Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over

Matt Roush says...

SUNDAY: At 82, still relevant enough to make waves on Twitter (and to be parodied on Saturday Night Live), the pioneering crossover singer reflects on her six-decade career and passion for advocacy—for civil rights and AIDS research—in an admiring and illuminating bio-documentary. Her ability, back in the 1960s, to move from the R&B to pop charts with those Bacharach-David classics (“I Say a Little Prayer,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”) gave her a platform to promote social change and to open the door for a generation of Black artists, including her cousin Whitney Houston. “That’s the beauty of music: It transcends color,” she declares. Fellow music icon Smokey Robinson nails it when he describes Warwick as “the picture of elegance.”

What's Worth Watching (Dec 31)