Heat Wave (1990)

Heat Wave is a 1990 American thriller-drama television film about the 1965 Los Angeles Watts Riots, directed by Kevin Hooks and starring Blair Underwood, Cicely Tyson, James Earl Jones, Margaret Avery, and David Strathairn. On August 11, 1965, a routine traffic stop on a summer night sparks years of frustration within Los Angeles' African American community into a race riot that shocks the United States. A rookie black journalist investigates the tensions of the Watts section of Los Angeles in the bloody summer of 1965. A superb depiction of the Watts riot and how it possibly started in gre…