16 Essential Films About the Black Experience

From ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ and ‘Sounder’ to ‘Get Out’ and ‘Sinners,’ these movies span the vast culture of Black life in America

Lisa Kennedy,

Updated June 18, 2026

AARP

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Updated June 18, 2026

a collage with still images of scenes from the films sounder and sinners

Left: "Sounder," Cicely Tyson, Kevin Hooks, Taj Mahal, 1972; Right: "Sinners," Michael B. Jordan (both), 2025.

Courtesy Everett Collection; Warner Bros./Courtesy Everett Collection

Ah, the “Black experience.”

The quotes feel right. After all, it’s tricky to sum up the history of a people, of a community that resists a one-story-fits-all approach.

Still, you don’t have to go all professorial to know there are films that resonate a little differently because their creators share a lived experience and intimacy with their subject matter — yes, even with genre or fantasy tales. There’s a little more texture woven in by a Black writer or director, a little more nuance in an actor’s grimace or grin. It may be the way a father pauses to take the measure of his son, the way a mother hums, or how she looks across the table at an impertinent grownup child. (Remember Oprah at the dinner table in The Butler?) Yes, experience is vapor, an evolving story passed down, but it's also a saga of strength, enduring love and abundance.

First, a note about Spike Lee

We have four words for you that continue to resonate: Do. The. Right. Thing. Even before Spike Lee’s hilarious, wise and incendiary 1989 comedy — about a day in the life of pizza delivery guy Mookie and his Brooklyn neighborhood — was added to the National Film Registry in 1999 (the first of four) and gained a spot (No. 24) on the British Film Institute’s decennial ranking of the greatest films of all time in 2022, the nation’s sense of the “Black experience” was being shaped by the prickly, brilliant filmmaker sporting the Knicks jersey. Lee, now 69, has taken on sexual liberation (She’s Gotta Have It), historically Black colleges and their conflicts (School Daze), music industry exploitation and jazz (Mo’ Better Blues), political resistance and Black empowerment (Malcolm X) and interracial relationships and the crack epidemic (Jungle Fever). Those films don’t even get us deep into the 1990s. And they don’t touch on the provocative work Lee’s done with documentaries that get to the heart of ache and outrage: 4 Little Girls, about the church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, about Hurricane Katrina, to name but two. You see the bounty — and therefore the problem: Lee would overwhelm an essential-viewing list even as he has expanded the possibilities for so many other Black filmmakers.

And now, on to the movies, which run the gamut because, well, so does the Black experience.

Sinners (2025, R)

Ryan Coogler was listening to Howlin’ Wolf and washing dishes in his Oakland, California, home when the story that became Sinners called to him. Can a vampire flick truly be about the Black experience? Most definitely, if it’s set in the Jim Crow era and is steeped in the blue-black blues. The actor Michael B. Jordan provides an anchoring presence in Coogler’s movies, from the director’s 2013 indie debut, Fruitvale Station (about a day in the life of Oscar Grant III, who was killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit policeman in 2009), to his heavyweight take on the Rocky franchise, Creed, and the ample marvels of his Black Panther behemoths. With Sinners, the story of twins Smoke and Stack and their Mississippi juke joint under vampire seige would be wild enough. But there has never been a set piece as perfect in its back-to-the-future glory as the spirits meeting in the juke joint’s fiery past, present and beyond, summoned by Sammie (Miles Canton) singing “I Lied to You.”

Watch it: Sinners

Sing Sing (2023, R)

A group of incarcerated men mount a comedy in this film that pulls back the curtain on participants in the Rehabilitation Through the Arts theater program at the titular New York prison. Colman Domingo, now 56, portrays the writer John Whitfield, aka Divine G., the go-to playwright and de facto leader of the prison ensemble. (The actual Whitfield makes an appearance in the film.) Newcomer Clarence Maclin, now 59, brings prickly energy as Divine Eye, the newcomer to the troupe. The authenticity shimmers throughout. Many in the cast — including the magnetic Maclin — were once incarcerated. But that’s only half of it: Director Greg Kwedar and his writing partner, Clint Bentley, devised an equal pay rate and equity participation agreement for cast and crew. Talk about walking the walk.

