame from his wartime combat in the 1940s. His son, finds a love in Paris too. Written by Reece Lloyd

The story of Bobby Sands, the IRA member who led the 1981 hunger strike during The Troubles in which Irish Republican prisoners tried to win political status.

An act of civil disobedience turns into a standoff with police when homeless people in Cincinnati take over the public library to seek shelter from the bitter cold.

A seamstress recalls events leading to her act of peaceful defiance that prompted the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.

Ex-slave and former Union soldier Gideon Jackson represents other ex-slaves at the constitutional convention, and is soon elected to the U.S. Senate despite opposition from white landowners, law enforcement and the KKK. He unites with sharecropper Abner Lait, who helps Jackson unite ex-slaves and white tenant farmers.

With the ending of the Spanish Civil War, a dispirited band of volunteers from the International Brigades seeks refuge in France. But on reaching the frontier, the band is disarmed, and all are detained as political prisoners. Then come instructions from Vichy that all fit prisoners are to be sent to Morocco to work on the Sahara railway for the Germans. However, one man manages to escape to London with vital information for the Allies.

Matt Braddock is a civil engineer during World War II who has new ideas for shipbuilding. Braddock tries to establish yards for building prefabricated ships on the West Coast, but he is hindered by the former superintendent of the shipyard, Joel Kennedy. A disappointed lover fails to deliver an important message on welds and it leads to the collapse of a new ship's superstructure and the death of a boy.

Director Christy Cabanne's 1933 film dramatizes one year in the lives of four midshipmen at the U.S. Naval Academy.

A Chickasaw man survives great hardships and tragedy to establish a vast ranching empire along the famous cattle highway of the American West.

A group of terrorists take a radio disk jockey and his wife and child hostage in order to get their manifesto out to the world.

The second chapter in the story of John Bunyan's immortal classic Pilgrim's Progress. Christiana, who had earlier scoffed at her husband for leaving his family in the City of Destruction, truly repents of her sins. She is rewarded with a glowing faith and leads her daughter, Credence, and sons, Avail and Avow, plus her doubting neighbor, Mercy, towards the Celestial City. With the help of Greatheart, Christiana sets a wonderful example of a loving, but concerned mother who guards and guides her children through numerous dangerous adventures. At Doubting Castle, Mercy at last takes firm grip upon the promises of God's Word and is rewarded with deep faith. Then, at Pilgrim's Rest, the entire group discovers the meaning of the verse, "For me to live is Christ and to die is to gain."

This documentary film tells the dramatic story of Richard and Mildred Loving, an interracial couple living in Virginia in the 1950s, and their landmark Supreme Court Case, Loving v. Virginia, that changed history.

Nick is a writer in New York when he gets posted to a bureau in Greece. He has waited 30 years for this. He wants to know why his mother was killed in the civil war years earlier. In a parallel plot line we see Nick as a young boy and his family as they struggle to survive in the occupied Greek hillside. The plot lines converge as Nick's investigations bring him closer to the answers.

The seven sisters of the outcast LeFleur family try to survive in a post-Civil War Deep South. The movie was unable to be completed, thus, it may be left to the viewer to imagine the ending to his screeching, sinful epic.

When a young couple buys a contested home at auction from the U.S. government for $5,400, they become involved in a political and moral battle much larger than what they originally bargained for.

It is 1865 and Union prisoners use a military balloon to escape a Southern prison camp near the end of the Civil War. The balloon drifts for days and finally lands on a mysterious volcanic island with very unusual inhabitants. Also landing, in a better aircraft, is Rulu, a visitor from Mercury. She seeks a radio-active material that will enable her to manufacture an explosive that will destroy the world or, at least, the portion known as Earth in this 15 Chapter Serial from the 1950s.

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.

Election Night 1979: Margaret Thatcher is about to come into power. A young black man is held on suspicion of murdering his pregnant wife. Officers Karn and Wilby, racist to the core and high on the prospect of a Conservative Party victory, try to lure the suspect into a quick confession. But the night has just begun...Callous humiliation gives way to a barrage of sinister violence, leading to a devastating conclusion.Written by Barrie Keefe, who was behind the British classic The Long Good Friday, SUS is an emotionally charged and incredibly tense crime drama that serves as a powerful outcry against past institutional racism. But in the age of counter-terrorism SUS also begs the question: has history caught up with us?

When a planeload of Pakistani orphans are shipped to his state for permanent relocation, the governor of Idaho defies the president and closes the state's border. News Net Television, a cable news program that makes hay by reporting on political scandals, quickly spins the racist act into an overnight media sensation, creating a divide in national opinion over the issue.

