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Jamaa Fanaka’s Penitentiary (1979) is about boxing, but its first, longest, and most brutal fight centers on grappling. In lieu of boxing’s reliance on discrete blows, the combatants—protagonist Martel “Too Sweet” Gordone (Leon Isaac Kennedy) and “Half Dead” Johnson (Badja Djola)—spend most of the grueling, eight-minute struggle in a variety of arm locks and chokeholds. With boxing, one punch ends before the next is thrown, which means that, in theory, a nimble fighter could go entire rounds without being struck. By contrast, this scene conveys a sense of unrelenting tension, a constant straining of every bodily fiber to survive for one second longer, to come out just barely on top. There’s no respite, no time-out between bouts, just a state of extreme and prolonged exertion. Enhancing this impression is the low-key lighting, which shades and accentuates the fighters’ muscular c­­ontours to suggest bodies wound tight with fear and adrenaline,...

Willem Dafoe and Gene Hackman star as FBI agents who crack a 1964 conspiracy of racist murderers – without any help from the activists who played such a vital role at this time

Mississippi Burning (1988)

Director: Alan Parker

Entertainment grade: B

History grade: D–

On 21 June 1964, one black and two white civil rights activists disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The FBI codenamed the case Miburn – short for Mississippi Burning.

Crime

The three activists – in real life, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, though they are not named in the film – are driving, tailed by several cars. When they stop, they are murdered and their bodies hidden by a mob of white men connected to the Ku Klux Klan. Later, the FBI turn up, in the fictionalised forms of spiky white liberal intellectual Agent Ward (Willem Dafoe) and rough-around-the-edges white liberal anti-intellectual Agent Anderson (Gene Hackman). Viewers may erroneously conclude that the FBI...