Bookmark this page!

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

African-American Cinema DVDs

Barbershop (Special Edition)

Sales Rank:29193
List Price: $14.98
Lowest New Price: $0.98
Lowest Used Price: $0.01
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)

Format:

Anamorphic
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
Dubbed
DVD-Video
Special Edition
Subtitled
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Ice Cube
Cedric the Entertainer
Eve
Anthony Anderson
Sean Patrick Thomas

With enough lively banter to keep its customers happy for years, Barbershop is a loose, lanky comedy with its heart--and its humor--in all the right places. Ice Cube plays Calvin, reluctant heir to his late father's barbershop on Chicago's South Side--a neighborhood institution that seems like a trap for a guy with bigger dreams. But Calvin is devoted to his employees and local customers, and when he makes an ill-considered deal with a loan shark (Keith David), the future of the barbershop hangs in the balance. There's a goofy subplot involving a stolen cash machine, but what gives Barbershop its abundant charm is its compassionate, feel-good vibe for its likable characters--not just scene-stealer Cedric the Entertainer (as Eddie the veteran barber, whose shaving lesson is a shining pearl of wisdom), but the entire well-chosen cast. It may seem like a lot of casual rap, but look and listen closely, and Barbershop will reward you with its danceable rhythms of life. --Jeff Shannon

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Street Fight: A Film by Marshall Curry

Sales Rank:26471
List Price: $24.95
Lowest New Price: $10.00
Lowest Used Price: $9.99
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
Full Screen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

(Documentary) Oscar-nominated STREET FIGHT follows the turbulent campaign of Cory Booker, a 32-year old Rhodes Scholar/Yale Law grad running for mayor of Newark, N.J. against Sharpe James, the four-term street smart incumbent twice his age. It tells an Am

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Live at the Nelson Mandela Civic Theatre

Sales Rank:51056
List Price: $19.99
Lowest New Price: $12.51
Lowest Used Price: $11.49
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Color
DVD-Video
Full Screen
Live
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

In their five-year existence, the Soweto Gospel Choir has become a world-wide sensation, winning two Grammy Awards and selling out concert halls around the world. This DVD captures all the spontaneity and infectious spirit that makes their live appearances an unforgettable experience.

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

The Color Purple

Sales Rank:15658
List Price: $19.96
Lowest New Price: $23.99
Lowest Used Price: $8.50
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...

The History Channel Presents Voices of Civil Rights

Sales Rank:6451
List Price: $29.95
Lowest New Price: $10.05
Lowest Used Price: $10.03
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Black & White
Color
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

The civil rights movement in the 1950s and '60s--a tumultuous time marked by frequent tragedy and occasional triumph--is examined in this provocative two-disc, four-hour set containing five programs produced for the History Channel. The first of these, "Voices of Civil Rights," eschews the standard documentary format of narration, interviews, photos, etc. in favor of personal, firsthand reminiscences by people, black and white alike, who lived through the turbulent years when there were two very separate Americas, especially in the South. For "Negroes," there was the world in which they were reared, loved and cherished; then there was "the real world," where they were hated by whites and discrimination was a bitter fact of daily life. Major events and issues like the struggles for school integration and voter registration, the killing of Medgar Evers, and the Ku Klux Klan's reign of terror are covered, but it's the anecdotal accounts of these exceptionally well-spoken people that really drive them home. The extraordinary tale of the KKK's atrocities against the family of Vernon Dahmer, for instance, is told not only by the victims but by one of the Klansmen who participated. Repentant and deeply ashamed to this day, the latter ultimately testified in court against his "brethren"; later, while serving his own sentence, he was visited in prison and forgiven by the very people whose lives he had shattered.

The remaining documentaries on the first disc detail the villainous tactics of the "Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission" (a government-appointed agency whose mission was to use whatever was needed--propaganda, threats, actual violence--to suppress the civil rights movement in that state), and the events surrounding March 7, 1965, the "bloody Sunday" when marchers in Selma, Alabama were viciously attacked by the local police. These are stories that evoke grim memories of folks like Sheriffs Jim Clark and Bull Connor, and racist governors Ross Barnett (Mississippi) and George Wallace (Alabama), all of them driven by a flammable combination of ignorance, hubris, and the fear of losing a preeminence they'd done nothing to earn. But it was a time that also witnessed the emergence of Martin Luther King, Jr. and a call to action by President Lyndon Johnson, who knew there was something very wrong about a country where young black people could fight in Vietnam but were denied the right to vote at home. Disc Two includes a biography of King, depicting a "reluctant hero... who raged beneath the weight of his burden," a leader who did not seek his position but was chosen for it. A second bio details the life and work of Thurgood Marshall, the first African American justice to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Neither disc contains any bonus features. --Sam Graham

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Edge of America

Sales Rank:24241
List Price: $14.98
Lowest New Price: $8.05
Lowest Used Price: $6.67
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Tim Daly
Geraldine Keams
James McDaniel
Wes Studi
Michael Flynn

From acclaimed director, Chris Eyre, whom People Magazine calls "…the preeminent Native American filmmaker of his time" comes this touching and inspirational story about loyalty, friendship and courage. New man in town Kenny Williams (James McDaniel) has just accepted a position as an English professor at the Three Nations Reservation in Utah. Finding it hard to fit in with the tight-knit Native American community, he decides to take on the challenge of coaching the high school girls' basketball team.

