Mississippi Burning (1988)
Directed by Alan Parker
Two FBI agents investigating the murder of civil rights workers during the 60s seek to breach the conspiracy of silence in a small Southern town where segregation divides black and white. The younger agent trained in FBI school runs up against the small town ways of his partner, a former sheriff.
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What critics compared Mississippi Burning to
Those who loved the novel will probably enjoy the film but anyone expecting a stirring, powerful drama in the vein of Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning will be disappointed.
It's certainly not Mississippi Burning (1988); it's Mississippi on Low Heat.
But this film is a far cry from, say, “ Mississippi Burning ,” which made white FBI agents into civil rights heroes.
But not Davis, whose monologues – for example, recounting the death of Aibileen’s son – give the script a depth it otherwise lacks, Yet her contributions also seem oddly out of place, as if she just stepped in from the set of Mississippi Burning.
Unlike most "civil rights" films, from "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" to "Mississippi Burning," "The Help" doesn't function primarily as a security blanket for white viewers who want to feel good about themselves for not sharing the overtly racist attitudes of the white characters onscreen.
This, in truth, is as it should be, given that Jan Kaczmarek's themes are maudlin and awful, genuine sins of cheap portentousness and fabricated poignance, and the lighting by Peter Biziou, who at least gave the corrupt Mississippi Burning a high-contrast chromatic urgency, bathes Unfaithful in such arid greys and blues that the film hardly seems to be happening.
Cinematographer Peter Biziou ("Mississippi Burning") and editor Anne V. Coates ("Lawrence of Arabia") serve Lyne's film well.
If audiences are looking for something like that, they should go stream Mississippi Burning or American History X.
“Mississippi Burning” was one of the few films to get the dread factor right, with all those Klansmen names of Stuckey, Bailey, Townley, and Swilley and kicking off the acting careers of the likes of Michael Rooker, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Pruitt Taylor Vince as exceptionally creepy racists.
In Alan Parker's Mississippi Burning and Chris Menges's World Apart it's hard to find a black person who's not in church out singing spirituals or gathered in groups that rob them of their human diversity.
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It's how you get Mississippi Burning, a thriller about three murdered civil-rights activists in which even the one-dimensional racists have bigger speaking parts than any black person.
From the opening scenes of a deep crimson sky over 19th-century London to its bloody climax to its elegiac denouement, From Hell has been impeccably designed (by Martin Childs, an Oscar winner for Shakespeare in Love) and costumed (by Kym Barrett, The Matrix Reloaded), scored (by Trevor Jones, Mississippi Burning), and photographed (by Peter Deming, Mulholland Dr.).
The Australian-born talent behind the provocative "Fearless" and "The Year of Living Dangerously," conspires with writer Andrew Niccol ("Gattaca") and cinematographer Peter Biziou ("Mississippi Burning") to create the illusion of a life well-examined ... by billions of viewers.