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Mississippi Burning

1988

Alan Parker

Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe, Frances McDormand, Brad Dourif ...

7.6

19,710

Drama. Mystery In 1964, when three civil-rights workers, two white and one black, mysteriously disappear while driving through Mississippi, two FBI agents, Ward (Willem Dafoe) and Anderson (Gene Hackman), are sent in to investigate. While Ward is young and by the book, Anderson is a seasoned southerner comfortable with the Byzantine (and, to Ward, morally ambiguous) ways of his region. Together they sift through a variety of leads and come up ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	TV Guide	"[It] is visually splendid.(...) As a history lesson, however, it's laughable"	NEU
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"More than any other film I’ve seen, this one gets inside the passion of race relations in America (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United Kingdom	Philip French The Guardian	"Arguably the finest of Alan Parker’s 17 feature films, it’s a vivid, passionate political thriller combining melodrama and semi-documentary realism to powerful effect"	POS
United States	Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader	"[It] has little to do with history, sociology, or even common sense"	NEG
United States	Desson Thomson The Washington Post	"[It] speeds down the complicated, painful path of civil rights in search of a good thriller (...) Surprisingly, it finds it"	POS
United Kingdom	Barry McIlheney Empire	"With remarkable performances, aggressive direction and a cracking pace, this is superb cinema, even if the historical accuracy leaves much to be desired (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Vincent Canby The New York Times	"The violence it depicts in such graphic detail - the beatings of innocents, the burnings of houses, schools and churches, the civil chaos - is sometimes so rough and harrowing that one looks for a way out of the film"	POS
United Kingdom	Time Out	"It's arguably the director's most controlled film to date."	POS
United States	Rita Kempley The Washington Post	"[It] surveys the geography of racism, sheds light on the dark night of the soul."	POS

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