Watch it: Sing Sing

A Thousand and One (2023, R)

The wounds of a broken foster care system come into focus in this award-winning debut by writer-director A.V. Rockwell. But this searing and subtle drama is more than a sociological critique. Portraying Inez, Teyana Taylor delivers a riveting turn as the mother who snatches her young son, Terry, from the indifference of the system and works — along with her boyfriend Lucky (an excellent Will Catlett) — to give him the life she never had. Stretching into Terry’s teenage years and set in Harlem, the movie provides lessons in the diligent labor parental love requires. Additionally, very few films capture the understated violence of gentrification as brilliantly as this one does, in a scene in which a kindly landlord shows up to “fix” Inez’s apartment.

Watch it: A Thousand and One

Get Out (2017, R)

Oh, the damage wrought by wolves in allies’ clothing. Gaslighting and virtue signaling get featured roles in Jordan Peele’s insta-classic horror flick. Like some of the best horror films that have come before, Get Out reinvigorated the power of the genre to provide soul-curdling metaphors for a nation’s failings and torments. In this case it’s “Sunken Place” racism.

Watch it: Get Out

Fences (2016, PG-13)

All sinew and simmering sentiment, this muscular adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer-winning play — part of his Pittsburgh Cycle — is about a father embittered by his missed opportunity to play professional baseball. Denzel Washington, now 71, directs with ardor, and he and Viola Davis, now 60, star in roles that garnered each a Tony — and Davis an Oscar. The film isn’t merely a labor of love, it’s the tribute paid by a consummate artist to the protean elder on whose shoulders he stands.

Watch it: Fences

Moonlight (2016, R)

Barry Jenkins’ abiding affection for Black love — at times damaged and damaging, but more often restorative — courses through his best picture Oscar winnner. The writer-director builds on collaborator Tarell Alvin McCraney’s script to cast his gaze on the hero Chiron, played by three very different actors. Each rivets and touches. It is also very much the story of a place. With its knowing and compassionate view of Miami’s Liberty City neighborhood (where the writers came of age) and its slow awakening of Chiron’s yearning for his male friend, the film’s variations on masculinity broke new ground.

Watch it: Moonlight

12 Years a Slave (2013, R)

Brit artist-director Steve McQueen’s take on the American horror story would make a tough but bold double feature with Get Out. A cordial dinner between a free Black man and a couple of white men turns catastrophic when he’s kidnapped and sold into slavery. Kafka’s inescapable nightmare has nothing on chattel slavery. While the outrages of the slave owner are woundingly vivid, it’s the movie’s grasp of the psychological trauma and survival strategies that render Solomon (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) so wrenchingly authentic.

Watch it: 12 Years a Slave

Talk to Me (2007, R)

Not enough folks know director Kasi Lemmons’ hellaciously entertaining and oh-so-astute film about the teaming up of radio maverick Dewey Hughes with charismatic ex-con Petey Greene. Don Cheadle, now 61, nails early shock jock Greene with verbal swagger and a peacock’s wardrobe. Chiwetel Ejiofor is uptight but oh-so-right as Hughes. Among the great scenes: Hughes pulling a “They call me Mr. Tibbs!” moment with the too-cocky Greene while playing pool. As Vernell, Petey’s squeeze, Taraji P. Henson, now 55, gives a performance as grand as her outsize Afro.

Watch it: Talk to Me

Barbershop (2002, PG-13)

Director Tim Story, now 56, takes a chair at the go-to location for enthusiastic sparring, neighborhood gossip and community reckoning. This comedy’s titular location is the South Side Chicago shop of Calvin Palmer (Ice Cube, who turns 57 on June 19), but could have been a spot in Atlanta or Milwaukee or Denver, which would give the sauce its own flavor but not change the fact that you were at a vibrant barbecue. The franchise found a holler back in the Queen Latifah–led Beauty Shop movies.

Watch it: Barbershop

Waiting to Exhale (1995, R)

Terry McMillan’s bestseller about four women, the men they love and, above all, the female friendships they forge got its stellar groove on with Angela Bassett, now 67, Whitney Houston, Loretta Devine, now 76, and Lela Rochon, now 62, as the women. In the midst of the gangsta movie explosion, it provided a breath of fresh air. Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds’ soundtrack is a keeper, too.