Nurse Margaret Sanger became a pioneering crusader for women's reproductive rights after she published a booklet on birth control techniques that flew in the face of a law established by Anthony Comstock forbidding the dissemination of information on contraception. Sanger later helped to establish America's first birth control clinic in 1916, and in 1925 was one of the founders of Planned Parenthood.

Forty years after Martin Luther King s assassination, HISTORY, with newsman Tom Brokaw, takes viewers through the extraordinary life and times of America's civil rights visionary. KING goes beyond the legend to portray the man, the questions, the myths and, most importantly, the relevance of Dr. King s message in today s world. Includes a rare interview with his son, Martin Luther King III, as well as associates from the civil rights campaigns and contemporary figures such as former President Bill Clinton, Condaleezza Rice, Bono, Forest Whitaker, Chuck D and others.

The rise, fall and rise of a teen death-rock idol.

Ernesto is a sweet, gentle man who is doing the best he can to get by in current-day Los Angeles. A sudden series of bad breaks, however, cause him to lose his job, his girlfriend, and his home - placing him in a very precarious situation. Then, just when all seems hopeless, he gains employment, a great place to live, an important friendship, and unexpectedly, an improved career trajectory. In his new position, he finds love, financial independence and a bright future - a happy ending beyond his wildest expectations.

Five years after the war in the Falklands between Britain and Argentina, many facts were still wrapped in red tape. Many of the key figures had remained silent. No-one had been to Argentina to tell the other side of the story. For the majority of the British people, the war was another glorious chapter in their history. With flags waving and bands playing, British troops had sailed away to repel the invaders. Patriotic emotions were stirred as they returned victorious. Government MPs tried to get the film banned, but Yorkshire TV's telephones were jammed with messages of support from wives and mothers of those who died in the conflict. Called 'the documentary to end all documentaries about the Falklands War' in the British press, it was also described as 'more poem than polemic - a hymn against war'.

Humans can communicate volumes without ever opening their mouths, all through the amazing power of body language. This surprising History Channel presentation explores the subtle art of silent (and sometimes, inadvertent) signals, and examines the ways in which political leaders and celebrities use the method to entice audiences to trust and follow them.

Channel 4 documentary about British mother, Sally Evans, whose son, Thomas, had been recruited - and joined - Islamist terrorist organisation, Al Shabaab, in Somalia.

A "What if?" alternative history sees Nazi Germany prevailing in the second World War. First the occupiers establish their power bases, before they find themselves under attack from the underground resistance.

America's experiences during the Civil Rights Movement and the Space Race are well documented. However, few know about the moment these two worlds collided, when the White House and NASA scrambled to put the first black astronaut into orbit. This is the untold story of the decades-long battle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to be the first superpower to bring diversity to the skies, told by the black astronauts and their families, who were part of this little known chapter of the Cold War.

'Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance ) (1978), based on two works by Cesare Pavese, falls into the category of History Lessons and Too Early, Too Late as well. It, too, has two parts—a twentieth-century text and a text regarding the myths of antiquity, each set in the appropriate landscape. Pavese's The Moon and the Bonfires looks back on the violent deaths of Italian anti-Fascist resistance fighters; Dialogues with Leucò is a series of dialogues between heroes and gods, connecting myth and history and returning to an ambiguous stage in the creation of distinctions, such as that between animal and human, which are fundamental to grammar and language itself. Such a juxtaposition of political engagement with profoundly contemplative issues such as myth, nature, and meaning points to the characters of Empedocles and Antigone in the Hölderlin films.' (From "Landscapes of resistance. The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub" by Barton Byg)

This lively, spirit-lifting musical celebrates the sheer joy -- and survival -- of black music, song and poetry since the days of America's Civil War. With utter grace and ease, the gifted eight-member singing ensemble glides from gospel to disco and from slave-quarter sermons to contemporary black poetry.

In this western, a decent Indian agent loses his job and his good name after someone steals the government money he was to deliver to a tribe. Because he cannot bear to see the people starve over the long winter, he begins searching for the robbers. He does so by looking for the unusual coins that had been included in the payroll.

Just after the Civil War, Captain Thorn is sent west to help protect the new telegraph line that is under construction. Leeds is out to establish an independent nation in the west and tries stop its construction and also incoming wagon trains by inciting the Indians to attack both of them.

Simon, a traumatised young man who can glimpse the future must do anything to stop a killer, even if it means being the murderer’s final victim. He hires Steve, an ex-SAS soldier but their plan goes awry.

When ex TV host and socialite Lex finds herself faced with the possibility of spending Christmas sharing a luxury chalet with her son, ex husband and his new girlfriend, she volunteers to work in the chalet to avoid things getting too close to home, while documenting her every move for a new wave of followers loving this new chapter of her life.