Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

Impossible, haughty, not likable, but sometimes rather admirable in its context.

People who believe that all that smoke must indicate one hell of a fiery movie might be rather dismayed by the movie itself.

For all its horror, the film has an exuberant, hedonistic excitement (including a sexual showdown in a Hell's Angels den); Sweetback's spirit of outrage and revolt gives rise to bitter, exasperated ironies.

Sweet Sweetback [is] a film that doesn't compromise. . Unfortunately, Van Peebles pays a price for not compromising.

Van Peebles emerges with an emphatic style, one that captures the restless tempo of ghetto life in a jagged flood of vivid, often surreal images.

Vinegar Syndrome's sterling Blu-ray of Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song will satisfy any cinephile who's been awaiting the definitive restoration and release of this cult classic.

Van Peebles' third film was a nuclear bomb.

The unusual mix of agitprop and exploitation is directed in a jagged style that recalls what Jean-Luc Godard was doing in France and set to a funky score performed by Earth, Wind, and Fire...

Farr more overtly political and experimental than anything subsequently bracketed in that ["Blaxploitation"] genre.

Like a Bertolt Brecht play or a George Grosz drawing, [Sweetback] lets you know where it's at as far as the creator is concerned. As an expression of Van Peeble's attitudes it is a stunning, albeit shattering experience.