Jackson's elegant performance gives the frequently tough to swallow story some credence.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 16, 2007

It's so profoundly, mind-blowingly offensive that you almost have to admire the writer/director Craig Brewer's nerve.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 19, 2007

Sam Jackson delivers the electric blues in a not-so-blue movie that promises more Deep South sin than it actually delivers.

| Original Score: 3/5 | May 18, 2007

This is an unusually bold film, but it's also a morality tale that's riddled with hypocrisy and is frankly offensive. Not a blues movie as much as a blue movie.

| Original Score: 2/5 | May 15, 2007

Pitched uncomfortably but compellingly between homage and exploitation in its big-hearted exploration of the steamiest corners of black life.

| Original Score: B | Mar 3, 2007

Delightfully outrageous, Black Snake Moan is an explosive mixture of sex, race and down-South swamp water.

| Original Score: 4/6 | Mar 3, 2007

You have to throw all reason and logic out the window and just feel the groove this movie's laying down.

Full Review | Mar 2, 2007

The movie strolls right past absurdity into offensiveness, by trying to pass this pulp nonsense off as noble art.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 2, 2007

This is the kind of movie that's best enjoyed as a stylized fantasy, much like Brewer's most obvious model, Elia Kazan's Southern-fried Tennessee Williams adaptation Baby Doll.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 2, 2007

Humid and overwrought, with Ricci working at fever pitch and Jackson bringing fire, brimstone and some passable blues licks to the equation, Black Snake Moan is no polite little indie thing, and certainly no formulaic studio exercise.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 2, 2007

Black Snake Moan is a trip to that unfamiliar territory well worth tagging along on.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 2, 2007

It's a steamy, searing saga of rigorous redemption confronting creepy Southern seediness. But it's not nearly the wake-up call it could have been.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 2, 2007

It's an exploitation film fraught with faux-sincerity, and ultimately it's utterly ridiculous.

| Original Score: 1/4 | Mar 2, 2007

Despite its considerable unwholesome appeal, the movie gives us the feeling it has been chained up as well and that chain won't let it go any farther than a single outrageous idea.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 2, 2007

This is one of those ludicrous, semi-offensive, semi-entertaining potboilers that feels as if the script were dragged out from someone's naughty-book stash.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 2, 2007

Having established his characters and built their bond, having cooked up a sense of place so strong you can taste it, Brewer can't find anywhere in particular to go. Suddenly he brings a gun into the mix, then takes an awkward Dr. Phil turn.

| Original Score: C+ | Mar 2, 2007

An engorged melodrama meant to evoke the dark passions of country blues, Black Snake Moan often comes off like Britney Spears singing Skip James.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Mar 2, 2007

Black Snake Moan is a myth-and-reconciliation story with outlandish scenes meant to make you laugh, make you uncomfortable. Both.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 2, 2007

Black Snake Moan is thick with Tennessee sweat and grit and the sound of insects. And it takes an overwrought, steamy path to what at least feels like a moral cautionary tale.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 2, 2007

Any movie that can make Samuel L. Jackson convincing as a great Memphis bluesman must be doing something right.

| Mar 2, 2007