Blaxploitation freaks won't want to miss BaadAsssss Cinema: A Bold Look at 70's Blaxploitation Films, Isaac Julien's loving ode to the genre, now available on DVD. The hour-long doc features interviews with all the key players in the movement, from Pam Grier to Richard Roundtree to Larry Cohen.

The films are campy fun to watch now, but this film cleverly places them in their social and historical context. Basically, as aficionado Samuel L. Jackson points out, blacks weren't allowed to act out off screen, so this was their big chance to get back at white authority figures, in satisfying fantasy. Though Sidney Poitier's name is never mentioned, it's clear these movies were an answer to his lily-white, studio-backed persona. As Jackson puts it at one point, blacks were "sick of the righteous black man." The film features some rare footage of Jesse Jackson protesting against the negative images he felt the films presented; indeed, it was the NAACP that spoke out most adamantly against these films, coining the phrase "black exploitation."

An intensely sad element arrives in the film's latter half, when this profoundly important countercultural movement began to dissolve. The stars discuss the work drying up - something depressing and undeserved, without a doubt. :

» Matthew Hays