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

No Way Out (Fox Film Noir)

Sales Rank:15576
List Price: $14.98
Lowest New Price: $6.11
Lowest Used Price: $5.99
MPAA Rating: Unrated

Format:

Closed-captioned
Black & White
Dolby
Dubbed

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Richard Widmark
Linda Darnell
Stephen McNally
Sidney Poitier
Mildred Joanne Smith

Nominated for the 1950 Oscar® for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay, this intense drama about racial hatred pulls no punches. When a white patient in a hospital dies under the care of a black intern (Sidney Poitier), the victim?s racist brother (Richard Widmark) seeks to destroy the doctor?s career. Although the hospital?s idealistic Chief Resident (Stephen McNally) tries to diffuse the escalating tension, the victim?s ex-wife (Linda Darnell) seems to go along with the vengeance-seeker?until she realizes she?s on the wrong side.

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Berkeley in the Sixties

Sales Rank:15339
List Price: $29.95
Lowest New Price: $17.23
Lowest Used Price: $17.37
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Color
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

John Searle (III)
Jackie Goldberg
Susan Griffin (II)
Jack Weinberg (II)
Nancy Davis

This outstanding documentary by Mark Kitchell, six years in the making, is a comprehensive and insightful story of campus and community activism as born at the University of California at Berkeley. Using extensive archival footage and bridging the distance between past and present with more recent interviews, Kitchell shows how a 1960 protest aimed at the House Un-American Activities Committee was the launching point for the Free Speech movement, which evolved into organized opposition against the Vietnam War, support for the Black Panther party, and the feminist movement. No simple valentine to student-demonstration days, the film brilliantly uses contemporary perspective to show how great legacies and inevitable failures were simultaneously born in a charged atmosphere. Not to be missed. --Tom Keogh

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

I Got the Hook-Up

Sales Rank:28306
List Price: $14.99
Lowest New Price: $8.62
Lowest Used Price: $5.38
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
DVD-Video
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Master P
Anthony Johnson
Gretchen Palmer
Frantz Turner
Richard Keats

Hip-hop czar Master P cowrote, executive produced, and stars in I Got the Hook-Up, which is truly one of the more surreal urban comedies ever seen. P plays Black, a small-time hustler who scams a shipment of cell phones. With his partner Blue (A.J. Johnson) and semi-girlfriend Lorraine (Gretchen Palmer), Black snags a bit of cellular service from a large corporation and starts making a bundle from cell-phone sales. Unfortunately, the phones are a bit undependable, and a gangbanger accidentally broadcasts the location of a package of cash over the radio, setting off a treasure hunt. The gangbanger swears vengeance on Black and Blue, the cellular company starts investigating the surge in use, the FBI gets involved--everyone's on the hunt for our heroes. This plot description, however, is much more direct than the way it plays out. I Got the Hook-Up is a bizarre conglomeration of oddball characters and odd, off-the-cuff incidents, such as when a couple of cops get called in for a domestic dispute, only to discover one of the cop's wives, a dwarf, having an affair with a guy in a leather bat suit. Or there's the funeral of a gangster that turns into a brawl; the pleasure palace a TV repairman has in the back of his shop; an FBI interrogation in which the agents tear off Mission: Impossible-style rubber masks--the plot quickly gets lost in the madness. Which is not a bad thing, really. Tall, laconic P and short, excitable Johnson make an appealing Mutt and Jeff comic duo. Featuring cameos by Ice Cube, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and others. --Bret Fetzer

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

The N Word - Divided We Stand

Sales Rank:35219
List Price: $17.33
Lowest New Price: $2.00
Lowest Used Price: $1.99
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Anamorphic
Color
Dolby
DVD-Video
Full Screen
HiFi Sound
Surround Sound
THX
Widescreen
NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Richard Pryor
Dick Gregory
Paul Mooney
Todd Boyd
Samuel L. Jackson

Easily the most inflammatory, shocking and historic word in the English language, the N word has smoldered in the American psyche for over a century. It has morphed from a source of hate, degradation and embarrassment to a term of endearment used amongst the many races of young people. But is that OK? Surf the web or eavesdrop in the lunchroom and you will find the N word is alive. Has overuse removed its horrific origins; has it lost its power to insult and enrage? Given the word’s continually shifting use, The N Word is a brave and bold confrontation of the taboo, exploring the history and relevance of the word and the social status within and between races. The N Word ignites the conversation. Let the debate begin!

Click here for Customer Reviews and more...

Previous | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | Next

Quick Links

Home
Amazon
Our Shops
Merchants
Reviews
Blog
Price Drops

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

African-American Cinema DVDs

Quick Links

Categories