The Exiles Reviews

A ghostly and startling tale of Native Americans in Los Angeles -- a fusion of documentary and fiction -- in the late '50s. Never previously released, it's a revelation.

Full Review | Original Score: A-

A sorrowful and beautiful film, the kind you never see from mainstream Tinseltown studios, then or now.

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Kent Mackenzie's 1961 movie 'The Exiles' was so revolutionary that even now it seems gutsy.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

It's an essential film that hardly anyone saw upon its release in 1961.

Full Review | Original Score: A

For its beautiful black-and-white aesthetics, docudrama realism, and, sadly, still fresh portrait of off-reservation Native Americans, an excellent rediscovery

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10

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.

Full Review | Original Score: B+

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

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.

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

Just because a movie was lost and found doesn't mean it's worth your $8.75.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

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.

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The Exiles is a vivid portrait of Native American culture. Even more astonishing is the fact the movie is more than 40 years old.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

The movie has an undeniable emotional punch and its historical place in cinema is undisputable (there's still nothing else quite like it).

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

It is like cracking open a time capsule.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

Best if approached as a nostalgic curiosity shot a half century ago rather than as a conventional flick offering a satisfying cinematic experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4

...one of the great under-seen cinema gems of the 1960s.

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You can only brood on the near half-century since The Exiles was shot -- and be grateful that someone went to that place and captured it all.

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Director Brent MacKenzie's black-and-white documentary/narrative genre blender about urbanized Native Americans in 1961 Los Angeles is a cold glass of cinematic water drawn from the same well as Joseph Strick's "The Savage Eye" (1960).

Full Review | Original Score: A