Streaming through Art Cinema at Home:

The Iran Hostage Crisis helped quash Jimmy Carter’s bid for a second presidential term, and ended the ‘70’s with a real bummer for American morale. A military rescue operation called “Desert One” failed spectacularly, and tragically. But as legendary filmmaker Barbara Kopple asserts in this riveting documentary, genuine heroism often coexists with failure. With interviews from Americans involved in the operation and some of the actual Iranian hostage-takers, Kopple provides a detailed, engrossing analysis of what went wrong and why. But the film is really a tribute to courage—the kind of courage that too often gets forgotten. 

(Unrated; contains mature content.)