“Sidney,” a documentary tribute to the trailblazing Black movie star Sidney Poitier, was produced by Oprah Winfrey, and it leans far more toward one-dimensional inspiration than insight. Important questions are sometimes raised here by the interview subjects, but they are almost always evasively dropped.
In the opening moments of the movie, we hear Poitier’s unmistakable voice on the soundtrack: “I was not expected to live,” he says. “I was born two months premature.” Poitier relates that his father got a shoebox in which he was going to “tuck me away,” but Poitier’s mother insisted on giving him some more time to recover.