Movie Review: A Call to Spy (2019). Netflix.

In the past few decades, many of the greatest espionage secrets of the British and American governments from World War II have finally been revealed. As I’ve mentioned in several other reviews, this has led to a growing awareness and increasing coverage of the important roles played by women in some of the most dangerous and sensitive Allied secret organizations and operations, in helping to win the war against the Axis powers.

The many books, memoirs, movies and TV shows that have followed these gradual revelations are endlessly fascinating and intriguing, while also making some of the same points over and over: women were often effective as spies, code breakers and operatives in part because they were less suspected by the opposition than the men were. 

At the same time, they had to constantly battle within their own organizations for respect, assignments and positions due to the same heavy sexism and “old boy networks” that dominated the leadership of all the warring societies of the times. And they could be very tough and resourceful, sometimes more so than most of the men around them.

Among the by-now most widely recognized and revered women spies who fought in the secret war against the Nazis are the three who are the main subjects of this Netflix docudrama, A Call to Spy. The first, Vera Atkins (played ably here by Stana Katic), was a Jewish woman from Romania who was an early recruit to the Special Operations Executive (SOE), Winston Churchill’s secret organization for waging clandestine war against the Axis powers. From a humble start in a clerical position, she rapidly rose to a role as a leading organizer of SOE secret operations in Europe.

The SOE’s primary assignment was “to set Europe ablaze” with sabotage, spying and subversion. Atkins’ storied career included some dangerous early assignments she herself carried out, but her greatest contribution to SOE was in recruiting and running female agents, and helping to build the clandestine networks the SOE set up in occupied France.

Virginia Hall (Sarah Megan Thomas) was one of the agents recruited by Atkins to the SOE, who became one of the Nazi’s most hunted enemies in the secret war in France. An American woman with a partially amputated leg from a hunting accident, who wore a wooden prosthetic leg as a result, Hall was nevertheless a brilliant operative and network leader, who survived many dangerous actions and repeatedly avoided capture to become one of the leading Allied agents in France. 

Remarkably, and despite her physical handicap, she did all this during two different long tours in France, the first with the British SOE as an agent/network leader early in the war, and then later (after the SOE considered her "blown" because of her notoriety and the German price on her head) with William Donovan’s American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), where she served as a wireless operator and a key agent in organizing support for the French resistance. She went on to a long career with the American CIA after the war.

Noor Inayat Khan (Radhika Apte) was an Englishwoman, born in Russia of Indian parents, who became a wireless operator in the WAAF (the British women’s air force auxiliary), from which she was recruited by Atkins. She eventually become the first female wireless operator sent into occupied France. 

Wireless operators had the difficult but vital job as secret agents of serving as the main communications link back to the SOE in England for entire networks of spies in France, by quickly tapping out coded radio messages from fellow agents on a teletype key. They carried out this dangerous mission, while having to constantly move to new “safe houses”, and find new hiding places for their suitcase-sized radio equipment and antennas, while also trying to evade aggressive radio tracking by French police and Nazi counter-intelligence agents.

Khan’s doomed career was particularly noteworthy, because she was the first Moslem agent in the British secret services. She was arrested in 1944, and sent to Dachau concentration camp, where she died before the end of the war.

The remarkable and heroic stories of these three famous female spies, their close relationships with each other and with their colleagues, and the sacrifices they made, is a lot to pack into a single movie, but A Call to Spy is a worthy attempt. It’s a suspenseful and moving entertainment as well as an inspiring World War II story of women at war. Recommended.

Personal Note: A New Song, and New Video!

Oh my -- it's Thursday already, and I haven't done a single post to The Memory Cache all week. It's okay, though, I hope -- I haven't gone anywhere, and I do have several new books and shows I'm ready to review, which I will get back to within the next couple of days.

But as I mentioned recently, I've been heavily focused this late summer and early fall on recording and preparing a number of new songs for release, a process which I've now chosen to make more labor intensive, but also even more artistically rewarding, by taking on the challenge of making my own music videos to go with my songs.

I learned enough about video editing and production by making the lyric video for Brand New Driver last summer to be able to at least provide a pleasing background for displaying the words of the song in a music video, but this time I wanted to see if I could actually create a visual presentation of the song's story, in music video format.

Today you can actually check out the results of my experiments. This morning, I released my latest rock single, Canadian Girl, on all music streaming services, along with not one but two Canadian Girl music videos on YouTube. They are essentially the same video, but the official lyric version includes the lyrics on screen for those who want to read along with the song.