Watch it: Waiting to Exhale

Boyz N the Hood (1991, R)

Career-changing performances by Cuba Gooding Jr., now 58, and Ice Cube make it easy to forget how many actual kids live in the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood of writer-director John Singleton’s trailblazing debut. An internet description tags it “Drama/Crime,” which is boneheaded. There’s death, self-poisoning masculinity, gunplay. But to prioritize that is to ignore the fundamental thread: It’s about a father and a son, and about women trying to figure out their place in that narrative while pursuing their own. It’s about the Black family as economically vulnerable, but also stout and aspiring. It’s about community self-love and, yes, self-sabotage. The flashback scenes between Furious Styles (Laurence Fishburne, now 64) and Gooding’s character, Tre (played by a younger actor as a 10-year-old), offer a glimpse of fatherly tenderness worth the price of the ticket.

Watch it: Boyz N the Hood

Daughters of the Dust (1991, NR)

Julie Dash’s history-making feature (the first by a Black female director distributed theatrically) offers a poetic, rich, near-mythical yet fully embodied vision of three generations of Gullah Geechee women in South Carolina. The film itself is a bold gesture of recovery, but the writer-director’s vision also remains an invitation to Black filmmakers to spin ancestral tales into bold and haunting cinema.

Watch it: Daughters of the Dust

To Sleep With Anger (1990, PG)

A middle-class Los Angeles family gets upended and a sibling rivalry is set ablaze when an old friend from the South comes a-visiting Gideon (Paul Butler), Susie (Mary Alice) and their grown sons. In Charles Burnett’s damn smart dramedy, increasingly thorny relationships between the urban and the rural, the modern and the folkloric — the stuff of the Great Migration — get loving treatment. The initially welcome guest becomes more than a pest. Great turns by Sheryl Lee Ralph, now 69, Mary Alice and Ethel Ayler signal that there’s trouble afoot with this Harry, played with devilish relish by Danny Glover, now 79.

Watch it: To Sleep With Anger

Cooley High (1975, PG)

Boyz II Men titled its first album Cooleyhighharmony and covered this flick’s final song, “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday,” for good reason. This coming-of-age film is a touchstone. The year is 1964, and best friends Richard “Cochise” Morris (Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, now 72) and Leroy “Preach” Jackson (Glynn Turman, now 79) have plans to leave their Near North Side Chicago stomping ground: smooth operator Cochise on a basketball scholarship, brainy Preach to pursue his California dreams. Funny but also unexpectedly crushing, the movie comes by its hints of Good Times and What’s Happening!! honestly — it was penned by Eric Monte, now 82, writer and creator of those TV sitcoms.

Watch it: Cooley High

Sounder (1972, G)

A player in the Black Arts Movement of the ’60s and ’70s, playwright Lonne Elder III took William H. Armstrong’s young adult novel about a boy and his sharecropping family and rooted it even more deeply in Black life. He leavened the racial injustice with grounded moments of family affection, joy and even emotional bounty — not in order to make a happy story, but to create a fuller one. As true as the dialogue of parents Nathan and Rebecca rings, much also passes without words between acting greats Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson. Kevin Hooks’ David sees so much — and so do we. Taj Mahal’s steel-guitar-strumming score adds a buoyant blue tint to the hurt and the hope.

Watch it: Sounder

A Raisin in the Sun (1961, NR)

There was a time in the 1960s when some Black critics grew pointedly dismissive of Sidney Poitier’s growing stature as one of America’s great actors, treating his characters as too establishment-pleasing to be significant. To do that was to ignore what he always brought to the screen: the deeper truths of the men he played. Behold Walter Younger’s thwarted aspirations, pent-up anger and simmering frustration in the movie version of Lorraine Hansberry’s groundbreaking play about a South Side Chicago family. He embodies the coiled start of an answer to poet Langston Hughes’ query, “What happens to a dream deferred?”

Watch it: A Raisin in the Sun

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Lisa Kennedy, a regular AARP film critic, is a former Village Voice editor (1986-96) and Denver Post film critic (2003-15) who writes on popular culture, race and gender for Variety, The New York Times, Essence, American Theatre, the Denver Post, and others.

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