Cane River

Cane River offers American indie cinema a hero worth remembering, and a romantic with a vision beyond his years.

Jenkins' one and only feature weaves living history, charged and messy, into a homespun, hopeful tale. It's impossible not to wonder what he might have done next.

"Cane River" invites a rethinking of American film history, and also, in its disarmingly offhand, uniquely charming manner - of other aspects of American history as well.

A vivid portrait of small-town, working-class African-American life.

The film's awkwardness is expressive of the pain and confusion of wrestling with truths that shake one's conception of identity.

Jenkins's spare, frank lyricism foregrounds the couple's tense discussions about the traumas of history, the weight of cultural memory, and the pressure of racial injustice; he lends the intimate tale a vast and vital resonance.

A remarkable low-budget Black indie film.

...its bleached images capture its time and place perfectly. The film has the faded-color look of a country and western album cover from a musical tradition lost in thrift store bins.

If people get a chance to see Cane River, they might be intrigued to experience some 1980s nostalgia, but they should also appreciate the larger context of how difficult it must have been to make this movie.

Cane River offers a prescient perspective on how history lingers, and how blackness is not simply diverse in a neoliberal multiculturalist sense, but also contradictory and in conflict politically...