Fear of a Black Hat
Spotlight on Black Cinema
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1h 28m
Directed by Rusty Cundieff | 88 mins | 1993
Overshadowed somewhat at the time of its release by another gangsta rap mockumentary send-up of the same year, the Chris Rock vehicle "CB4," Cundieff’s shoestring-budget feature debut gets just as many laughs at a fraction of the price, following sociologist Nina Blackburn (Kasi Lemmons) as she discovers, for her graduate thesis, the world of hardcore hip-hop outfit N.W.H. (a burlesqued N.W.A.), a trio with a gift for assigning socially relevant meanings to their vulgar and misogynistic lyrics and a penchant for losing their white managers (like Spinal Tap drummers) under bizarre circumstances. Come for the rat-a-tat one-liners (“We anti-violent. Anyone says different, I’ll bust a cap in their ass”), stay for such classic tunes as “Fuck the Security Guards” and P.M. Dawn parody “I’m Just a Human.”
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Ganja & Hess
Directed by Bill Gunn | 113 mins | 1973
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Hyenas
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 110 mins | 1992
One of the treasures of contemporary cinema, Senegalese master Mambéty made his long-delayed follow-up to his canonical Touki Bouki with this hallucinatory comic adaptation of Swiss avant-garde writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play The ... -
Le Franc
Directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 45 mins | 1994
Djibril Diop Mambéty, a towering figure in world cinema, is best known for his two features, Touki Bouki (1973) and Hyenas (1992, re-released in a new restoration by Metrograph Pictures in 2019). Yet these two extraordinary films...
