Each week, Richard Brody picks a classic film, a modern film, an independent film, a foreign film, and a documentary for online viewing.

The French-born director Jacques Tourneur was a Hollywood master of genre films, including Westerns, and the best of them, “Stars in My Crown” (Amazon, iTunes, and others), from 1950, is also one of the high-studio era’s most frank and fierce depictions of racist violence. The story, narrated as a man’s late-life reminiscence about his childhood in a Southern town soon after the Civil War, involves a new preacher, the quick-witted, tough-minded, sharp-humored J. D. Gray (Joel McCrea), who confronts a local tycoon—and a group of Klansmen—seeking to chase a black farmer (Juano Hernandez) off his land. (The pretext for the conflict is miners’ need for work.) There’s also a subplot involving a raging epidemic, which reveals the preacher as a virtual scientist whose reasoned approach to the crisis proves to be a sort of antibody to hatred and paranoia. It’s also a warm and lofty vision of a marriage of kindred spirits (Ellen Drew, as the preacher’s wife, matches McCrea quip for quip) and their wider family ties. (Dean Stockwell plays their foster son, John Kenyon, whose memories the movie depicts.) The song-filled core of the sometimes comedic drama is the quest for a hearty, earthy Christianity that both stirs the soul and fosters charity, compassion, and community; its themes echo as grandly now as they did at the time of the film’s release.

Charles Burnett, who started making films (including his recently restored “Killer of Sheep”) as part of the so-called L. A. Rebellion, a group of black filmmakers at U.C.L.A. in the nineteen-seventies, made “Nightjohn” (iTunes), from 1996, for television, but its spirit matches that of his do-it-yourself films. It, too, is narrated as a reminiscence—of a woman who tells the story of her childhood as an enslaved black girl on a small Southern plantation. (It’s based on a novel by Gary Paulsen; Burnett and the screenwriter, Bill Cain, shift the action from the eighteen-fifties to the eighteen-twenties and thirties, and make Nat Turner and the revolt that he leads into a subplot.) The girl, Sarny (Allison Jones), is befriended by John (Carl Lumbly), who has recently been sold by another slave owner and is considered a troublemaker—he teaches other slaves to read and write, an offense that’s brutally punished. The drama, of Sarny’s ardor for literacy and its crucial role in the struggle for freedom, lyrically and passionately delineates the cruelly threatened and disrupted family lives of enslaved blacks. Burnett unstintingly dramatizes the horrific, mutilating violence of Southern slave owners, the dependence of American institutions and wealth on the practice and maintenance of slavery, and the heroic efforts to resist it, maintain cultural continuity, and preserve intimate and political history.

Clint Eastwood, freedom fighter? Yes, if the notion is viewed from the right angle, as it is in his 2011 drama, “J. Edgar” (Amazon, iTunes, YouTube, and others). It stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the feared, revered, and hated founding head of the F.B.I., who held the position from 1935 until his death, in 1972. As told by Eastwood, working with a script by Dustin Lance Black, it’s the story of the perversions of politics and distortions of personality resulting from American puritanical mores. Here, Hoover, a dedicated law-enforcement officer, is also struggling with, or against, his homosexual desires; Eastwood shows Hoover’s desperate effort to foster a stereotypically macho image of his masculinity—and to broadcast it—and how Hoover’s sense of secrecy, fear, anger, and constraint turned him paranoid and repressive. (One of Hoover’s depicted misdeeds is an attempt to blackmail and harass Martin Luther King, Jr., in the nineteen-sixties.) In Eastwood’s view, sexual terror gets in the way of a rational and responsible conservatism; recent developments seem to bear out his thesis.

Hoover’s paranoia was echoed and amplified throughout the government and country at large, and Charlie Chaplin—Charlie Chaplin!—was one of its targets. A British subject threatened with the suspension of his American visa when he went back to England in 1952 (to promote “Limelight”), Chaplin spent the rest of his life in exile (O.K., in Switzerland). But, in the mark of a true artist, he turned that experience into one of his greatest films, “A King in New York” (the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck), from 1957—the last film in which he starred—about one of the central American political pathologies of the time, McCarthyism, and some related social pathologies, including the money-made vulgarity of mass media. Chaplin plays King Shahdov, a pacifist ruler chased from his throne in the fictitious country of Estrovia. Reaching New York penniless, he falls under the spell of an advertising executive (Dawn Addams) who gets him onto a primordial version of reality TV and into a whiskey commercial that’s the precursor to Bill Murray’s great commercial scene in Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation.” King Shahdov also befriends a boy (played by Chaplin’s son Michael) whose parents are imprisoned in an anti-Communist witch hunt, and, as a result, the King himself is subpoenaed by a congressional committee. Chaplin’s wild yet precisely calibrated comedy is as derisive and keenly targeted as it is in “The Great Dictator,” and is even more pointedly aimed at his personal persecutors. Its furious lampooning of American politics and shibboleths led to its virtual suppression—it wasn’t shown here until 1973.

Johanna Hamilton’s documentary “1971” (Netflix), released in 2014, illuminates a little-known but crucial episode in modern American politics—and political protest. In 1971, eight anti-Vietnam War activists in Philadelphia, weary of F.B.I. efforts at surveillance and infiltration, organized a break-in at a small suburban Bureau field office, where they stole files and sent copies of them to the news media. (The first Ali-Frazier fight for the heavyweight championship, the so-called Fight of the Century, is part of a crucial subplot.) The documents included records of F.B.I. programs to suppress legitimate and constitutionally protected speech and action; only the Washington Post was willing to publish the stolen information, and the reports sparked widespread outrage—and much wider reporting—about the agency’s repressive policies. (Congressional hearings were held, and new oversight legislation resulted.) Among the discoveries was the Cointelpro project, which included evidence of the F.B.I.’s plots against Martin Luther King, Jr. The participants in the break-in were, remarkably, never caught. In “1971,” Hamilton interviews five of them—none of whom had previously discussed the event on camera—as well as Betty Metsger, the journalist who wrote the first report about the break-in and the documents. The twin central aspects of the story are the grave threat to freedom posed by politicized law-enforcement officials, and the grave personal risks on the part of principled activists that it took to confront and redress that threat.