Film

I Am Not Your Negro

Name: I Am Not Your Negro
Genre: Documentary
Released: 2017
Cast: Samuel L. Jackson, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Arnold Schwarzenegger

Built entirely from James Baldwin's unfinished manuscript, read by Samuel L. Jackson over archival footage, home movies, and Hollywood clips, this is an essay film rather than a biography — one sustained, devastating argument about the mythology America tells itself. Dense and demanding, it rewards close attention and offers no easy catharsis. For anyone willing to sit with hard ideas, not just hard history.

TMDb rating

7.7

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13th2016

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A conventional biopic in the best sense: gripping, focused, and anchored by David Oyelowo's performance as King, it dramatizes the machinery of nonviolent resistance Baldwin analyzed from a different angle.

But It's a traditional awards-season drama, and after Peck's essay film its straightforward storytelling might feel almost too tidy.

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Spike Lee's epic biopic gives the man Baldwin quotes throughout his own three-hour reckoning with American history, with Denzel Washington delivering one of cinema's greatest, most electric performances.

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Same diagnosis of the white liberal gaze Baldwin spends the whole film dissecting, just dramatized as B-movie horror instead of essay.

Jordan Peele smuggles Baldwin's core argument — that white America's gaze on Black bodies is possessive, extractive, and violent — into a horror movie so effective people forget it's an argument at all.

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Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) poster

King in the Wilderness2018no page yet

A close, intimate portrait of King's final, most doubt-filled years, built entirely from the people who were actually in the room with him as history closed in.

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The Black Power Mixtape 1967-19752011no page yet

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But The Swedish-TV footage is uneven in quality and the framing device can feel a little thin stretched over 90 minutes.

Whose Streets?2017no page yet

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Random Acts of Flyness2018

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