Review – American History X

This brutal portrait of a family struggling with racism is well-written and well-acted. But be warned: when I say “brutal,” I mean it. The film-makers pull few punches either with the skinhead characters’ language or the depictions of the violent acts they commit. Further, the black-and-white flashbacks are a teeny bit pretentious, and the sound is inconsistent. Get by that, though, and the rest of the film is an extremely rewarding experience, one of the few films on race relations that manages to stay reasonably distant from the usual preachy Hollywood sentiment on the subject. Worth seeing