If you follow the link on the bottom right side of this page to my YouTube music video channel, you can see both new videos, along with the others I've released since I started this mad post-retirement rock musical adventure. I hope you like the new song and video, a musical tale of young summer romance with a glockenspiel in it!  And I'll be back with new reviews here shortly.

Movie Review: The Janes (2022). HBO Max.

This inspirational new documentary of events from half a century ago could hardly be more timely or relevant to current events, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Dobbs case to overrule Roe v. Wade, and thereby revoke the constitutional rights of women to control their own reproductive freedom, specifically the right to obtain abortions.

The Janes is the story of a small collective of young women in Chicago, who in the early 1970s came together to create an underground network to help women obtain abortions, which were still illegal at that time. 

Building on their own experiences, and those of friends and family members, the group tried a variety of approaches for providing illegal abortions. In the beginning, they relied on existing illegal abortion providers, and used their organizational skills to handle information dissemination, set up secret communications, and provide scheduling, funding and transportation for young women who lacked the skills, connections and money to find abortionists themselves. That in itself was a remarkable achievement for a small group of young amateur conspirators.

However, as several of the now-elderly members of the group recount in the film, they soon realized that the skills required to safely do an abortion as a routine medical procedure were not impossible to acquire, even for people who had not been trained or certified as medical doctors or nurses. 

Eventually, several of the young women learned to perform abortions themselves, and were then aided by the collective in setting up constantly-moving one-day clinics in borrowed homes and apartments, to which the patients would be driven using the same sort of clandestine operational methods used by spies, terrorists, resistance fighters and criminals. And they were criminals – at least to the local police in Chicago, based on the existing laws and social norms at that time.

For a short time, they managed to safely arrange and carry out many hundreds of abortions. But like most ongoing black market activities involving many consumers, eventually the authorities got wind of it, and managed to raid one of their pop-up clinics, capturing several of the principals and charging them as illegal abortionists. And it would have gone badly for them, except for the timely intervention of the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Roe v. Wade in 1973 (by a 7-2 margin) that abortion was a constitutional right of all women in the United States, before their prosecution could be concluded.

The story of the Janes collective, so well told in this documentary, has become legendary as an example of the kinds of bold early feminist militancy that arose in the 1970s, where women began to make the difficult decision to consciously refuse to be limited by sexist laws and male-imposed control over their bodies and reproductive choices. 

As we are seeing in the resistance to the Dobbs decision, this determination of women to control their own bodies and their destinies has not abated in the intervening half century. Their determination is being demonstrated in the rapid rise of new political and legal activism in support of the right to prevent and end pregnancies, as well as in the formation of new networks (again, sometimes clandestine) to provide information, medications and services to women living in areas where abortion has been outlawed.

This film provides an enlightening history of the desperation women feel when their right to choose has been taken away by law and society, for the particular enlightenment of several generations of Americans who have never lived under these conditions. It also shows the kinds of creative acts of resistance to state control and meddling in private medical decisions that can be expected whenever abortion is banned, as is now happening again in so many states. Highly recommended.

Movies: Livin' Right Now (2005), and Love, Pain and the Whole Crazy World Tour (2008). Keith Urban.

Hello! It’s Rock and Roll Friday again here at The Memory Cache, the fourth Friday of each month, where for the past few months I’ve been posting reviews of books and shows about music, its history and some of my favorite artists and bands as a fan as well as a musician.

This month I don’t have any major new book or TV reviews, so instead today I’m going to talk about a couple of outstanding concert videos which are among the favorites on my bookshelf. These might be available from the library; otherwise they can probably still be found for sale on Amazon. I know that releasing full-length feature concerts on DVD is probably becoming a thing of the past for most music stars (along with DVDs!), but I want to share a couple of the best from my concert video library.

Today I want to talk about two concert DVDs from earlier in the career of my current favorite major rock star, Keith Urban. Keith Urban is technically considered to be a country music star, but his extensive catalog of music crosses over and includes influences from many strains of popular music, definitely including country and rock, but also folk and blues, pop, and in recent years, hip-hop, R&B and electronic dance music too.

