Bookmark this page!

Check out our new blog! We'll be posting great discounts and deals there often.

African-American Cinema DVDs

The Color Purple

Sales Rank:17554
List Price: $19.96
Lowest New Price: $19.90
Lowest Used Price: $2.49
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Format:

Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
DVD-Video
Full Screen
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Danny Glover
Whoopi Goldberg
Oprah Winfrey
Margaret Avery
Willard E. Pugh

Steven Spielberg, proving he's one of the few modern filmmakers who has the visual fluency to be capable of making a great silent film, took a melodramatic, D.W. Griffith-inspired approach to filming Alice Walker's novel. His tactics made the film controversial, but also a popular hit. You can argue with the appropriateness of Spielberg's decision, but his astonishing facility with images is undeniable--from the exhilarating and eye-popping opening shots of children playing in paradisiacal purple fields to the way he conveys the brutality of a rape by showing hanging leather belts banging against the head of the shaking bed. In a way it's a shame that Whoopi Goldberg, a stage monologist who made her screen debut in this movie, went on to become so famous, because it was, in part, her unfamiliarity that made her understated performance as Celie so effective. (This may be the first and last time that the adjective understated can be applied to Goldberg.) Nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including best picture and actress (supporting players Oprah Winfrey and Margaret Avery were also nominated), it was quite a scandal--and a crushing blow to Spielberg--when it won none. --Jim Emerson

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Citizen King

Sales Rank:6792
List Price: $24.99
Lowest New Price: $15.00
Lowest Used Price: $14.97
MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Format:

Black & White
Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Noland Walker
Orlando Bagwell

Actor(s):

Taylor Branch
David Halberstam
Martin Luther King
Andrew Young

CITIZEN KING, a two-hour documentary from acclaimed filmmakers Orlando Bagwell and Noland Walker, explores the last five years in the life of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Personal recollections and eyewitness accounts of friends, movement associates, journalists, law enforcement officers, and historians illuminate this little-known chapter in the story of America's most influential moral leader in the 20th century.

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner

Sales Rank:14346
List Price: $14.94
Lowest New Price: $16.64
Lowest Used Price: $10.83
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Full Screen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Spencer Tracy
Sidney Poitier
Katharine Hepburn
Katharine Houghton
Cecil Kellaway

Spencer Tracy's last performance was in this well-meaning, handsome film by Stanley Kramer about a pair of white parents (Tracy and Katharine Hepburn) trying to make sense of their daughter's impending marriage to an African American doctor (Sidney Poitier). The film has been knocked over the years for padding conflict and stoking easy liberalism by making Poitier's character in every socioeconomic sense a good catch: But what if Kramer had made this stranger a factory worker? Would the audience still find it as easy to accept a mixed-race relationship? But there's no denying the drawing power of this movie, which gets most of its integrity from the stirring performances of Tracy and Hepburn. When the former (who had been so ill that the production could not get completion insurance) gives a speech toward the end about race, love, and much else, it's impossible not to be affected by the last great moment in a great actor's life and career. --Tom Keogh

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Def Comedy Jam, Vol. 2

Sales Rank:24651
List Price: $19.98
Lowest New Price: $13.43
Lowest Used Price: $7.74
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Color
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Martin Lawrence
Bernie Mac
Chris Rock
Chris Tucker
Rudy Rush

Studio: First Look Home Entertain Release Date: 05/29/2001 Run time: 120 minutes Rating: Nr

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

The Search for Robert Johnson

Sales Rank:8028
List Price: $9.98
Lowest New Price: $4.99
Lowest Used Price: $5.00
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Black & White
Color
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

John Hammond
Miller Carter
Eric Clapton
Wink Clark
Honeyboy Edwards

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

The Green Pastures

Sales Rank:13870
List Price: $19.98
Lowest New Price: $11.36
Lowest Used Price: $11.47
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Subtitled
NTSC

Director(s):

Marc Connelly
Roy Mack
William Keighley

Actor(s):

Rex Ingram
Oscar Polk
Ethel Waters
Sammy Davis Jr.
Hamtree Harrington

"Gangway for de Lawd God Jehovah!" Despite racial stereotypes and a naive, backward vision of "Negro Heaven," The Green Pastures remains an important, controversial, and still-entertaining milestone in African American popular culture. Because this 1936 spiritual musical embraces all of the black stereotypes that were prevalent in its time, Warner Home Video has appropriately included a disclaimer regarding the political incorrectness of the film's then-common racial prejudices, stressing the importance of acknowledging these stereotypes as opposed to pretending they never existed. With this understanding, The Green Pastures still endures as a classic American folk drama, based on Marc Connelly's Pulitzer Prize-wining Broadway production (suggested by Roark Bradford's southern sketches "Ol' Man Adam an' His Chillun"), in which several Old Testament stories are performed as they might be imagined by black Sunday-school child in the Depression-era South. It's an all-black vision of heaven as a perpetual fish-fry, full of black angels and cherubs eating catfish and smoking 10-cent "see-gars," where "De Lawd" (Rex Ingram) presides over the tales of creation: Noah and the Flood; Joshua at Jericho; Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; Adam and Eve; Moses and Pharaoh; etc. With heavenly accompaniment by the Hall Johnson Choir, these Bible stories play like a lavish fantasy revival, and while the stereotypical images and all-black colloquialisms may seem absurdly regressive from the perspective of latter-day enlightenment, there's no denying that The Green Pastures is still a transcendently joyful celebration of faith. As a relic of its time, it's a vivid (and for some, still uncomfortable) reminder that racial stereotypes--even in a joyful gospel context--can teach us a lot about where we've been, and where we've yet to go. --Jeff Shannon

