How is your african american movies on dvd game? Whats in your collection- these are my top 7 list of african american films that I have or will have on DVD-



Top 7 African American Movies on DVD:
1. Miss Evers' Boys
Editorial Reviews on Miss Evers' Boys
Laurence Fishburne helped shepherd this Emmy Award-winning exposé from American medical history books to the small screen. Anchored in the 1973 Senate inquiry into the infamous Tuskegee Study, the film uses a flashback structure to take us back 40 years as Nurse Eunice Evers (played with honest conviction by Alfre Woodard, who also earned an acting Emmy for her powerful performance) describes how a program designed to treat syphilis among blacks in the South was twisted into an inhuman study. Evers's conscience is torn between leaving her position on principle or remaining to give the dying men what comfort she can while they are systematically refused life-saving medicine at every turn. Fishburne costars as Caleb, a easygoing but ambitious young fieldhand who discovers the cold reality of the study while courting Miss Evers. Adapted by Walter Bernstein from a play by David Feldshuh, the film rises above the TV Movie of the Week mold with a complex moral structure that eschews (if you'll pardon the expression) black and white polarities for shades of gray as the doctors' initial compromises become a lifetime of lies. Ultimately that tone becomes the most disturbing facet of the drama: doctors and nurses so enmeshed in what is tantamount to a conspiracy they can find no way out, and a government that searches for scapegoats for its own cold-blooded research. --Sean Axmaker
Description of Miss Evers' Boys
Based on the shocking true story, Miss Evers' Boys exposes a 40-year government backed medical research effort on humans which led to tragic consequences. It is 1932 when loyal, devoted Nurse Eunice Evers (Alfre Woodard) is invited to work with Dr. Brodus (Joe Morton) and Dr. Douglas (Craig Sheffer) on a federally funded program to treat syphilis patients in Alabama. Free treatment is offered to those who test positive for the disease included Caleb Humphries (Laurence Fishburne) and Willie Johnson (Obba Babatunde). But when the government withdraws its funding, money is offered for what will become known as "The Tuskegee Experiment", a study of the effects of syphilis on patients who don't receive treatment. Now the men must be led to believe they are being cared for, when in fact they are being denied the medicine that could cure them. Miss Evers is faced with a terrible dilemma-to abandon the experiment and tell her patients, or to remain silent and offer only comfort. IT is a life or death decision that will dictate the course of not only her life, but the lives of all of Miss Evers' Boys.

2. Roots: The Next Generations
Editorial Reviews on Roots: The Next Generations
Roots rocked the cultural landscape in the late '70s, creating a new wave of awareness of black history. That wave opened the door for its sequel, Roots: The Next Generations, even more of a star-studded event than the original, with stars like Olivia de Havilland, Henry Fonda, Marlon Brando, and James Earl Jones eager to partake in the tale. The sequel follows the rest of the saga of the family of author Alex Haley, from where Roots ended at the Civil War, up to the 1970s when Haley was researching and writing his earth-shattering family story.
While nothing can rival the power of the original Roots' unflinching look at the slave trade and slave life in the early years of this country, the sequel is still full of rich African American history, from Reconstruction, to Jim Crow, to the civil rights movement and the early rumblings of black power. Fonda and de Havilland are respectable in their period-piece roles, but the real power of this sequel is in the more immediate concerns of Haley and his own experience of prejudice while building a stellar reputation as a writer and journalist in the '60s and '70s. One of the most unsettling scenes takes place then, when Haley interviews the head of the American Nazi Party, played with chilling diffidence by Brando. (Brando won an Emmy for this performance.) Haley is also challenged by his fractious interview with Malcolm X (a gripping Al Freeman Jr.). Jones launches his acting career playing Haley with nuance and heart, but with a humanizing set of his own demons.

