BrightsunNYC Cornbread, Earl and Me is NOT a blaxploitation film, what a ridiculous idea. This is a serious, beautiful, and powerful drama that is well acted and thoughtfully conceived. It also has a great soundtrack. Obviously, it is also highly underrated.Everything in this movie rings true to real life, so it is funny to notice that some other reviewers say the opposite. It seems to me their problem is that it doesn't ring true to the fantasy of motion pictures, rather than that it doesn't ring true to reality.Does the courtroom scene not seem realistic? Here is a news flash: the real life drama that goes down in real life courtrooms is chaotic and often bizarre. That's reality. Everything in this film felt true to me, and it rings true as a human story, leaving politics and ideology completely out of it.And speaking of the courtroom scene, the way the coroner in charge of the courtroom treats the people coldly and superciliously and then gradually becomes ashamed of himself as they behave with grace and dignity is TOTALLY TRUE TO LIFE. It doesn't even have anything to do with race, which is one of the beautiful things about this film. The black people in the gallery feel like it has something to do with race, and the movie makes you understand how they would feel that way, but it also leaves the door open for you to understand that from the coroner's perspective race really might not be any factor in the equation of his behavior. He's just trying to churn through the usual bullshit and get through the day.You don't know there are poor people who try to maintain their dignity and want to pay their way instead of signing off on a poor man's waiver? If you think that's not reality, you haven't seen much of the world. You don't know that their lips sometimes tremble when they reject the waiver and pay their cash instead?So much of this movie is really beautifully acted. Laurence Fishburne puts in one of the best performances from a child actor that you will ever see. Several of the adults are even better.To put it simply, this is a great film. The scene when the cops shoot Cornbread is as good an example of how the wrong person can end up being shot as you will find anywhere in motion pictures. The cops are afraid, they're doing something brave under difficult circumstances, we in the audience can practically feel the rain pouring down on us and clouding our vision, and they shoot the person they legitimately believe to be a murderous criminal running away from them. It takes them weeks or more to realize they were wrong. They aren't bad men, or even bad cops, they just made a bad decision under a bad set of circumstances.Or is the basketball element and the families involved supposed to be a caricature that should offend us? Really? Because it could have come straight out of the documentary Hoop Dreams which was produced twenty years later. Are we meant to suppose that all of the people depicted in Hoop Dreams decided to base their whole lives and personalities off of Cornbread, Earl and Me? Or can we admit that in fact families, neighborhoods, and characters like this existed in real life?Apparently Cornbread, Earl and Me is too real for some people. Or maybe it just goes over many audience heads. The beauty of its drama is sometimes subtly wrought, to be fair. But if you can watch it with an open mind it is an extraordinary film and well worth your time.Having seen it once as a teenager, and once again recently (many years later), I feel strongly enough about it to create an account to write this review. So there you go.

evan_ginzburg I think the label of blaxploitation for this film is quite unfair- it's heartfelt, various Black and White characters are shown as flawed rather than the "us vs. them" mentality of many racially charged films of that era- and you deeply care about what happens to everyone involved. Plus Moses Gunn is as fine an actor as ever set foot on the silver screen. Just thoroughly enjoyed it in spite of low budget feel and some clichéd moments. I even got choked up at times. Well worth seeing. Additionally, I was quite saddened to find that so many of the cast died relatively young. For a film from the mid 70s, there's an awful lot of actors in this movie no longer with us.

leighabc123 It was funny seeing the great actor Laurence Fishburne as a 13 year old child in this movie. He could act back then.This movie had a whole lot of great actors who were guest stars in popular black sitcoms of the seventies. Rosalind Cash as Laurence Fishburne's character's mother. Moses Gunn. Antonio Fargas is type-casted with the same type of role in every movie that he is in. This movie was made in the early 1970s. A police shot an innocent black man. Fast forward to 2007 in Norfolk, Virginia. The same thing is happening here today, over 30 years later! Yes cops intimidate people just like they intimidated people in this movie.

hillari A kid witnesses the shooting death of the neighborhood basketball star. The basketball player had been mistaken by the police as a crime suspect. The kid is subjected to harrassment from the policement involved to keep quiet about what he knows. The cops even go so far as to intimidate his mother. This is an early film appearance of Lawrence Fishburne's. He was thirteen or fourteen when he did this movie. The always magnificent late Rosalind Cash plays his mother. The film makes a sharp comment about the conflicts people have with the very people who are supposed to be protecting them.