FREE: Soul Food (1997)

The listing, Soul Food (1997) has ended.

Soul Food (1997)
Condition: Good
Actors: Vanessa Williams, Vivica A. Fox, Nia Long, Michael Beach, Mekhi Phifer
Directors: George Tillman Jr.
Writers: George Tillman Jr.
Producers: Kenneth 'Babyface' Edmonds, Llewellyn Wells, Michael McQuarn, Robert Teitel, Tracey E. Edmonds
Format: Color, Director's Cut, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Language: English (Dolby Surround), French (Dolby Surround), Spanish (Dolby Surround)
Subtitles: English, Spanish
Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)

Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Number of discs: 1
Rated: R (Restricted)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
DVD Release Date: April 3, 2001
Run Time: 115 minutes

Soul Food is the kind of movie that seems to have been blessed throughout its low-budget production, and it's got a quality of warmth and charm that fits perfectly with its authentic drama about a large African-American family in Chicago. Twenty-eight-year-old writer-director George Tillman Jr. drew autobiographical inspiration from his upbringing in Milwaukee, and on a well-spent $6.5 million budget he succeeded where similar films (including Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back) fell short: He depicts his many characters with such depth and sympathy that, by the time they have weathered several family crises, we've come to care and feel for them and the powerful ties that bind them together. As seen through the eyes of Tillman's young alter ego Ahmad, the film primarily focuses on the rivalries and affections that rise and fall among Ahmad's mother and her two sisters. Through them, and through the weekly Sunday dinners cooked with love by their mother, Big Mama, we witness marital bliss and distress, infidelity, success, failure... in short, the spices of life both bitter and sweet. But when Big Mama falls into a diabetic coma, Ahmad watches as his family begins to fall apart without the stability and love that Big Mama provided with every Sunday meal.