Blends the uncanny staging of home movies with a French New Wave perspective on iconography and metaphors.
100
TV Guide Magazine
TV Guide Magazine
A landmark in Black filmmaking in the U.S., this angry, extravagant, loud, belligerent movie reaches a high pitch early on and stays there.
88
Slant MagazineClayton Dillard
Slant MagazineClayton Dillard
Over 40 years after its release, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song still retains its shock value, but even more so, it remains distinct as a work that cannot be squarely placed within a singular category.
Without question or competition, the most influential movie by a black filmmaker.
80
Time Out
Time Out
Totally uncompromising and grindingly repetitive, the film nevertheless accumulates a kind of hallucinatory groove, with unexpected shafts of bizarre humour and vigorous, experimental new wave direction.
Melvin Van Peebles produced this film, edited it, wrote the screenplay, composed the music and played the leading role. He comes out ahead in all but one category: there are some serious problems with his screenplay.
If Sweet Sweetback is unforgettable, it is also deeply flawed. The acting is mediocre at best. And in depicting women as grotesque, flailing sex machines serviced by the indifferent stud hero, it matches today's gangsta rap in arrogant misogyny.
40
Village Voice
Village Voice
Does for the black movement what Getting Straight did for the student movement: reduces it to escapist entertainment, cinematic stylishness, and near nonsense. [13 May 1971, p.68]