Matrixiole Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

leonblackwood Review: This is an extremely deep documentary about the rise and fall of the Black Panthers in America, and I must admit, I did find some of it slightly boring. Don't get me wrong, I did find the subject matter very interesting and the various interviews with fellow members and witnesses to the terrible police brutality towards them, was very touching but it does drag a bit and I personally don't find watching Black people getting treated like animals, that entertaining. I was left feeling extremely bitter when this graphic documentary had finished but I still learnt a lot about this powerful movement. The different scenarios which are highlighted throughout the movie, were quite shocking, especially the corruption with the law, but it was still good to see how far a radical group can go, when they pull together to fight for there rights. I will say this though, you really have to be in the right frame of mind to watch it because there are some scenes which are pretty upsetting but it's still worth a watch. Anyway, if your into your black history films, then this is definitely the movie for you, because it's an important part of history which will never be forgotten. Watchable!Round-Up: This documentary was written and directed by Stanley Nelson, 60, who has brought you various documentaries, like The Black Press, Marcus Garvey, Beyond Brown, A Place Of Our Own, Jonestown, Wounded Knee and Freedom Summer, which are all based around important periods in black history. He certainly done well to get interviews with different Black Panther members and officers of the law but it really didn't have to be nearly 2 hours long.Budget: N/A Worldwide Gross: $600,000I recommend this movie to people who are into their documentaries about the rise and fall of the Black Panthers. 5/10

treywillwest This is a heroic attempt at a one-film history of the Panthers. It suffers only from its own ambition- this is too complex a subject to offer a "history of" in the length of a single feature film. The best parts of the film are the stirring, emotional recounts of battles with agents of the state by revolutionaries who were on the front lines, heroes most of us have never before heard of. The portraits offered of the iconic Party leaders were a bit more problematic, or simply lacking. The presentation of Huey Newton is far too simplistic. One comes away with a sketch of a sociopath who the Party naively turned into an icon. While there is credible documentation of Newton's erratic behavior and drug abuse after spending many years in prison on likely trumped up charges, watching this film you would not know of Newton's extensive and influential writings on revolutionary theory, including his ground-breaking advocacy of the Gay- Equality struggle. Other important strands of Panther history were simply lacking. There is, for instance, no mention of George Jackson or the Angola Three. Still, a fine attempt to do a lot with too little space and time.

reelwoman Because I'm old as dirt, I recall reading about the murder by the Chicago Police of Black Panther Fred Hampton in his bed while he slept, clearly part of J.Edgar Hoover's national program to undermine any leadership of the Black Panther Party. I was a senior in high school, and promptly tossed aside the Beowulf paper I was writing for one on the Black Panthers. This documentary gives you the full story that overlooked in civil rights discussions: the idea of militant blacks bearing arms was too frightening, although it sure made Martin Luther King's marches seem quite suddenly acceptable. I suspect it is the frightening aspect that has kept the Black Panther story stuffed in the closet of civil rights history. The documentary portrays how carefully the Panthers attended to legal rights regarding guns, how they stood witness en mass whenever police pulled over black in the neighborhood (Black Lives Matter) to ensure just treatment. Very well portrayed was the diabolical and successful program of the FBI and law enforcement to cripple the organization. Important viewing for all Americans.

jakob13 When was the last time a state legislature infringed on the right guaranteeing a citizen's right to openly carrying a gun? Well, Stanley Nelson's excellent documentary The Black Panthers answers that question. Imagine then governor Ronald Reagan and the conservatives in the California legislature, won over temporarily, to the idea of gun control by the sight of the Black Panther Party marching into the statehouse in Sacramento, carrying loaded shotguns and rifle, as state law and the Constitution allowed. Challenging political order and mayhem, who were this new breed of "Negroes," dressed from head to foot in black? Why did they did they project an image of militancy and armed purpose? Today's headline grabbing evidence of police brutality and racial injustice to black people have not spawned the same response that gave birth to the BPP in response to oppression and marginalization, as #-tag Black Lives matter. Why? Nelson has recovered through use of newsreel, take, take outs from Eye on the Prize and interviews with aging ex-Panthers, to dust off 50 years of ignorance. We are transported to another galaxy of time. It was an age of war and revolution. Algeria, Cuba, Vietnam. It was also an age of turmoil that broke the back of colonial domination and smashed in the chains of vote denial in the American South, albeit through non-violence, as Ava DuVernay's striking film Selma serves as clear evidence. But what worked in the South couldn't and wouldn't in the North because voting rights were not the issue. Racial injustice and the ever-present violence and brutality of the police were. (Chester Himes' "Coffin Ed and Grave Digger Jones" mysteries, recreate life in urban ghettos.) The Black Panthers gives body to the logic of a society that marginalized and trivialized and isolated a third of its citizens through naked violence. And, as such, it birthed the BPP in Oakland, California in 1966. The choice of the symbol of the Black Panther is significant. In Mayan culture, the animal, a fierce fighter, is a totem of aggressiveness and power. It does roar. It won't strike unless provoked. The outbreak of the Panthers on the scene was merely an acceleration of a process of political awakening that had been building for some time at home and abroad. Stokley Carmichael had called for Black Power in the heart of Mississippi. And James Baldwin's 1963 The Fire Next Time, according to the Negro Spiritual, promised a conflagration as the wide range of injustices morphed into a call for political action. Furthermore, the BPP saw itself in the vanguard of sweeping change. To exploit the fever of heated times, it harnessed revolutionary gestures and emotions. So, six young men began organizing activists to confront the local police with guns. They spurned the appeal of Nation of Islam that preached self-segregation. They also rejected the belief that society could be made better by the change of the human heart. The zeitgeist of revolution had taken hold. If the US was fighting for "democracy and freedom and liberation from Communism" in Vietnam, the BPP figured that they were going to protect and fight for the interests of their own people that Washington sorely neglected. So, they took up the gun; they didn't confront the police but stayed at a respectful distance, to see that blacks weren't abused. Like their namesake, they remained vigilant unless otherwise provoked. The adoption of the powerful image of a gun had a revolutionary source: after all Mao did affirm "power grows out of the barrel of a gun?" The Party had an all-embracing slogan Power to the People. It had an ideology--and a 10-point program What We Want Now! It had a newspaper; it had revolutionary art; it had a "military force," and above all, it had what Carlyle called: beginners, men who had qualities to serve its ideas and ideals in the persons of Bobby Seale, Hotspur-like Huey P. Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver. Government repression and internal backstabbing over who upheld the purity of the BPP helped destroy the party is this gripping film.