TOP MOVIES

Mississippi Burning e.tv, Channel 194, Today, 22:35

I don’t think many people will disagree that the intense racism that used to typify the American South was a particularly brutal example of the subject.

The Oscar-winning Mississippi Burning (1988) is one of my two favourite movies about the subject, the other being A Time

to Kill, with Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock and Samuel L Jackson, which also came out in 1988.

Mississippi Burning follows the usual formula for that kind of movie — those racist white folks down south did something bad, and some progressive law-enforcers from up north have to sort it all out, even if it means walking right into the lion’s den.

This movie is inspired by real events, in which a car full of civil rights activists, including two Jews and an African American, disappears while on a mission to register coloured voters in Mississippi.

FBI agents Alan Ward (Willem Dafoe, pictured) and Rupert Anderson (Gene Hackman) are sent to investigate. Ward wants to do things by the book, but Anderson is more street-smart. His underhand tactics mean one or two Ku Klux Klan conspirators will get off the hook, but it’s the only way to get the information they need to charge the rest.

It’s one of those films that legitimately makes you squirm and keeps you thinking about it long after you’ve turned off the TV.

The Imposter M-Net Movies Premiere, Channel 103, Tuesday, 20:30

Fact is always stranger than fiction. No number of fanciful stories — which you know can never happen — can blow your mind in the same way a true story can — one that leaves you wondering how it could possibly have happened.

This moviementary about Frédéric Bourdin, a career criminal and serial imposter, is just such a story. Three years after 13-year-old Nicholas Barclay disappeared from his hometown of San Antonio, Texas, Bourdin saw an opportunity and claimed to be the missing boy who had escaped from a child-prostitution ring.

Despite the fact that their missing son had light hair and blue eyes, the Barclay family acknowledged the dark-haired, brown-eyed — and French-accented, no less — Bourdin to be Nicholas.

Documentarian Bart Layton brings the exposition of this unbelievable fraud case to us with re-enactments and interview testimonies.