✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
United Kingdom · 2020
1h 20m
Director Rubika Shah
Starring Red Saunders, Dennis Bovell, Mykaell Riley, Pervez Bilgrami
Genre Documentary, Music
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
In late-1970s Britain, a group of artists united to fight the far-right National Front and form Rock Against Racism. This documentary explores the organization's formation and activism, showing how music can be used to fight for change.
CineVue by Christopher Machell
White Riot is a belligerently hopeful film: Shah vividly depicts the insidious violence of racism, but she also renders its futility in the face of community, and of music’s limitless power to unite and strengthen.
The Film Stage by Christopher Schobert
What’s most unsettling and provocative about White Riot is how current it feels. Because of this, perhaps White Riot’s greatest achievement is that it takes something that can cause sneers and eye-rolling—committed cultural and political action—and make it feel both necessary and triumphant.
The filmmaker has given us a pitch-perfect, punk-as-fuck portrait of a movement. She’s also reminded us that, regardless of bygone victories, the fight still goes on. Here’s a blueprint for resistance.
Screen Daily by Demetrios Matheou
Given the recent debates about British identity and the spike in race hatred and racially motivated crime – all as a result of Brexit – the timing of White Riot couldn’t be more apt.
The Irish Times by Donald Clarke
White Riot is here both to educate and to serve the nostalgists.
The New York Times by Glenn Kenny
One of the many things that White Riot, a documentary about RAR directed by Rubika Shah, brings home is that the world could still use more somethings against racism.
The film employs a punk-inspired cut-and-paste collages, smashing together footage of police and protestor clashes, rock concerts, television shows and political marches, all annotated with animated handwritten letters, posters, newspaper clippings, and excerpts from RAR’s fanzine, Temporary Hoarding.
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
An excellent brief documentary about a heroic grassroots political movement whose importance reveals itself more clearly in retrospect with every year that passes.
The Observer (UK) by Simran Hans
Rubika Shah’s smart, spirited feature debut is a whistle-stop tour of a DIY uprising.
The Hollywood Reporter by Stephen Dalton
White Riot is a timely, engaging exercise in social and cultural history, but a wider focus might have given it deeper context and broader marketability.
Two tales of love and loss told in sequence.
She’s everything. He’s just Ken.
A failed stand-up comedian is driven insane, turning to a life of crime in chaos in Gotham City.
A poor family lies and schemes their way into the employ of a wealthy household — successfully, but with great consequences.
It takes the friendship with a young girl to change this boy's mind about the tyrannical leader of his country.
Two British soldiers race to deliver a message that will stop over 1,000 men from walking into a German ambush.
Inspired by love, he created a masterpiece.
It's all fun and games...until he destroys the universe
When a young woman, Bella, is reanimated by an eccentric physician, she begins her life anew, exploring the pleasures of the world.
Arthur, an archaeologist with a supernatural gift for locating Etruscan relics, reunites with a ragtag group of tomb raiders.
When Fanny runs into Alain, a former high school friend, their fast developing relationship puts her perfect marriage in jeopardy.
Aristocratic student Felix invites his Oxford classmate Oliver to Saltburn, his eccentric family’s estate, for an unforgettable summer.