Director Raoul Peck has made a powerful and vitally timely film about James Baldwin -- and about today. By juxtaposing Baldwin's words with images from Ferguson and other contemporary conflicts over race and poverty, he underscores the impact and importance of Baldwin's commentary.
It is shocking how little has changed. Peck makes that point subtly by going behind the grainy black-and-white images that are so familiar to us from the Civil Rights Era, so stylized that they seem almost as...