True Crime Docs

IMDb Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. Jeremiah 1:5   Netflix's latest documentary,  Our Father , tells the story of an Indianapolis-based fertility doctor, Donald Cline , who fathered many children by secretly inseminating patients with his own sperm.   The film unfolds as both a detective and horror story.  It begins when Jacoba Ballard  sets out to find if she has any siblings.  Ballard realized at a young age that she looked different from her family.  She thought she was adopted but learned that her parents had fertility issues.  Her biological dad was a sperm-donor.  When she took a DNA ancestry test, she discovered many half-siblings.  Eventually they all traced their paternity back to the Dr. Donald Cline.  The shocks keep coming as more families discover they've been affected.  The numbers are staggering.  It leaves a very real possibility that in the Indianapolis area, unsuspecting people may have dated, married or had children with a half-sibling.  Despite

IMDb There's a mystery about the story.  Sex and politics.  The Kennedy brothers.  The Cuban Revolution.  Question mark.  Question mark.  Question mark.  -Anthony Summers Marilyn Monroe died on the night of August 4, 1962 in her Los Angeles home.  She was the most famous woman in the world, and in many ways, she still is. Over the years, many programs, books and articles have examined Monroe's untimely death from  acute barbiturate poisoning .  Into the fray comes Netflix's latest documentary, The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes .   What makes this documentary interesting are the hours of tape-recorded interviews done by journalist, Anthony Summers , in the early 1980s.   His investigation begins with the 1982 decision by the Los Angeles District Attorney to reopen the inquiry into Monroe's death: https://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/29/us/los-angeles-inquiry-on-marilyn-monroe-rules-out-murder.html    Summers interviewed many people, including  John Huston , Bi

  IMDb Netflix's latest documentary,  White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch   was not a film I eagerly anticipated.  Even in its heyday, I didn't shop at A & F.  It was too expensive and I knew that I didn't belong there.  My looks didn't match their image, which suited me just fine.  I took my dollars elsewhere.  The documentary is worth watching.   It examines the beginnings of the company as an elite outdoorsman brand, to its revamping and meteoric rise in the late 1990s.  Its success was derived from exclusionary and discriminatory practices.  From its corporate culture to its ad campaigns, Abercrombie & Fitch projected the image that "all-American" was synonymous with "all-White." Abercrombie & Fitch was founded in NYC in 1892 as an elite sporting goods outfitter.  Its costumers came to include President Theodore Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway.  By the time Les Wexner acquired the company in 1988 , it was in fin