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Killer of Sheep (1977)
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Reviews Counted: 68
Fresh: 66
Rotten:2
Average Rating: 8.7/10
Consensus: By turns funny, sad, and profound, Killer of Sheep offers a sympathetic and humane glimpse into inner-city life.
Runtime: 83 mins
Genre: Dramas
Theatrical Release: Mar 30, 2007 Limited
Starring: Henry Sanders, Kaycee Moore
Starring: Henry Sanders, Kaycee Moore
Director: Charles Burnett
Director: Charles Burnett
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Reviews for Killer of Sheep
Burnett is a truly unsung cinematic movie pioneer, clearly in the vanguard in that lonely and trying battle to colorize, so to speak, ideas and experiences in film with his body of unheralded visionary work.
A little known, long lost classic thankfully becomes available on DVD after decades of obscurity.
fills the screen with visual poetry that plays like intimate documentary
It takes an eye-opening, unglamorous view of the black Los Angeles ghetto of the post-Watts riots.
There's a voyeuristic, woe-is-them quality to the film that makes me uncomfortable.
It may fill you with despair or offer up relief, but you will not be unmoved.
Burnett's empathy for his characters is obvious, and his carefully composed vignettes provide a host of indelible images...
Don’t go to Killer of Sheep expecting a conventional movie experience. This is an art film, a realistic-yet-poetic examination of a time and place and the people stranded there.
Burnett's documentarian empathy, coupled with his easygoing skill as a dramatic essayist, result in a film that doesn't look, feel or breathe like any American work of its generation.
...his [Burnett's] tale about a south central Los Angeles neighborhood is stunning, and it holds up remarkably well.
...about staying put and standing up - about what it means to be a man, or more precisely an adult, in a battering world that, at the end of the day, leaves you too tired to move.
Not much seems to be happening in Killer of Sheep, but in reality every moment counts.
It's truly rare to find something this original, honest and insightful.
Free of the ghetto clichés that fill the movies made by people who have never lived in one, Killer of Sheep is a strongly individual portrait of black, working-class America.
A time capsule of 1970s style and attitude that remains utterly timeless in its respect for its characters and its recognition of the despair, passion, boredom, playfulness and cruelty nurtured not just by life in the ghetto but by life itself.
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