Slam

Oct 7, 1998

1h 40m

★ 6.9

Words make sense of a world that won't.

Overview

Raymond Joshua, a young black performance poet, is arrested and imprisoned for a petty marijuana charge in a Washington, D.C. jail. Although the confining prison walls do little to shield him from danger, it is within those walls that Raymond establishes his identity, strength, and voice and meets a prison gang leader and a prison writing teacher, Lauren Bell. Bell inspires Raymond to use the power of creative expression to free himself from the struggles and demise of the Black male as another victim of the judicial system.

Genres

Drama

Production Companies

Off Line Entertainment Group

Slam Trailers

Cast

Ray Joshua

Saul Williams

Lauren Bell

Sonja Sohn

Hopha

Bonz Malone

Big Mike

Lawrence Wilson

Jimmy Huang

Beau Sia

China

Andre Taylor

Bay (Jail Rapper)

Momolu Stewart

Do Wop Cop

Ron Jones

Do Wop Cop

Reamer Shedrick

Chief C.O.

Allan E. Lucas

Officer Dom

Dominic Chianese Jr.

Jail Class Poet 'Why'

Jerome Goldman

In a senseless act of hatred, openly gay college student Matthew Shepard was murdered in 1998. This critically-acclaimed, moving film recounts the final days of Matthew's killers' trial—and the weeks leading to Matthew's death—with unnerving detail. Stockard Channing delivers an unforgettable, Emmy® Award-winning performance as Matthew's grieving mother, Judy, in a story of a murder that moved a nation to action. Also starring Law & Order's Sam Waterston.

6.0

A Marine Story

Nov 5, 2010

Marine officer Alexandra is tough enough to kick any guy's ass in a bar fight, but there's one opponent she can't beat: military policy. When she returns to her conservative hometown from Iraq with a mysterious personal life, she finds herself charged with preparing a tempestuous teenage girl to boot camp.

6.4

Story of G.I. Joe

Jul 13, 1945

War correspondent Ernie Pyle joins Company C, 18th Infantry as this American army unit fights its way across North Africa in World War II. He comes to know the soldiers and finds much human interest material for his readers back in the States. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in partnership with The Film Foundation in 2000.

7.1

The Short Films of David Lynch

Feb 20, 2002

This collection of David Lynch's short films cover the first 29 years of his career. Each film is given a special introduction by the director himself. His earliest underground films Six Figures Getting Sick (1966), The Alphabet (1968), The Grandmother (1970) and The Amputee (1974) are showcased as well as two requisitioned works well into his successful career The Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988) and his addition for Lumière and Company (1995).

4.0

I Don't Know

Nov 9, 1971

A truly major work, I Don’t Know observes the relationship between a lesbian and a transgender person who prefers to be identified somewhere in between male and female, in an expression of personal ambiguity suggested by the film’s title. This nonfiction film – an unusual, partly staged work of semi-verité – is the first of Spheeris’s films to fully embrace what would become her characteristic documentary style: probing, intimate, uncompromising. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2014.

6.6

Joe

Jul 15, 1970

After murdering his daughter's drug-dealing boyfriend, a wealthy ad executive stumbles into a bar and strikes up an uneasy alliance with Joe Curran, a drunken bigot with a bloodlust who works at a local factory.

6.1

Pelican Blood

Jun 17, 2010

Nikko is a twenty-something man with good friends, a passion for birdwatching, and self-destructive tendencies. When he falls back into a relationship with Stevie—his seductive, aggressive environmental activist ex-girlfriend he first encountered on a suicide website—his stable existence takes a turn towards chaos once again.

6.6

Fetching Cody

Sep 12, 2005

Art, a drug-addicted dealer and hustler, arrives at his girlfriend Cody's apartment to find that she has overdosed on heroin. He tries to fix things by traveling back in time in an attempt to prevent her death.

5.5

Goodnight, Joseph Parker

Oct 1, 2004

Unapologetically brash in dialogue and texture GOODNIGHT JOSEPH PARKER is the classic love story brought to a no-pleasantries bar room. Girl loves man who loves woman, woman isn't worth his time. Into that mix throw in a hopeless drunk with a good heart and weak stomach, a bartender who's more desperate than his customers and Steven Tyler as a shameless bad boy looking for a good time and fast woman. Powerful, gritty, hard hitting and raw.

5.8

The Grass Harp

Oct 11, 1996

Based on the novel by Truman Capote, this often-witty coming-of-age drama looks at a young man growing up with an unusual family in the Deep South in the 1940s. Becoming an orphan in 1935, Collin moves to his dad's cousins Verena and Dolly. Verena is a rich, bossy businesswoman. Dolly, Collin and the maid revolt, moving to a tree house.

6.4

Love Will Tear Us Apart

May 17, 1999

The film gets under the skin of a very marginalized group: recent immigrants to Hong Kong from Mainland China. Belying the expectation that they will belong in a territory now returned to China's sovereignty, they find themselves lonely, frustrated, poor, and employable only in the most menial jobs, from elevator service staff to prostitution.

5.0

Johnny

Sep 14, 1999

Johnny, the megalomaniac leader of a group of squeegee kids, finds a video camera and pushes his followers into "acting" out increasingly dangerous "scenes".

5.5

Empty

Jan 16, 2006

A young intellectual, Mati, engineers himself into a situation where he has to spend a weekend with his wife Helina and her lover Eduard. The trio goes to Eduard's summer house, surrounded by the majestic scenery of big forests and an empty beach. Mati, either out of jealousy or pride, has decided to win back his wife and will do anything his introverted and inert mind can come up with.

5.5

Gringuito

Jan 1, 1998

Ivan is a kid whose family decides to go back to Chile from New York, after at least a decade away. Ivan of course is not quite the Chilean kid his grandparents would like him to be: he sulks, misses the Opera, finds things odd and ugly, acting like a real "little gringo" (hence the title).

4.5

Race You to the Bottom

Jan 1, 2005

Nathan and Maggie are in the throes of a passionate affair. They're young, good-looking, and both have boyfriends. When Nathan is assigned to write a travel article on romantic hot-spots in Napa Valley, these unconventional lovers test the limits of the sensuality and fantasy that bond them.

4.9

Kings

Sep 21, 2007

In the mid 1970s a group of young men leave the Connemara Gaeltacht, bound for London and filled with ambition for a better life. After thirty years, they meet again at the funeral of their youngest friend, Jackie. The film intersperses flashbacks of a lost youth in Ireland with the harsh realities of modern life. For some the thirty years has been hard, working in building sites across Britain. Slowly the truth about Jackie's death become clear and the friends discover they need each other more than ever.

5.7

Nights and Weekends

Oct 10, 2008

A man and woman must face the tension that builds between them during a long-distance relationship.

7.2

Melody

Mar 28, 1971

Two youngsters declare to their parents that they want to get married. Not sometime in the future but as soon as possible.

6.1

The Man in the Glass Booth

Jan 27, 1975

Arthur Goldman is a rich Jewish industrialist, living in luxury in a Manhattan high-rise. He banters with his assistant Charlie, often shocking him with his outrageousness and irreverent musings on aspects of Jewish life. Nonetheless, Charlie is astonished one day when Israeli secret agents burst in and arrest Goldman for being a Nazi war criminal. Whisked to Israel for trial, Goldman forces his accusers to face, not only his presumed guilt, but their own.