Average Rating: 7.9/10
Reviews Counted: 31
Fresh: 28 | Rotten: 3
An historic film, The Exiles combines the realism of social consciousness films with the loosely spun narrative of improvisational features to tell the true story of Native Americans adrift in a derelict neighborhood in Los Angeles, 1960.
Average Rating: 8.4/10
Critic Reviews: 13
Fresh: 13 | Rotten: 0
An historic film, The Exiles combines the realism of social consciousness films with the loosely spun narrative of improvisational features to tell the true story of Native Americans adrift in a derelict neighborhood in Los Angeles, 1960.
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Average Rating: 3.8/5
User Ratings: 215
The independently produced The Exiles was warmly received at the 1966 Venice Film Festival, then inexplicably fell into obscurity. This is a shame: though made 30 years ago, the issues raised by the film are just as potent and powerful today. The story concerns a trio of young Native Americans who decide to leave the reservation. Once they've reached Los Angeles, the three protagonists find themselves just as lost and isolated as they would have been in the middle of the desert.
Dec 31, 1989 Wide
Nov 17, 2009
Connoisseur Video
All Critics (31) | Top Critics (13) | Fresh (31) | Rotten (4) | DVD (8)
The Exiles ... presents one boozy night in the lives of Homer, Cliff, Tommy and Yvonne, from a convertible joy ride through the Third Street Tunnel, to an early-morning powwow.
Kent Mackenzie's magnificent, long-undistributed, unclassifiable first feature, The Exiles, stands as a rare consideration of the inner and outer lives of American Indians in a big American city.
Rife with astonishing black-and-white images of an unknown L.A. and clashing sounds of bars, cinemas and poker games, The Exiles is one of those movies that functions as both artifact and fresh discovery.
Its moving portraiture is refreshingly free of cliches and moralizing platitudes, and the high-contrast black-and-white photography and dense, highly creative sound track are equally impressive.
A cinéma vérité look at the rootless Native American community that once upon a time lived in Bunker Hill and hung out in downtown bars such as Club Ritz, this Kent Mackenzie film is a brooding picture of a darkly beautiful, long-gone Los Angeles.
It is like cracking open a time capsule.
A sorrowful and beautiful film, the kind you never see from mainstream Tinseltown studios, then or now.
At its best, The Exiles achieves the same kind of visual poetry found in neorealist classics such as Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief)...
There's no uplifting message here and the internal monologues that accompany their wanderings speak of desires and anxieties and disappointments that appear doomed to repeat themselves.
Best if approached as a nostalgic curiosity shot a half century ago rather than as a conventional flick offering a satisfying cinematic experience.
Kent Mackenzie's 1961 movie 'The Exiles' was so revolutionary that even now it seems gutsy.
Kent MacKenzie's 1961 groundbreaking classic about Native American urban alienation, unfolds like an Edwin Hopper painting in motion as intimate noirish voiceover soliloquies of these three troubled protagonists.
It's an essential film that hardly anyone saw upon its release in 1961.
For its beautiful black-and-white aesthetics, docudrama realism, and, sadly, still fresh portrait of off-reservation Native Americans, an excellent rediscovery
The amateur actors, many of whom in reality met sad ends on those same streets, are utterly convincing. You have the sense again and again that you've unearthed a time capsule -- a sensation that cinema alone of all the arts can impart.
Mackenzie imposes no obvious attitude or mediating outsider's perspective on the material; he just presents it to us, a snapshot of an otherwise unknown culture, with details specific to its time and place.
Just because a movie was lost and found doesn't mean it's worth your $8.75.
The Exiles is a vivid portrait of Native American culture. Even more astonishing is the fact the movie is more than 40 years old.
The movie has an undeniable emotional punch and its historical place in cinema is undisputable (there's still nothing else quite like it).
I don't know how to react to this film. Am I supposed to empathize with these lazy, sluggish Indian men? Aimless, callous, unemployed spongers who do nothing but drink, smoke, flirt, fight and play cards? It's as if the script aims to reinforce negative stereotypes."The Exiles" has virtually no dramatic shape. The men
September 4, 2011Super Reviewer
At its best when photographing the exteriors of a lost city, "The Exiles" is an ethnographic docudrama about a trio of American Indians(Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish & Tom Reynolds) over a twelve hour period in Los Angeles. The men hang out, play poker, and get drunk. For them, they have lost confidence in the future,
July 15, 2008Super Reviewer
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