The four-disc set includes all seven episodes plus a compelling documentary, Roots: The Next Generations--The Legacy Continues, with interviews with Jones, costar and episode director Georg Stanford Brown and a still starry-eyed David L. Wolper, who understands the cultural impact of the two miniseries he helped bring to the screen. --A.T. Hurley

3. A Lesson Before Dying
Editorial Reviews A Lesson Before Dying
On a bright sunny day in 1948, Jefferson (Mekhi Phifer) sets off down the road to go catch some fish; by the end of the movie's opening sequence, he is the one who's been caught, and wrongly accused of the murder of a white shopkeeper. Racial inequality, at the time, is so pervasive in Louisiana that the white defense lawyer's argument at Jefferson's trial is that his client is not worthy of conviction: "You might just as soon put a hog in the 'lectric chair as this," he declares. Outraged by this statement, Jefferson's godmother (Irma P. Hall) does not want her godson to die as a hog. To this end she enlists the reluctant aid of the black community's teacher, Grant Wiggins (Don Cheadle), to teach him to "be a man." As Grant and Jefferson get to know each other (and the viewer gets to know them both), it's not clear which of them needs the lesson more. As in Ernest J. Gaines's award-winning novel, the movie goes beyond the conflict between the races to explore divisions that splinter the black community: education versus religion, dark skin versus light. And, thanks to masterful performances from Cheadle and Phifer as well as a thoughtful screenplay by Amy Peacock, A Lesson Before Dying goes even further, examining what it means to be human and the responsibility a man has to himself and to his community. Originally made for HBO, this adaptation of Gaines's novel richly deserves to be seen by a wider audience. --Larisa Lomacky Moore

4. Roots
Editorial Reviews on Roots (Four-Disc 30th Anniversary Edition)
From the moment the young Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) is stolen from his life and ancestral home in 18th-century Africa and brought under inhumane conditions to be auctioned as a slave in America, a line is begun that leads from this most shameful chapter in U.S. history to the 20th-century author Alex Haley, a Kinte descendant. The late Haley's acclaimed book Roots was adapted into this six-volume television miniseries, which was a widely watched phenomenon in 1977. The programs cover several generations in the antebellum South and end with the story of "Chicken" George, a freed slave played by Ben Vereen whose family feels the agony of entrenched racism and learns to fight it. Between the lives of Kunta and George, we meet a number of memorable characters, black and white, and learn much about the emotional and physical torments of slavery, from beatings and rapes to the forced separation of spouses and families. Nothing like this had ever confronted so many mainstream Americans when the series was originally broadcast, and the extent to which the country was nudged a degree or two toward enlightenment was instantly obvious. Roots still has that ability to open one's eyes, and engage an audience in a sweeping, memorable drama at the same time. --Tom Keogh

5. The Tuskegee Airmen
Editorial Reviews on The Tuskegee Airmen (1995)
This true story of the black flyers who broke the color barrier in the U.S. Air Force during World War II is a well-intentioned film highlighted by an excellent cast. Proud, solemn, Iowa-born Laurence Fishburne and city-kid hipster Cuba Gooding Jr. are among the hopefuls who meet en route to Tuskegee Air Force Base, where they are among the recruits for an "experimental" program to "prove" the abilities of the black man in the U.S. armed services. Fighting prejudice from racist officers and government officials and held to a consistently higher level of performance than their white counterparts, these men prove themselves in training and in combat, many of them dying for their country in the process. Andre Braugher costars as a West Point graduate who takes charge of the unit in Africa and in Italy (where it's christened the 332nd). The film is rousing, if slow starting and episodic, but it's periodically grounded by a host of war movie clichés, notably the calculated demise of practically every trainee introduced in the opening scenes (ironic given the 332nd's real-life combat record--high casualties for the enemy, low casualties among themselves, and no losses among the bombers they escorted). Ultimately the Emmy-nominated performances by moral backbone Fishburne and the dedicated Braugher and the energy and cocky confidence of Gooding give their battles both on and off the battlefield the sweet taste of victory. --Sean Axmaker

6. Mama Flora's Family
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful on Mama Flora's Family:
I must have cried or come close watching this movie about a dozen times. This is a great movie about a strong lady who has survived so many upheavals in her life as a poor black woman who never loses her sense of self worth or the importance of integrity. Cicely Tyson is wonderful as always, and Erika Alexander has the ability to act well without saying a word as the young Flora. It takes a great actress to speak with her eyes the way Alexander did!

