Critic wrangle: "The Exiles."

2008-07-11 18:00:11

"The Exiles," Kent MacKenzie's 1961 black and white film about a Native American couple living in a now-demolished Los Angeles neighborhood, has been restored and finally gets a theatrical release today from Milestone Films, the company that last year brought Charles Burnett's long-lost "Killer of Sheep" to cinemas and plenty of critics' top ten lists. "The Exiles," while getting a fair amount of love, doesn't quite have "Killer of Sheep"s cinematic holy glow. Manohla Dargis at the New York Times calls the film "a beautifully photographed slice of down-and-almost-out life, a near-heavenly vision of a near-hell that Mr. Mackenzie situated at the juncture of nonfiction and fiction." She does point out "the film's great flaw" -- the characters have "no sense of the larger world, no politics, no exit, and neither does the film, which swaddles its subjects in shadows and ravishing despair." Andrew O'Hehir at Salon describes it as...

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