Movies: Historical documentary

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...

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

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

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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....

Using original footage and interviews, this documentary tells the nail-biting story of Apollo 13 and the struggle to bring its astronauts safely home....

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....

On June 6, 1944, the Allied Forces executed Operation Overlord, the largest seaborne invasion in history, storming the beaches of Normandy. This pivotal event, known as D-Day, liberated France and Western Europe. A new documentary features interviews...

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....

Egyptian archeologists dig into history, discovering tombs and artifacts over 4,000 years old as they search for a buried pyramid in this documentary....

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

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

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....

This documentary by Theo Kamecke from 1970 gives an indepth and profound look at the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. NASA footage is interspersed with reactions to the mission around the world as the film captures the intensity as well of the philosop...

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...

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....

This documentary delves into the mysteries surrounding the Neanderthals and what their fossil record tells us about their lives and disappearance....

A democracy and a dictatorship. A presidential campaign and dirty money. War and death. When Nicolas Sarkozy affirmed in the press that “No one can make sense of it”, he was trying to discredit the investigation into his ties with Muammar Gaddafi, po...

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....