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Looks amazing. Fingers crossed that Killer of Sheep follows soon.

This film also has one of the best opening title sequences of the 1990s!

Watched this for the first time last night and am just gobsmacked by how great it is. Every time Burnett has an opportunity to make his narrative exist in a mysterious middle ground, in the spaces between the lives of his characters, he takes it and runs with it. I sit here still unsure whether Glover was creating problems or pulling them out and absorbing them into himself until he'd outlived his usefulness. Whether he is an agent of heaven or of hell is something I'm certain I'll never know - but the choices made to fade to black each time we might get a hint at the answer to that question, or to cut away to a scene that doesn't feature him, is just startling and so well executed. Absolutely stunning film, an out and out masterpiece that I can't wait to revisit.

The first of what will no doubt be many such reactions. As I said when this was announced, saying this is one of the most important Criterion releases of all time only sounds like hyperbole if you haven’t seen it

Burnett has such a difficult oeuvre to watch, I'm hoping that this signals Criterion attempting to wrangle more of his pictures for release. I wish Eclipse was still a thing so that they'd try to do a release of some of his shorts and documentaries that are largely unavailable.

A decent percent of his stuff is available. The Milestone set has a lot of things, plus Nat Turner is available through California Newsreel, Nightjohn with Mill Creek, and BFI has The Glass Shield. His television stuff seems the most MIA alongside Nambia and The Wedding. Maybe not an ideal situation, but also not totally awful.

Quite a substantial amount of his work is available on Amazon Prime/Fandor (which you can subscribe to still through Amazon). This includes his shorts and To Sleep with Anger. It does not include Killer of Sheep or The Glass Shield.

Edit: To Sleep with Anger, Nightjohn, Nat Turner, My Brother's Wedding (Fandor), When It Rains (F), Several Friends (F), Quiet As Kept (F), The Horse (F) are all on Amazon/Fandor channel.

Thanks for the info. There's a couple of these I haven't seen yet.

All of the Fandor films are also available through the Milestone set.

domino harvey wrote: Wed Feb 27, 2019 4:59 pm The first of what will no doubt be many such reactions. As I said when this was announced, saying this is one of the most important Criterion releases of all time only sounds like hyperbole if you haven’t seen it

When I saw there was a new post in this thread, I expected some new convert. Welcome to the club, mfunk!

Given that this is is also this week’s Criterion Channel movie, I expect many more very soon!

zedz wrote: Wed Feb 27, 2019 6:54 pm

domino harvey wrote: Wed Feb 27, 2019 4:59 pm The first of what will no doubt be many such reactions. As I said when this was announced, saying this is one of the most important Criterion releases of all time only sounds like hyperbole if you haven’t seen it

When I saw there was a new post in this thread, I expected some new convert. Welcome to the club, mfunk!

LQ's in too, in absentia

I still fondly remember first seeing the film back in the early 90s when it turned up on Moviedrome. I had ended up 'forcing' a schoolmate to watch the film when he stayed over. Neither of us really knew about it before watching and he ended up really loving the film, saying that he thought it was much better than Boyz N The Hood, which was quite high praise coming from a teenager who it might have been presumed would have been more into the more violent aspects of the John Singleton film!

Sadly the screening of Contempt straight afterwards left him cold and he fell asleep half way through!

colinr0380 wrote: Wed Feb 27, 2019 10:16 pmhe thought it was much better than Boyz N The Hood,

er... dare I ask what the connection is that prompted this particular comparison?

Two contemporary black-led and made American films set in California and released within months of each other, the comparison is not so unusual, especially since more than one critic has suggested the reason Burnett’s film never found an initial audience is because distributors and audiences were more receptive at the time to films depicting black culture in the vein of Singleton’s movie

Makes sense. I had forgotten that they shared a "moment," even if in most respects they could hardly be more different. (And the last time I saw Boyz in the Hood, I was downright embarrassed by how crude it was as a piece of storytelling.)

I'd cross out the "at the time" part of your last sentence; I don't think there's ever been a time when non-sensationalist depictions of the black family along the lines of this film were fashionable compared to the overfamiliar depictions of urban vice. In an earlier era, stuff like Claudine and Emma Mae got lost in the blaxploitation shuffle.

I should note that we were both 14 at the time, so while domino is right in the context I do not suppose that we were really consciously thinking about it in too deep sociocultural terms, just that both films seemed to take place in a similar milieu! Later on of course Ice Cube would appear in Burnett's The Glass Shield.

It is interesting to think of the way that To Sleep With Anger stands out even in this period just post the early Spike Lee films and Do The Right Thing. A year or two after this Albert and Allen Hughes would direct Menace II Society, which is probably the better companion to Boyz N The Hood, and in New York the 19 year old Matty Rich directed Straight Out of Brooklyn. Mario van Peebles would be making Posse and Panther in the first half of the 90s. And Spike Lee was moving into grander historical subjects himself with Malcolm X.

Also around the same time there was that controversy about the dangerous gang ridden portrayal of Inglewood in Lawrence Kasdan's ensemble drama Grand Canyon, also starring Danny Glover, another one of those films that is moving more towards the "Alan Rudolph and Robert Altman" portrait of the city, as described by Alex Cox in that introduction, but which at least is tackling such issues compared to later on in the decade when the other big ensemble portrait of L.A. from the end of the 90s, Magnolia, I seem to recall was almost entirely absent of any potentially 'controversial' racial element. Presumably the South Central riots in 1992 post-Rodney King made such issues too close for comfort? (The only film that really seemed to tackle the fallout of the riots around that period, and even then in abstracted millennial angst sci-fi terms, was Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days)

This movie has a way of infecting your brain after you see it, while it worms its ways through various possibilities and interpretations. I kind of can't wait to see it again.

Just announced at BAM:

To Sleep with Anger + Q&A with Charles Burnett
FRI, 3 MAY AT 19:00

Our series Black 90s: A Turning Point in American Cinema (May 3—22) kicks off with legendary director Charles Burnett's TO SLEEP WITH ANGER, screening with the director's short film WHEN IT RAINS (1995), followed by a Q&A with Charles Burnett.

TICKETS:
General Admission: $15
Members: $7.50 (free for Level 4 and above)
MULTI-FILM TICKET DISCOUNT for the Black 90s series: (2 or more films) save 10—20% off your purchase

One of the best opening sequences, as colinr0380 said, and one of the best endings too, terrifically executed. And in between, I don't think I've ever encountered such a population of disparately charismatic characters. Even the near mute children exude their own magnetism.

Randall Maysin Again wrote: Tue Apr 15, 2025 5:46 pm He really is one of the greatest living film artists, I'm so glad he seems to be having a bit of a (second?) renaissance.

Definitely a fresh wave of attention, but the man still can’t get $10 mill to make a film after getting an honorary Oscar

beamish14 wrote: Tue Apr 15, 2025 5:58 pm but the man still can’t get $10 mill

Which is next to nothing in the film world...

Randall Maysin Again wrote: Tue Apr 15, 2025 6:02 pm

beamish14 wrote: Tue Apr 15, 2025 5:58 pm but the man still can’t get $10 mill

Which is next to nothing in the film world...

Oh, for sure. His most expensive film, Namibia: The Struggle for Liberation cost about $8 million USD