Set in the Watts area of Los Angeles, a slaughterhouse worker must suspend his emotions to continue working at a job he finds repugnant, and then he finds he has little sensitivity for the family he works so hard to support.
A man who has struggled personally has conflicts with his upwardly mobile lawyer brother and well to-do fiancee and is reluctantly to be the best man at their wedding.
An improvised late '60's short-subject student film, and debut movie of Director, Charles Burnett; done in the neo-realist, documentary film style. A day-in-the-life South Central L.A. tale... See full summary »
The lives of an English working-class family are told out of order in a free-associative manner. The first part, "Distant Voices", focuses on the father's role in the family. The second part, "Still Lives", focuses on his children.
Director:
Terence Davies
Stars:
Pete Postlethwaite,
Freda Dowie,
Angela Walsh
After years of living alone, an eccentric black and white couple find real companionship and romance. Lynn Redgrave and Jams Earl Jones are just wonderful.
Director:
Charles Burnett
Stars:
Lynn Redgrave,
James Earl Jones,
Margot Kidder
Stan works in drudgery at a slaughterhouse. His personal life is drab. Dissatisfaction and ennui keep him unresponsive to the needs of his adoring wife, and he must struggle against influences which would dishonor and endanger him and his family.Written by
Jim Beaver <jumblejim@prodigy.net>
Included among the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die", edited by Steven Schneider. See more »
Goofs
After Stan and his friend load the engine block on the truck, they drive away and it falls out, and a car is then seen parked along the curb. The car was not there when they carried the engine out. See more »
Quotes
Man:
[first lines]
Man:
[to his older son]
You let anyone jump on your brother again, and you just stand and watch - boy, I'll beat you to death! I don't care who started what, or whether he was winnin' or losin'; well, you get a thick oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, a goddam brick, get *anything*, and you knock the shit out of whoever fightin' your brother! 'Cause if anything was to happen to me or your mother, you ain't got nobody except your brother. And this goes for him, too - and he knows! You're the one that keep ...
[...] See more »
Raw American Poetry. Killer of Sheep takes the immediacy of Italian neo-Realist cinema and shapes it into a dreamy, beautiful montage of everyday life in Watts, Los Angeles, California, in the 1970s.
The revelations, in the year 2000, are surprising: black kids in the middle of the Ghetto acted up and goofed off exactly the same as white kids in small towns across the midwest...but not like black OR white kids today. The folks in this movie have an innocence about them that survives, along with their dignity, regardless of the social decay around them. You are left with a simple fact: these are still country people, who happen to be living in a city.
For anyone, like me, who grew up in the 1970s, the movie aches with a sense of a lost era, when being a kid meant building forts out of left-over construction materials, throwing dirt clods, and laying down big fat skidmarks with your bicycle.
And all this is just the subplot. The main storyline, of a slaughterhouse-working father trying to run a stable family in the midst of urban decay, is simple, understated, and powerful. The musical sequences inside the slaughterhouse rival Kubrick's ability to juxtapose music and image in a manner that creates infinite levels of meaning and irony. You can only sit with your mouth half agape and think, 'aaah.'
Like La Jetee, this is a movie that will allow you to see life anew, with children's eyes. Never pass up a chance to see it.
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Raw American Poetry. Killer of Sheep takes the immediacy of Italian neo-Realist cinema and shapes it into a dreamy, beautiful montage of everyday life in Watts, Los Angeles, California, in the 1970s.
The revelations, in the year 2000, are surprising: black kids in the middle of the Ghetto acted up and goofed off exactly the same as white kids in small towns across the midwest...but not like black OR white kids today. The folks in this movie have an innocence about them that survives, along with their dignity, regardless of the social decay around them. You are left with a simple fact: these are still country people, who happen to be living in a city.
For anyone, like me, who grew up in the 1970s, the movie aches with a sense of a lost era, when being a kid meant building forts out of left-over construction materials, throwing dirt clods, and laying down big fat skidmarks with your bicycle.
And all this is just the subplot. The main storyline, of a slaughterhouse-working father trying to run a stable family in the midst of urban decay, is simple, understated, and powerful. The musical sequences inside the slaughterhouse rival Kubrick's ability to juxtapose music and image in a manner that creates infinite levels of meaning and irony. You can only sit with your mouth half agape and think, 'aaah.'
Like La Jetee, this is a movie that will allow you to see life anew, with children's eyes. Never pass up a chance to see it.