Premiering at the New York Film Festival, the filmmaker's follow-up to her '13th' tackles birthright citizenship, the Equal Protection Clause and the undoing of the gains of Reconstruction.

The movie, I'm pleased to report, exerts the same kind of historical/topical force that "13th" did. DuVernay, while she works in an extremely accessible and mainstream way, has a singular gift for ...

Ava DuVernay's ambitious follow-up to "13th" traces the Fourteenth Amendment's unfinished promise, but its urgency sometimes overwhelms its argument.