On the DVD
The Green Pastures is accompanied by an excellent DVD commentary in which actor/director LeVar Burton and African American cultural scholars Herb Boyd and Ed Guerrero (author of Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film) place the film in proper historical context. Burton candidly explains why he could never watch Green Pastures in its entirety until he gained the detached perspective of an actor/director, while Boyd and Guerrero relate many of the precedents and milestones that inform such '30s-era movies as The Green Pastures and Cabin in the Sky. Entertaining and informative, their commentary is essential listening for anyone seeking an enlightened perspective on racial stereotypes of the past. Also included, for similar historical appreciation, are two Vitaphone shorts from the early 1930s: "Rufus Jones for President" is a lively "two-reeler" (20 minutes) in which the 7-year-old future Rat Pack star Sammy Davis Jr. sings and dances (along with blues great Ethel Waters) as a young boy who fantasizes about becoming President of the United States. "An All-Colored Vaudeville Show" delivers just what the title promises: a stage revue of black performers including Broadway star Adelaide Hall and the legendary tap-dancing Nicholas Brothers. Both shorts represent all that was good--and bad--about Depression-era show business as a vibrant showcase for African American performers and the social conditions through which they endured. --Jeff Shannon

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Redemption - The Stan "Tookie" Williams Story

Sales Rank:13827
List Price: $14.98
Lowest New Price: $6.87
Lowest Used Price: $0.58
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
Dubbed
DVD-Video
Full Screen
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Jamie Foxx
Lynn Whitfield
Lee Thompson Young
Brenden Jefferson
Brenda Bazinet

In the annals of acting, 2004 will be remembered as a banner year for Jamie Foxx. Before his acclaimed turns in Collateral, alongside Tom Cruise, and Ray, the Ray Charles biopic, he produced and starred in this made-for-cable movie about former gangbanger Stan "Tookie" Williams. Directed by actor-turned-filmmaker Vondie Curtis Hall (Gridlock'd), Redemption tracks Tookie's rise as co-founder of L.A.’s notorious Crips, fall to death-row inmate, and rise again to Nobel Prize Nominee. Tookie’s reminiscences to journalist Barbara Becnel (Lynn Whitfield), while he is on death row, frame the story. Virtually unrecognizable from his days on In Living Color, a buffed-up, dreadlocked Foxx gives an effectively low-key performance, while Whitfield also shines in a less rewarding role. Redemption may not have the grandeur of Malcolm X or The Hurricane--and Tookie's transformation from man of violence to man of peace happens too quickly--but his story is just as inspirational. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.

Sales Rank:22196
List Price: $9.98
Lowest New Price: $4.11
Lowest Used Price: $3.00
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Ariyan A. Johnson
Kevin Thigpen
Ebony Jerido
Chequita Jackson
Jerard Washington

Sassy, in-your-face account of an intelligent, flippant Brooklyn girl who lives in the projects and dreams of college. Ariyan Johnson is captivating as the teen with attitude and a brain, but she cannot decide which should guide her. She wants a better life but finds herself taking a very hard road. First-time writer/director Leslie Harris put together a sharp, realistic, very funny account of life for a young black woman. It is rough around the edges, however, and is definitely hampered by the minuscule budget. This may not always be pretty, but it is consistently interesting. --Rochelle O'Gorman

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Hollywood Shuffle

Sales Rank:15630
List Price: $14.98
Lowest New Price: $4.39
Lowest Used Price: $5.13
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Letterboxed
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Gregory 'Popeye' Alexander
Sena Ayn Black
Conni Marie Brazelton
Sarah Kaite Coughlan
Starletta DuPois

The alumni of Hollywood Shuffle are spread across dozens of current comedies and TV sitcoms--this is the movie that introduced Robert Townsend and the Wayans Brothers to the world. Townsend plays a young actor who struggles with being offered stereotyped street hustler roles while trying to maintain his self-respect and the approval of his family. Between scenes of comically humiliating auditions, Bobby has satirical fantasies about the plight of black actors, including the classic "Black Acting School" sketch, in which white teachers demonstrate jive talk and street moves for the befuddled black students. Townsend has a charming, low-key comic style, one considerably more subtle than that of some of the black comics who have risen to success with supposedly self-aware renditions of the stereotypes Townsend mocks. Townsend made this movie on his credit cards and it is clearly a heartfelt labor of love. --Bret Fetzer

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Cornbread, Earl & Me

Sales Rank:13341
List Price: $14.98
Lowest New Price: $6.83
Lowest Used Price: $5.41
MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Format:

Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
DVD-Video
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Moses Gunn
Rosalind Cash
Bernie Casey
Madge Sinclair
Jamaal Wilkes

He had all the right moves to put the ball away...until the cops put him awayfor good. UCLA All-American and NBA Rookie Of The Year Keith Wilkes and Academy AwardÂ(r)* and Golden Globe** nominee Laurence Fishburne III give spectacular debut performances in this "touching...sensitive and gripping movie" (Cue) that's "guaranteed to take your emotions for a reckless ride" (L.A. Herald-Examiner)! Step into the court with Cornbread, Earl And Me...you'll be glad you did. Wilkes is "Cornbread," a promising high school basketballer who has what it takes to shoot himself right out of the ghetto...until two cops mistake him for a rapist and gun him down in cold blood. But when the police attempt to cover up their mistake, strong-arming the community into silence with threats of jail time and violence, it's up to Cornbread's 11-year-old brother Wilford (Fishburne) and his pal Earl (Tierre Turner) to find the courage to speak the truth and clear Cornbread's name. *1993: Supporting Actor, What's Love Got to Do With It **1995: Actor, "The Tuskegee Airmen"

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Previous | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | Next

Quick Links

Home
Amazon
Our Shops
Merchants
Reviews
Blog

Check out our new blog! We'll be posting great discounts and deals there often.

African-American Cinema DVDs

Quick Links

Categories