I first discovered his music in 2016, already almost 20 years into his brilliant (and ongoing) career, when I took a listening foray into the world of modern country music after a family trip to Nashville. This was toward the end of Tom Petty’s career and life (my previous favorite), and I was feeling a need to explore some new music, and see if there were contemporary artists in country music that I might like, since there didn’t seem to be a lot new going on in rock music anymore. I actually listened to music from a half-dozen or so of the top country stars of the moment, including Blake Shelton, Thomas Rhett, Chris Stapleton and Brad Paisley, and liked several of them, but Keith Urban’s music stood out as utterly unique among them. It immediately caught my attention.

His songs had plenty of country elements, particularly during the early part of his career, like the sound of banjos and mandolins mixed in, but the songs were more complex in structure than most 3-chord country songs, the lyrics told emotionally appealing and relatable stories, Urban’s wonderful voice and delivery were captivating, and the lead guitar playing (also Urban) was absolutely thrilling to hear.

After I started collecting his albums, and becoming more familiar with my fast-expanding library of his amazing, memorable and addictive songs, I became aware of two full-length movies he had made of earlier concert tours, as his career was on the rise and gathering momentum. The first, Livin’ Right Now, was from 2005; and then he released another one, Love, Pain & the Whole Crazy World Tour, in 2008. I immediately ordered them both, and they were a revelation to see.

The thing I’ve come to believe about Keith Urban is that he is perhaps the most completely realized male rock star of my lifetime, in that he is the whole package of rock star skills and abilities in a single individual. If all we had were the large catalog of his songs and his studio recordings, we would already have more memorable and well-loved music than we have any right to expect from an artist or band. But to see him in a live concert performance setting is even better (even if on a DVD), because then you see the full range of the tools he has as a performing artist with which to work his magic on adoring crowds.

He is a charismatic showman. He is the riveting (and yes, very attractive) front man and leader of the band, generous and sharing with his audience, full of joy, funny, and energetic, running around the stage and out into the crowd, giving off so much warmth and fun, and singing those great songs, with his fans singing along to every word. That in itself should be enough to satisfy any rock fan or concert goer.

But then you see him playing his stunning guitar solos, like on the records but even better, often while he is also singing the lead vocals. I can’t remember ever seeing any other lead singer and front man for a great band who could also seemingly effortlessly play such dazzling guitar parts at the same time he was singing. It is awesome to behold, and I only realized that he could actually do that when I watched these two excellent concert videos.

A lot of folks by now are content to hear the classic songs from their youth (whenever that was), and maybe don’t believe there’s much new out there worth hearing or seeing. But I don’t agree. I believe that some of the greatest performing and recording musicians today, like Keith Urban and Taylor Swift, in fact put on much more amazing shows, and have much higher levels of individual artistic talent across a wider variety of media than the rock stars of decades ago, precisely because they are standing on the shoulders and the achievements of those great artists and music creators of earlier generations.  It also helps that they have far more and better technology at their fingertips, technology they've also had to learn to master.

Keith Urban regularly continues to deliver new bestselling albums, wonderful singles, and YouTube music videos, and continues to play sold out tours around the world. But for a time-capsule view of his live concert performances as a young breakout star, these two concert videos, Livin’ Right Now and Love, Pain and the Whole Crazy World Tour, are a treat. Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Te Ata (2021). Netflix.

This is a short historical docudrama about an early 20th century young Chickasaw woman from Oklahoma, known as Te Ata, who became a famous actress and performer despite discrimination and prejudice against her as a Native American and a woman.

She eventually became a friend of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and a legendary storyteller and performer of traditional American Indian cultural stories and myths. I had never heard of her before, so this was an interesting and worthwhile revelation. Recommended.

Movie Review: The Railway Man (2013). Netflix.

Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman star in this movie based on the true story of a British World War II veteran and former prisoner of the Japanese, tormented after the war by his past, who tracks down one of his wartime torturers, and ultimately forgives and reconciles with him. Kidman portrays the protagonist's later-in-life romantic interest and then wife, who believed in him and helped him through his postwar struggles.

An interesting and well-acted historical drama about the savagery of war and its traumatic aftermath, as well as the healing possibilities of forgiveness. Recommended.

Movie Review: Being the Ricardos (2021). Amazon Prime.

This movie was heavily reviewed last year, mostly favorably, and was written and produced by Aaron Sorkin.  It features Nicole Kidman playing the role of Lucille Ball, during a particular week of filming of the second season of "I Love Lucy", in which she and her husband Desi Arnaz ((Javier Bardem) are trying to deal with tabloid reports that she is a Communist, how to reveal the fact that she is pregnant with a new TV season ahead of her, and pressures in the marriage as Lucille finds out that Desi may be cheating on her.

