Harlan County, U.S.A.

Barbara Kopple isn't a great documentarian, but she has a great subject in Harlan County, U.S.A, and she has the taste and sensitivity not to betray it.

Few documentaries rivet you to your seat; this one does. The guts it took to make are up there on the screen, in the footage shot by director Barbara Kopple and cameraman Hart Perry during the violent encounters.

Suffers from some makeshift structural devices and occasional lapses of judgment, but it's an ardent, absorbing work of partisan documentary film-making.

The film retains all of its power, in the story of a miners' strike in Kentucky where the company employed armed goons to escort scabs into the mines, and the most effective picketers were the miners' wives -- articulate, indominable, courageous.

Kopple's rather terrifying film rocked its minuscule audience and instantly became a cultural touchstone.

Raw emotions on display without any manipulation...

Harlan County USA is a powerful documentary of a long and brave struggle. But it also shows the lack of theoretical foundations in the American labour movement.

Harlan County USA is one of the most important films ever made about American labor.

Hollywood could do some thing with a story like [this] but no fictional script could begin to capture the drama played out in a remarkable documentary, Harlan County, U.S.A., by New York filmmaker Barbara Kopple.

...a portrait of America at its greediest and most haggard.