Starring Academy Award(R)-winner Denzel Washington (Best Actor, TRAINING DAY, 2001) and multi-talented Whitney Houston (WAITING TO EXHALE), here's a delightful romantic comedy to send spirits soaring! Washington plays a charming angel named Dudley who's sent to earth to help a young minister (Courtney B. Vance -- DANGEROUS MINDS) and his beautiful wife (Houston) revive their marriage! But things ...

Manufacturer: Walt Disney Video
Starring: Denzel Washington, Whitney Houston, Courtney B. Vance, Gregory Hines, Jenifer Lewis
Directed By: Penny Marshall

One of the very best films about the Civil War, this instant classic from 1989 is also one of the few films to depict the participation of African American soldiers in Civil War combat. Based in part on the books Lay This Laurel by Lincoln Kirstein and One Gallant Rush by Peter Burchard, the film also draws from the letters of Robert Gould Shaw (played by Matthew Broderick), the ...

Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
Starring: Matthew Broderick, Denzel Washington, Cary Elwes, Morgan Freeman, Jihmi Kennedy
Directed By: Edward Zwick

A shameful chapter in American history is powerfully dramatized in Rosewood, but moviegoers in 1997 may not have been ready for the African American equivalent of Schindler's List. And while the massacre that occurred in the nearly all-black town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1922 cannot compare in scale to the Nazi holocaust, it potently illustrates the same issues of racism and ...

Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Starring: Jon Voight, Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle, Bruce McGill, Loren Dean
Directed By: John Singleton

Filmmaker Spike Lee, star Denzel Washington (the New York, Boston and Chicago Film Critics' choice as 1992's Best Actor) and other talents vividly portray the life and times of the visionary leader. "One of the decade's best and most important films." (Arch Campbell, WRC-TV/Washington D.C.)

Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Starring: Angela Bassett, O.L. Duke, Al Freeman Jr., Sonny Jim Gaines, Albert Hall

Even when it misses a dramatic opportunity in favor of generic action, Set It Off benefits from a sharp understanding of its well-drawn central characters. They're a quartet of young African American women in Los Angeles (Jada Pinkett, Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox, Kimberly Elise), all struggling against a system that seems designed to prevent them from realizing their dreams. The movie ...

Manufacturer: New Line Home Video
Starring: Van Baum, Vincent Baum, Thomas Jefferson Byrd, Natalie Desselle, Dr. Dre

Tim Reid's wonderful film about life in the black neighborhood of Glen Allan, Mississippi, from the mid-'40s to the dawn of the civil rights movement, is thick with terrific, inspired actors and possessed of a mature, limpid visual style. The story is told from the point of view of a young boy raised by his stalwart grandfather and his kind aunt. But the collective tale of a community coming to ...

Manufacturer: Republic Pictures
Starring: Al Freeman Jr., Phylicia Rashad, Leon, Paula Kelly, Salli Richardson
Directed By: Tim Reid

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

This ambitious 1995 film by John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood) doesn't quite succeed at painting the illuminating, collective portrait of college life in the '90s that the director seeks. But Singleton does do a fine job of defining some conflicting impulses for young people on the cusp of adulthood, particularly the desire to broaden horizons on the one hand and circle the wagons with ...

Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
Starring: Omar Epps, Kristy Swanson, Michael Rapaport, Jennifer Connelly, Ice Cube
Directed By: John Singleton

This layered film, a labor of love from director Jonathan Demme and star Oprah Winfrey, covers a lot of turf in its nearly three-hour running time. Part slavery fable, part mother-daughter tale, part ghost story, Beloved demands an audience's full attention from its dramatic, slightly bewildering opening, when a family dog comes down on the wrong side of some angry, unseen force. But Demme ...

Manufacturer: Walt Disney Video
Starring: Oprah Winfrey, Danny Glover, Thandie Newton, Kimberly Elise, Beah Richards
Directed By: Jonathan Demme

Spike Lee's incendiary look at race relations in America, circa 1989, is so colorful and exuberant for its first three-quarters that you can almost forget the terrible confrontation that the movie inexorably builds toward. Do the Right Thing is a joyful, tumultuous masterpiece--maybe the best film ever made about race in America, revealing racial prejudices and stereotypes in all their ...

Manufacturer: MCA/Universal Home Video