Kidman's performance is excellent, but the script doesn't require her to re-create many of Lucy's hilarious "physical comedy" performances in the show -- instead, she shows the "behind the scenes" Lucille, especially her genius at envisioning what would make a scene hilarious and believable, and her tough, calculating professional actress side, as she tries to get and retain the fame and respect she seeks. 

There were some disorienting "flash back" scenes, where I lost track of when the scene was taking place relative to the main story line.  But in general, this was an interesting and believable story of two famous Hollywood and TV icons, and their complex professional and personal relationship.  Recommended.

Movie Review: Downton Abbey: A New Era (2022). Theatrical release.

For the second time, the producers of the vastly popular Downton Abbey British TV series, about an aristocratic English family living in an old country mansion with their downstairs servant crew, have extended the story line of the show with a theatrical movie featuring all the same characters, actors and of course the glamorous old mansion where almost all the action takes place.  I had the good fortune to see it a couple of weeks ago on vacation, my first trip back into a public theater since the pandemic began, and in the longest continuously operating theater in the country!  It was really fun to be back in a movie theater again.

The first Downton Abbey movie, released in 2019, was set in the mid-1920s, and explored all the tensions and excitement upstairs and downstairs caused by a weekend visit by the king and queen of England (and their extensive staff, of course) to Downton Abbey.  It was well-received by the large world of Downton Abbey fans, but in fact it didn’t have a great deal of dramatic tension – nothing really important was at stake for any of the characters, as I recall.  For fans, though, it was just fun to see all the familiar, beloved characters back again, being together and doing what they do in their glorious old house.

This second outing makes an attempt to get back to more of the sort of intrigue, uncertainty and jockeying for position within the family and the household staff that drove the plot of the TV show.  The end of the 1920s is approaching, the world is changing, and suddenly it turns out that Violet (Maggie Smith), the ailing grand dame of the family, has inherited an exotic villa in Italy from a long-ago suitor, which she intends to pass on to one of her grandchildren.

While some of the family and staff head off to meet the prior owners of the villa, and try to piece together what long-ago romantic events (and possible scandal) caused this unexpected gift, the rest of the family and staff are at home, hosting a film crew that is making a silent movie in the grand old house, just as the industry is starting the transition to “talkies”.

There’s a lot going on in the family and the larger world outside, and it’s all the usual fun and surprises in the relatively safe world of the extended Crawley family.  Recommended.

Movie Review: Castles in the Sky (2014). Amazon Prime.

This BBC made-for-TV movie is about the British scientist Robert Watson Watt, a meteorologist who, after failing to produce a workable prototype of a death ray prior to World War II, went on to invent and lead the R & D development of radar technology, and the equipment and monitoring stations that were so valuable to the RAF during the Battle of Britain. Quite informative and entertaining.  Recommended.

Movie Review: Top Gun: Maverick (2022). Theatrical release.

By now, most people know that the long-awaited sequel to the mega-hit Top Gun from 1986, Top Gun: Maverick, was just released to theaters this past weekend.  The new movie, which was ready for release in 2020, was shelved for two years until it could be seen by audiences in theaters on big screens.

Tom Cruise, the movie’s star and one of the executive producers, was insistent that this film would not be released to streaming platforms until it could be seen in theaters first, and so it wasn’t throughout the first two years of the pandemic.  But it’s finally here, and it was well worth the wait, especially for fans of the original movie (who are legion).

It’s worth noting at the outset that the plot contains a large number of elements that are absurd, and just not believable from a rational standpoint.  But of course, we can always decide to suspend disbelieve, just as we would for a blockbuster science fiction film, in which case, strap in for an incredible and entertaining ride!

The absurd parts: a legendary fighter pilot now in advanced middle age is still in the Navy, stuck by his own individualistic misbehavior at the rank of captain in the role of a test pilot, but yet somehow not forced out of the service for failure to advance.  An unnamed hostile country possesses fighter planes that are way better than the F-18s (or for that matter, F-22s or F-35s) the U.S. military actually flies.  A 3-week “emergency” is created, where an elite team of pilots needs to train for and perform an impossible and unprovoked attack on the unnamed country’s new uranium processing plant.  And so on.

