To Sleep with Anger. 1990. USA. Written and directed by Charles Burnett. 102 min.
With Danny Glover, Paul Butler, DeVaughan Nixon, Mary Alice. One of independent American cinema’s true masters (and the subject of a MoMA retrospective in 2011), Charles Burnett is perhaps best known for his 1981 masterpiece Killer of Sheep. To Sleep with Anger is every bit that film's equal, a modern-day trickster narrative that draws significantly from traditions of African American folklore, and adds an undercurrent of the mystical to the poetic realism found in his earlier work. A film about the specter of migration, To Sleep with Anger centers on Harry Mention, a stranger in the village (played with satanic charm by Danny Glover) who threatens the domestic harmony and patriarchal authority of a contemporary middle-class black family in Los Angeles. Courtesy Sony Pictures Releasing.