Popular reviews

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★½ 5

  The Exiles grew out of the friendships that director Kent MacKenzie developed with young indigenous people in LA while making his first film, a documentary about retirees in the Bunker Hill neighborhood in which many of these indigenous 'exiles' lived.

  MacKenzie was friends with Native American men; the film is about men, and their experiences. The main female character, Yvonne (Yvonne Williams) was the girlfriend of one of MacKenzie's friends, so she was asked to be part of the movie. MacKenzie didn't know her; she didn't know him — she was just used to fill a hole he felt existed in the movie he was envisioning.

  And Yvonne being a total stranger to MacKenzie in a sea of friends is…

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  Review by shookone ★★★

  Narrativized, naturalistic, but also staged documentary about the lives of Native American descendants in the urban Los Angeles of the 1960s. Kent MacKenzie's arrangement exudes charm and is ultimately an early form of the slacker film genre. The Indians are seen “hanging out” downtown. At one point a protagonist says significantly: "In prison or outside, it doesn't matter, I just do time." THE EXILES is a film full of alienation scenarios and rock'n'roll in aspic.

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  Review by Arsaib Gilbert ★★★★ 41

  [Favorites of 1960s]

  The most transgressive element of Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles, a genuinely fascinating and poignant low-budget independent feature about Los Angeles-based Native Americans, might be its relaxed, casual air regarding the ethnicity of its protagonists. In fact, if it weren’t for the opening montage of classic photographs of nineteenth-century Native Americans by Edward S. Curtis, and a select few applicable references later on, even a well-meaning viewer could mistake the film’s characters for Peruvian or Filipino Americans, or urban African or Italian Americans if he or she were just listening to them. In a way, given how Native Americans are generally treated in movies, that could be taken as a complement to what Mackenzie has accomplished here.

  Though…

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  Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★½ 2

  1st Kent MacKenzie

  Bits of this film I know well thanks to Thom Anderson's excellent Los Angeles Plays Itself, which commends it for capturing the now demolished Bunker Hill region of the city, once a haven for the working-class community in the city. And as a record of that world, The Exiles is exceptional. It's a hardscrabble ecosystem, populated by loutish men living paycheck to paycheck and women pushed into submissive positions of wives and squeezes. The only female character to receive a name is Yvonne, Homer's wife who finds herself isolated from her husband who's entirely content to hang on to the edge of the hip crowd, passively encouraging their worst behaviour while quietly homesick for his family on…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★

  English born filmmaker Kent MacKenzie provides an expressive and meaningful voice to displacement and the struggle for cultural continuance in this semi-documentary film. Through the agency of its resolute neorealism, it illustrates the miserable existences of Native Americans who have amassed in the downtown area of Los Angeles through the nineteen fifties. 

  The screenplay comes across as being organically evolved through interviews which MacKenzie has conducted, and they perform as the necessary instrumentalities in establishing an extraordinary and unconventional story. Shot mostly at night, the black and white cinematography seems to intensify the starkness of the surroundings and the general unwelcomeness of Los Angeles.

  It's acutely distressing in its portrayal of a population who have become deprived of their culture…

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★

  "Native peoples do not look for salvation from worlds beyond. They need no alternate reality, because the mortal world and the spirit world are the same. This Earth is heaven, hell and purgatory; but most importantly, it is home. The greatest of spiritual mysteries may be revealed just beyond the front door, in the life of a community."
  - Israel Morrow

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  Review by russman ★★★½

  It's intermission time for cherry lemon lime

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  Review by boygeorgeii ★★★★½

  Saw this on a super crisp 16mm print a few years ago. Been lying around in a university cellar for ages. See this movie soon as you can, it’s well worth it.

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  Review by Evan “Raymond Gun-Virus” Pincus ★★★½

  Boozy DTLA-after-hours hangout, well worth seeking out. The city at night has never looked this good in monochrome before or since and probably wouldn’t look this good again in general until Mann!

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  Review by Film at Lincoln Center

  Neglected for decades prior to its re-release in 2008 as a co-presentation of writer Sherman Alexie and filmmaker Charles Burnett, Kent Mackenzie’s The Exiles recounts a day in the life of a group of Native American twentysomethings who have migrated from Arizona to Los Angeles. Set in Bunker Hill, or rather a version of the neighborhood that has long since vanished, the picture drifts from story to story, from bar to rooming house to streets humming with neon, and what gradually develops is a moving, quasi-documentary, and unprecedented treatment of urban indigenous youth culture, shot through with the sorrow of dislocation but also flashes of vibrancy. “Instead of leading an audience through an orderly sequence of problems-decisions-action and solution on the part of the characters,” Mackenzie explained, “we sought to photograph the infinite details surrounding these people, to let them speak for themselves, and to let the fragments mount up.”

  Playing on November 29 & December 1.

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  Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★

  feels like the Los Angeles equivalent of something like On the Bowery, naturalistic albeit stagey, yet never feeling affected as a result; still some of the most vibrant location footage of the city of the era, despite being monochrome

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★½

  A docu-drama about the life of some Native Americans who chooses to leave the Reserve and live on the city.

  This would be short, because there's really isn't too muc to say. For what they are worth, performances are really good. The cinematography is very decent, and there are some great work on framing and camera work. And of course, the story itself has some importance on its own.

  Unfortunately the execution and script as a whole is just boring. IIts been done throughout the years, way much better. You can see some of the struggles here on other films, mostly from Mexico or about Mexicans in America like La Bamba, El Norte and so on, that are waaaaay much…