Of course, the original Top Gun film had a lot of the same sort of contrived and unrealistic plot devices to set up its story, and none of us who have watched and enjoyed it over the years have ever really cared about that, because the believable characters, the portrayal of the human relationships under stress within an elite world of competitive warriors, the humor, and the incredible aerial combat scenes more than made up for any trivial lack of story plausibility.

The new movie is absolutely faithful to those aspects of the original, while continuing the story of several of those personalities and relationships as they have aged and matured through time, and at the same time showcasing even more spectacularly realistic aerial footage than the original, as a new Top Gun team of "best of the best" fighter pilots trains for and then launches the seemingly impossible attack.

Much has been made of the extent to which this is a Tom Cruise showpiece, and it certainly is.  As a producer, he brought a long career’s worth of knowledge and experience about how to create outstanding action-packed cinematic entertainment, along with his expertise as a highly trained pilot (in real life), and his strong connections to the Navy from the original film, due to its decades-long value as a major recruiting tool for naval aviation.

But as an actor, he also brings authenticity to his portrayal of an older, sadder but wiser Maverick.  He’s still the dominant fighter pilot among the “best of the best”, and he still won’t follow orders if it doesn’t suit him, but he also knows how to act his age and life experience – struggling over whether he can teach his students what they need to survive, self-aware about the impact of pilots’ deaths on their families, and loving and compassionate toward his ailing friend and former Top Gun competitor Iceman (Val Kilmer), now the admiral who’s been providing “top cover” for Maverick’s checkered naval career over the years.

As is typical of Cruise, he also insisted on doing his own stunts to the extent possible, to make them look more realistic, although apparently (and not surprisingly) he did not actually pilot the Navy’s F-18s used in the movie.  He does briefly fly his own personally-owned World War II era P-51 Mustang fighter, which in the movie is one of Maverick’s fast-moving boy's toys, along with his iconic Kawasaki motorcycle.

If you’re ready to venture back into a movie theater, and you’re able to enjoy a film that is loud, visually overwhelming, blatantly militaristic and fantastical, but also epic entertainment with an uplifting story and likeable characters, Top Gun: Maverick should be at the top of your list for the summer.  It seems to be playing almost everywhere, so finding a theater near you that’s showing it shouldn’t be a problem, and in the near future, we can expect it to show up on one of the streaming services (although it won't be as grand or overpowering on the small screen).  Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Holiday in the Wild (2021). Netflix.

This movie on Netflix was a nice evening's diversion as a light entertainment.  A wealthy New York woman (Kristin Davis), whose only son had just headed off to college, is dumped out of the blue by her husband.  

To make things worse, the newly empty-nest couple in this movie plot had had a "second honeymoon" planned, an exotic African safari, so the suddenly single wife decides to go on the trip to Africa by herself instead.  

At the first hotel stop, she meets a seemingly rough and boorish local character at dinner (Rob Lowe), only to discover the next morning that he is her pilot for the flight out to the start point for the safari.  But along the way, he lands the plane in the African wilderness to save a baby elephant, and she goes to work at the nearby elephant rescue camp, where she rediscovers her calling as a veterinarian, and slowly falls in love with the pilot.  

It seemed to me to be a sort of modern Out of Africa lite, but with more romance and comedy. Recommended.

Movie Review: The Courier (2020). Amazon Prime.

Benedict Cumberbatch and Rachel Brosnahan star in a cold war spy thriller and docudrama about the Soviet spy Oleg Penkovsky, and the British businessman who was recruited to carry his secrets from Russia to MI6 and the CIA.  Cumberbatch plays the businessman courier, and Brosnahan plays the role of his wife. 

Taut, suspenseful and based on the real life story, with an excellent and believable performance by Cumberbatch.  Recommended.

Movie Review: Don't Look Up (2021). Netflix.

This is last year's star-studded "end of the world" movie satire about a planet-killing comet headed for earth.  At the beginning, a talented young PhD student (played by Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a new comet, but her excitement quickly turns to terror when she and her professor (Leonardo DiCaprio) calculate that the comet will crash into earth in six months. 

This seemingly far-fetched yet unfortunately all too believable farce satirizes every absurd thing that's happened in our culture through the past five years:  Trumpian autocratic politics, climate change denialism, celebrity culture obsessions, social media disinformation, space-seeking billionaires and COVID-19 vaccines and mask resisters.  

In doing so, it makes a powerful statement about our collective failure to take seriously the threats looming before us, or to focus on finding viable solutions to problems (especially climate change, for which the comet is an obvious stand-in) that present a clear and present danger to our survival as individuals and as a species.  

