Future biographers will doubtless find rich pickings in the FBI tapes, but King’s towering legacy is bound to endure.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 16, 2025

A spellbinding work.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 11, 2022

Pollard doesn’t linger on the unknown. His film is about examining what we do know, highlighting the abuse of federal power to thwart a powerful national movement.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 24, 2022

This film offers another example of how past administrations and agencies have worked against voices of equality, and how these conversations remain necessary even to this day.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 17, 2022

MLK/FBI leads us to question whether the governmental overreach it depicts is as safely in the past as some would have us believe.

| Sep 26, 2021

There's little new information about the FBI's open racism vs. the civil rights movement, but it's useful to have it documented in one place.

| Sep 13, 2021

It is a thorough examination of over a decade of conflict and strife, packaged into a feature film, which is no small feat. But its failure to focus on the FBI investigation and muddying its portrayal of King hurts the overall production.

| Original Score: 7/10 | May 25, 2021

Downright essential.

| May 16, 2021

Sam Pollard's Martin Luther King deep-dive unearths amazing contemporary footage and previously unseen government files.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 23, 2021

A disturbing doc on one of the most shameful chapters in American government history.

| Apr 16, 2021

MLK/FBI shuns the sensational and the speculative in favor of verifiable facts and evidence-based conclusions. While the more voyeuristic among us may be disappointed that Pollard chose this course, it's clear he took the high road.

| Apr 12, 2021

The director does a commendable job of condensing decades of America's past and delivering it in an insightful manner

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 29, 2021

...MLK/FBI starts to reflect our ongoing anxieties about lionizing individual people only to later duke it out in the culture wars when those human beings turn out to be human.

| Mar 25, 2021

While MLK/FBI is expansive and humane, it leaves room for a deeper and more concentrated look at Coretta Scott King as an individual who faced her own enormous challenges as a public figure.

| Mar 9, 2021

It gives the public a full opportunity to understand who King was as a person, a man, a human being...we see his failings, but we also see how great and powerful his movement was...

| Mar 2, 2021

King's tortured relationship with the FBI is the subject of the new documentary MLK/FBI. Directed by Sam Pollard, it offers a comprehensive overview of how the FBI targeted King during his years of activism.

| Feb 18, 2021

Feels unfinished and leaves you wanting more

| Original Score: B- | Feb 7, 2021

The film doesn't so much champion King as it does examine the challenges he had to overcome to ignite a movement.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 2, 2021

Using rich black-and-white archival footage and calling upon the detailed insights of historians and experts in social justice, among others, [Director] Pollard and his team take the controversial story and make it fresh and fascinating.

| Jan 29, 2021

MLK/FBI peels back the curtain about the U.S. government pressing all their weight on the great civil rights leader.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 28, 2021