Novelist James Clavell wrote, produced, and directed this 1967 British film (based on a novel by E.R. Braithwaite) about a rookie teacher who throws out stock lesson plans and really takes command of his unruly, adolescent students in a London school. Poitier is very good as a man struggling with the extent of his commitment to the job, and even more as a teacher whose commitment is to proffering ...

Manufacturer: RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video
Starring: Sidney Poitier, Christian Roberts, Judy Geeson, Suzy Kendall, Lulu
Directed By: James Clavell

Diana Ross stars as legendary blues singer Billie Holiday in this biopic that chronicles her rise and fall. It begins with her late childhood, a stint as a prostitute, those early days as a blues singer, her marriages, and her drug addiction. Overly glossy and lacking depth, this is worth seeing only for the performances. Diana Ross was nominated for an Oscar for her acting debut. A dynamo with ...

Manufacturer: Paramount
Starring: Diana Ross, Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor, James T. Callahan, Paul Hampton
Directed By: Sidney J. Furie

Lorraine Hansberry's play is given sensitive treatment by filmmaker Daniel Petrie (The Bay Boy). Sidney Poitier heads a fine cast in the story of an African American family in Chicago who are struggling with mixed aspirations, not enough money, conflicts over religion, and institutional racism. The film is pretty much set-bound (as plays adapted for the screen sometimes are), but the drama ...

Manufacturer: Columbia Pictures
Starring: Diana Sands, Louis Gossett Jr.
Directed By: Daniel Petrie

This 1967 film took home lots of Oscars for its fascinating drama about a Philadelphia detective (Sidney Poitier) who assists a redneck Southern sheriff (Rod Steiger) in solving a murder. A study in racism that ebbs a bit through the collective and shared need between a black man and a white man who don't want to be working together, the film continues to strike a chord today. Steiger is a mass of ...

Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Starring: Sidney Poitier, Rod Steiger, Warren Oates, Lee Grant, Larry Gates
Directed By: Norman Jewison

Actress Kasi Lemmons made an auspicious debut as a writer and director with this delicately handled, wrenchingly emotional drama, hailed by critic Roger Ebert as one of the best films of 1997. Eve's Bayou begins with ominous narration: "The summer I killed my father, I was 10 years old." From that point the story moves backward in time and memory to Louisiana in 1962, when a young girl ...

Manufacturer: Vidmark / Trimark
Starring: Samuel L. Jackson, Jurnee Smollett, Meagan Good, Lynn Whitfield, Debbi Morgan
Directed By: Kasi Lemmons

She's brown sugar and spice...and if you don't watch it, she'll put you on ice! Delivering a performance worthy of "the Queen of the genre" (Los Angeles Times), Grier portrays one of the screens first action heroines with humor, sensitivity and steely determination. This electrifying revenge thriller explodes with all the sex appeal and cooler-than-cool attitude of its irresistible leading lady. ...

Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Starring: Pam Grier, Antonio Fargas, Peter Brown, Terry Carter, Kathryn Loder
Directed By: Jack Hill

The first film directed by Vincente Minnelli (who directed the original Broadway version), this musical offers its pleasures, but also may make you squirm at the racial stereotypes that were considered both acceptable and entertaining in 1943. A story of the struggle between good and evil for the soul of a man named Little Joe (Eddie "Rochester" Anderson), the film plays with the same kind of ...

Manufacturer: MGM (Warner)
Starring: Ethel Waters, Eddie 'Rochester' Anderson, Lena Horne, Louis Armstrong, Rex Ingram
Directed By: Busby Berkeley, Vincente Minnelli

This 1958 variation on Huck Finn's adventures with Jim finds a white convict (Tony Curtis) chained to a black convict (Sidney Poitier) as they both escape their captors. With each man literally stuck with the other, racial conflicts take a back seat to survival. Directed by Stanley Kramer (Guess Who's Coming to Dinner), the film's obvious consciousness-raising is mitigated by a pair of raw ...

Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Starring: Tony Curtis, Sidney Poitier, Theodore Bikel, Charles McGraw, Lon Chaney Jr.
Directed By: Stanley Kramer

Manufacturer: MGM (Warner)
Starring: David Brian, Claude Jarman Jr., Juano Hernandez, Porter Hall, Elizabeth Patterson
Directed By: Clarence Brown

Director Norman Jewison's (In the Heat of the Night) 1984 adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play explores the ramifications of racism and loyalty through the prism of blacks in the military, revealed through a murder mystery set in the 1940s deep South. Howard E. Rollins (Ragtime) plays a military investigator assigned to the murder of a drill instructor (Adolph Caesar) in ...

Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
Starring: Howard E. Rollins Jr., Adolph Caesar, Art Evans, David Alan Grier, David Harris
Directed By: Norman Jewison