Lawrence and DiCaprio star, but there are also great assists from Cate Blanchett (as a vacuous morning show TV co-host) and Meryl Streep (as a female Trump-like president).   

It's grimly amusing, but also a passionate scream for sanity and planetary preservation in our own beleaguered times.  Highly recommended.

Movie Review: Greyhound (2020). Apple TV+.

Tom Hanks stars as an inexperienced American destroyer captain early in World War II, trying to lead an American convoy of ships through a Nazi U-boat attack in the north Atlantic.  A good World War II naval story, based on C.S. Forester’s post-war novel The Good Shepherd, about an aspect of the war which perhaps has been less well covered in cinema than many other parts of the wartime experience.  

Still, not that much new ground is broken -- by now, there have been so many good movies about men at war, particularly in World War II.  This was a good but not exceptional performance by Hanks, who can always be depended on to play the decent, solid and reliable everyman at the center of a dramatic story.  Recommended.

Movie Review: On the Rocks (2020). Apple TV+.

This entertaining film stars Rashida Jones and Bill Murray, and was directed by Sofia Coppola.  It’s an amusing comedy about a young New York mother (Jones) who develops suspicions that her otherwise seemingly wonderful husband might be cheating on her.  

Into this bout of post-natal insecurity comes her serial philandering playboy father (Murray), who is immediately sure she is right, and sets out to drag her into his wild ideas and outrageous plots for investigating the husband.  Recommended. 

Movie Review: The War Bride (2002). Amazon Prime.

An energetic young London girl marries a Canadian soldier in 1941 in the midst of the Nazi bombing campaign, and quickly gets pregnant.  As the wife of a Canadian combatant, she is shipped off to his home in poor, rural Alberta in 1943 with their young daughter, but without her husband, who is off fighting the war. 

 

When she arrives at the primitive family home on the plains, she has to learn how to get along with a dour mother-in-law, a crippled sister-in-law, and other unwelcoming and unsophisticated locals she doesn't know. 

 

This is a well-executed "fish out of water" tale, that highlights the plight of World War II British war brides sent off during the war to the "safety" of their new husbands' distant homes and families.  Recommended.

Movie Review: Carrie Pilby (2022). Netflix.

An amusing tale of a 19-year old genius girl, already graduated from Yale, who is trying to find happiness in New York city. 

 

She's alienated from her father, working on her issues with an older male therapist, dealing with her feelings of loss from her mother's death, starting a job as a proofreader, dating a guy who's  engaged, sleeping with one of her professors, and slowly falling for a nice guy who lives next door. 

 

She's sorting it all out.  It's charming and funny.  Recommended.

Movie Review: The Tender Bar (2022). Netflix.

Ben Affleck plays a key supporting role in a sensitive coming of age tale about a young boy with an abusive and absent father, who is growing up with the support of his mother's large, chaotic family, and particularly the help and fatherly guidance of his bartender uncle (Affleck), and the rowdy group of local working class guys who hang out at his neighborhood bar.  

 

Based on the J.R. Moehringer autobiography, and produced by George Clooney.  Recommended.

Movie Review: Letter to You (2021). Apple TV+.

Letter to You, the most recent Bruce Springsteen documentary, is about the four-day recording session with his beloved E-Street band which produced this same-named new album, his first rock album in seven years.  

Clips of recording studio performances are mixed with interviews, and reminisces by Bruce, the band members and other friends and family who were present.  Recommended.

Movie Review: One Night in Miami (2020). Amazon Prime.

This movie apparently is based on a true event, but with extensive dramatic license, since none of the participants have apparently shared their accounts of what happened (and both Malcolm X and Sam Cooke died shortly thereafter).  

In 1964, Cassius Clay (later known as Muhammad Ali) won his first world heavyweight title in Miami, and had a nighttime get-together after the fight to celebrate with three other black men who were icons of the civil rights era:  NFL star running back Jim Brown, Black Muslim leader Malcolm X, and soul music superstar Sam Cooke.  

The movie, which resembles a stage play in its limited scenery and backdrops, features earnest discussion and arguments between the four young men about the competing pressures, temptations, duties and requirements of their roles as media stars, black male role models, political leaders for their people in the time of civil rights struggle, and individuals with their own personal dreams and aspirations. 

A very thoughtful dramatic exploration of those issues, in the historical context of the times.  Recommended.