Popular reviews

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 40

  While there's a lot in here about the racial struggles in America and the crab bucket of bad situations and whatnot, the two things that stood out here were the rightfully acclaimed soundtrack and the sad blaxploitation homophobia that always seems to crop up even in the best of the genre.

  It really just comes down to that fact that Priest, in his moment of triumph, feels the need to call his enemy a homophobic slur, as if that's the ultimate putdown of the worst of white America. If not for that one word (repeated, I think, twice), this would be a great film. Instead, it's marred by a prevailing attitude of the time, I suppose, that is all the…

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  Review by phoebe 💫 ★★★½

  This started with a montage of 70s NYC set to Curtis Mayfield music and I was like “wow I wouldn’t mind an entire movie that’s just this” and then the entire movie was. Just that

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  Review by DallasFrance ★★★★ 2

  It’s impossible to overstate the greatness of Superfly’s soundtrack. This was the first time I’d seen the film, but the soundtrack has been one of my favorite albums for over two decades. Usually, I judge a soundtrack by how it supports a film. In this case, however, I couldn’t help but judge whether the film lived up to the soundtrack.

  The film is a great snapshot of early 70s New York City, but is of course groundbreaking in that the director is African-American, and the only characters that really matter are African-American. Because of this, the people in this film aren’t presented as lazy caricatures of pimps and pushers.

  In a scenario similar to the plots of many famous westerns, the…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★½

  While the legendary soundtrack from Curtis Mayfield is probably the most remarkable and undoubtedly timeless aspect about Superfly, the direction from Gordon Parks Jr ensures that it assists in being an extraordinary snapshot of a little portion of Manhattan during the early seventies. 

  Blaxploitation was up and running after the enormous financial success of Shaft; launching a procession of synonymous films during the period, the best of which is probably Across 110th Street. And although this is not anywhere near as good as that Barry Shear directed race relations classic, its position in the upper echelons of the genre is inevitably secure.  

  The screenplay by Phillip Fenty accelerates the morally dubious creation of a heroic pimp and cocaine trafficker…

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  Review by Ethan Lyon ★★★ 4

  1st Gordon Parks Jr.

  The film is worth 2 1/2 stars. While it may have a neatly gritty edge to its narrative, with some wonderful on location shots of New York circa 1972, it's also, truth be told, not a well made film. The sound recording is fuzzy and distant, there's some truly awful zoom shots in places and there's a prevalence of wide shots in the interiors to make sure the production company are getting value for money. There's some pretty lousy lighting too, including one set-up that casts huge shadows on the walls in a quiet amateur way. Now we could charitably say that the rough nature adds to the intensity of the piece, a sort of Cool…

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  Review by {Todd} ★★★★ 1

  "You going to give all this up? 8 track stereo, color TV in every room, and you can snort half a piece of dope every day...that's the American Dream n***a ain't it? You better come on in man. " - Eddie (1972),

  This is the best soundtrack ever made! With that out of the way let's discuss this pretty good movie. Priest Youngblood is a coke dealer who wants to get out of the business with one big score and trouble gets in the way. This is a gritty anti-hero crime film from the early 1970s and one of the 10 or so most iconic blaxploitation films ever made.

  By today's standards this film is slow, suffers in quality at…

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  Review by AD917 ★★★★ 2

  Released the year after his father’s smash hit Shaft helped define the movement, Gordon Parks Jr’s equally influential Super Fly represents the other end of the blaxploitation spectrum. Where Shaft was cool and collected, Super Fly is desperate and angry. Where Sr’s direction was smooth and polished, Jr’s is rough and rugged. And where John Shaft was slyly heroic, Youngblood Priest is unapologetically amoral. 

  A fiercely individualistic, relentlessly self-justifying character, it’s easy to see how the film’s depiction of Priest would draw criticism within the black community for glorifying a dug dealer. Hitchcock famously theorized that it doesn’t matter how morally compromised a character might be, the audience will always root for them as long as they’re the best at…

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  Review by Joe ★★★★½

  I've always heard this was bad (like, bad bad) but now I'm wondering if maybe most of the people I heard that from were music nerds who could only compare it to the album and have no other context for it. To me it feels like a blaxplo answer to something like Dirty Harry, the adventures of an almost completely misanthropic antihero that despite whatever the film's thematic lip service (or Curtis Mayfield's lyrics) may indicate to the contrary, are pure wish fulfillment fantasy.

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  Review by Julia Grohlo🇨🇦 🇻🇳 ★★★★½ 6

  I'm discovering a bit of Blaxploitation and it's absolutely brilliant. Even if the art direction isn't very good, it doesn't matter, because this film is charismatic thanks to Ron O'Neal, whom I'm discovering, and to Curtis Mayfield's legendary soundtrack. Following the life of a drug trafficker who wants to hang it up, but first prepares one last score, this film reveals a social and racial climate in the U.S. with corrupt cops and white police, the black population excluded and totally left to its own devices. Truly a gem.

  Criterion Collection

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  Review by SkaneNoise ★★★

  Every scene seems to open with a character asking another if they want some blow and then a portion of every scene is characters doing drugs.

  The first thirty minutes was pretty inspiring, I mean, with that music and how hard it is to make a movie and the fact these people made a movie with a unique and genuine voice was inspiring. 

  But the filmmaking isn’t very good and the movie gets a bit dull and aimless.

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  Review by Netscape Negro ★★★½

  Everyone in this looks like my grandma.

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  Review by Robert Daniels ★★★★

  It’s always interesting to put “Super Fly” in relation to “Shaft.” Gordon Parks Jr certainly had his father’s film in mind: That opening scene, an aerial push in, is one example. In “Shaft” a hero is introduced, a man  whose embodied suaveness is weaved into the stylish texture of the 1970s. But in “Super Fly” we’re immerse into the dirtier, grittier corners of Harlem’s underworld. 

  The same can be said of the politics: Parks Sr is aware of the perceived inequities of the civil rights movement creating last change colliding with the collective desire of black power movement. But he still positions Shaft as a cop. In “Super Fly,” Priest (Ron O’Neil) doesn’t just despise the system; he wants out…