Critics reviews

Through its collection of loose, detail-rich vignettes, Killer of Sheep remains sharply, but never didactically, attuned to the steady psychic corrosion caused by economic uncertainty. Just as expertly, Burnett captures the activities of children — those residents of Watts who, though bound by arbitrary rules, still enjoy anarchic freedom.

The film is too warm to be scathing. Instead, much like Stan, KILLER OF SHEEP feels innocent and unassuming. It's a sincere statement by a young director that earns its comparisons to the classics of Italian neorealism. And like those classics, Burnett's sense of realism is universal: The characters' victories and defeats are all small—a stroke of the knee and a smirk, a flat tire, a scraped elbow—but feel earth shattering in the moment.

The movie has the feel of a blues ballad, in that the sorrows it depicts nonetheless rise to a cinematic exultation, a joy in existence itself. And, like a jazz musician, Burnett makes use of all sorts of sources—popular and formal, old and new—as the basis for his spontaneous yet complex visual lyricism.

Burnett’s cinematic poetry arises from the hundred small “sensory-motor disconnections” of every damn day, gaps and disclocations from which a sad but resilient emotion flows.

There is a plaintive, dignified beauty to Burnett's grainy images, and the abundant blues and jazz ballads on the soundtrack are achingly lovely. But the movie doesn't sentimentalize the lives of its characters -- moments of pure joy coexist with an undercurrent of despair and frustration. The result often suggests an experimental version of an Italian neo-realist classic or a curious hybrid of John Cassavetes' raw immediacy and Jean Renoir's noble tenderness.

Sanders' unforgettable million-mile stare--whether in his kitchen or on the killing floor--makes his character's loneliness utterly chilling. J. Hoberman calls the film an "urban pastoral" of persisting relevance; indeed, the Watts of KILLER OF SHEEP bears a nuanced resemblance to many ghettos of the present. Watching it, one has the feeling that these images will remain lodged in the collective consciousness for years to come.

I think what I had some trouble adjusting to [on my first viewing in 1981] was the film's stopping-and-starting rhythm and its form, a collection of vignettes. Today those same characteristics, combined with beautiful cinematography and an uncanny feeling for body language, seem key to the film's power.

What we have here is the other side of "A Raisin in the Sun," Lorraine Hansberry's play about the black American family's battle for upward mobility. Very little in "Killer of Sheep" is mobile. Very little goes forward. Life is the exception. In Burnett's movie, it defiantly goes on.

The movie feels like a virgin work in the best sense, an impressionistic awakening to the possibilities of film and of life... Whether you see the last scene as a victory for Stan or his final defeat, it's impossible not to partake in Burnett's delight in the domestic, or in his celebration of an art that finds God in the details.

Thirty years after its creation, Charles Burnett's debut feature still hits with the force of revelation.

The mood is austere but not somber. Many scenes, including the central set piece involving Stan and Bracy's purchase of the engine, are wry and funny. The soundtrack is a history of black American music: everything from jazz to ragtime to urban blues, presented in choppy fragments that seem almost like messages from the characters' internal worlds.

Those who have never seen it or watched only battered prints will be gratified to find that the film, lovingly restored seven years ago and blown up to 35 millimeter, shimmers in deepest black and brightest white. Mr. Burnett has a wonderful eye, and his ability to create harmonious compositions from the free-form chaos of the streets brings to mind the work of photographers like Helen Levitt and Robert Frank... No longer washed out, Mr. Burnett's compositions now look as they should.