The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 Reviews
July 6, 2018
By resisting the impulse to let present-day moralists tamp the story into safe hindsight shape... it allows us to glimpse rawer and more remarkable elements of mutual transformation in real time.
November 5, 2013
Olsson includes material that might typically have been considered outtakes and lets clips play at length, reinforcing an impression of intimacy with the participants in the scene.
November 4, 2011
Broken into nine chapters -- one for each year -- the documentary isn't a rigorous work but a felt piece of vital, if flawed, art.
Original Score: 3/4
October 28, 2011
It's thrilling to hear from unrepentant revolutionaries such as Angela Davis and amusing to hear from their bell-bottomed white lawyers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
October 21, 2011
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 is not your standard documentary dealing with racism in America.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-
October 21, 2011
The timing of this release is more than perfect. And the story behind the film is nearly as interesting as the stories it tells.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
October 21, 2011
It is not a comprehensive history but the footage is an extraordinarily potent reminder that the stand taken by black people eventually bore fruit.
Original Score: 4/5
October 20, 2011
Interesting stuff, though it sometimes looks like a block of unedited raw material.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
October 20, 2011
Blazing interviews with Angela Davis and Stokely Carmichael supply stinging and unforgettable rhetoric: it simply can't fail with footage this wild.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
October 20, 2011
Like the era it represents, there are highs and lows.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
October 18, 2011
The film is testament to the power of archival legwork in documentary-filmmaking.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
October 17, 2011
While it assumes a fair bit of knowledge of the social changes exploding in sixties America, there's a wealth of fascinating material and punchy insights into an earth shaking movement.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
October 13, 2011
From the fly-on-the-wall, cinma-vrit style of the '60s to a more aggressive, advocacy approach in the mid-'70s, "Mixtape" is a wide slice of nonfiction film history.
Original Score: 3/4
September 30, 2011
A film that suffers from a surfeit of credulity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
September 29, 2011
You watch the material here and wonder whether most of the movies made about black people are meant to pacify general audiences, to distract them from demanding more of the movies.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
September 22, 2011
It is mostly impressionistic - but, wow, some of those impressions really pack a punch.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
September 9, 2011
This chronicle of pride and social upheaval is filled with vintage images and important voices.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
September 8, 2011
The Black Power Mixtape includes plenty of interest, but it would be stronger if the filmmakers had dug a little deeper into the footage from 1967 to 1972 and skipped the final years altogether.
September 8, 2011
You are left in a bracing state of confusion, wondering how much has changed and how the change took place.
Original Score: 3.5/5
September 8, 2011
Because Olsson is working exclusively with film shot by other people, with their own 40-year-old agenda, he loses some of what decades of reflection, reconsideration, and historical context could've brought.
Full Review
| Original Score: B