A wonderful mixture of heartbreak, warmth, and hope fuel this story along, and Queen Latifah also proves herself to be one heck of an actress. I dare you to sit down and watch this wonderful movie that approaches individual accountability the right way without crying and smiling a lot. It's a rich story anybody can learn a lot from about making mistakes and taking steps to correct them.

7. A LESSON BEFORE DYING
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful on A Lesson Before Dying:
"A Lesson Before Dying" which won the 1999 Emmy for Outstanding Made for Television Movie, is one of those movies adapted from a novel where I have not read the book but I end up thinking the depth it provides probably fixes a lot of the film's shortcomings. Obviously I think the fault is to be found in Ann Peacock's Emmy winning screenplay, because the performances by the cast and as good as you would expect them to be, but if you buy the story's premise from the beginning then you will not be having a major problem with director Joseph Sargent's film. Given the Civil Rights Movement to come what becomes interesting is not so much the battle by Wiggins to communicate with Jefferson, but the conflict between the teacher and Reverend Ambrose (Brent Jennings) over what is best for the condemned young man. Does death with dignity preclude salvation or does the quest for salvation require acceptance of your fate?

Ultimately, the character who learns the most is Wiggins, as the teacher becomes the student. Wiggins is a college educated black man in a place where few of either color get such formal education. He resists being asked to do this task because it means going backwards, giving up some of his own dignity to go with hat in hand to ask the white men to be allowed to meet with Jefferson. The fact that Wiggins wants to marry a light-skinned Negro woman becomes part of this equation as well, because "A Lesson Before Dying" indicts the schoolteacher for turning his back on his race (indeed, there is a scene where his remarks to his students are as demeaning as those of any of the white characters). By the end of the film life with dignity is the goal.

8. White Wedding [Blu-ray] (2009)
Editorial Reviews on White Wedding
Set against South Africa’s breathtaking landscapes, WHITE WEDDING is a high-spirited modern day road comedy about love, commitment, intimacy, friendship, and the unbelievable obstacles that can get in the way of a fairy-tale ending. Ayanda (Zandie Msutwana) is just days away from her lifelong dream of a modern ‘white wedding,’ complete with a dazzling dress, dozens of bridesmaids, a flamboyant wedding planner and large reception at a fancy hotel. The only problem is that her husband-to-be, the sweet, committed Elvis (Kenneth Nkosi), is 1,000 miles away with his childhood friend and best-man Tumi (Rapulana Seiphemo). What should be a simple, straightforward journey gets seriously derailed, forcing Elvis, Tumi and Rose (Jodie Whittaker), a footloose English doctor they meet along the way to tackle directional mishaps, car accidents, a tag-along goat, and a potentially dangerous encounter with a bar full of redneck Afrikaners seemingly stuck in the era of Apartheid. Ultimately charmed by Elvis’ infectious spirit, everyone surrounding him becomes determined to get him to his destination. Meanwhile, poor Ayanda is watching her dream unravel as she wrestles with problems of her own -- from questioning whether there’s any truth to Elvis’ preposterous excuses of why he might not get to the church on time, being caught between European and African traditions as her mother (Sylvia Mngxekeza) has a very different idea about how the wedding should be orchestrated, and dealing with the unexpected arrival of Tony (Mbulelo Grootboom), a slick old boyfriend with a questionable agenda. WHITE WEDDING subtly interweaves South Africa’s history as bride, groom, friends and lovers are forced to look at the meaning of marriage, fidelity, honesty and the two sides to every story.

This is just a short list for African American TV & Miniseries that I believe should be a part of any Black Families Collection- you can obvious can go to Amazon, where I frequent to find the best deals and as always when you spend $25 bucks or more- the shipping is usually free or you get a upgrade on shipping... here is a list you can start with: Search Amazon.com DVD for African American TV & Miniseries


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