(Charles Burnett, 1977, USA, 80 minutes)

New 4K restoration!

Killer of Sheep, submitted as director Charles Burnett’s MA thesis film at UCLA in 1977, was a legendary and virtually unseeable film until Milestone Films’ and the UCLA Film & Television Archive’s heroic 2007 restoration, 35mm blowup, and rerelease. (It played at the Webster Film Series in January 2008 with Burnett in attendance.) Surely that wider distribution helped skyrocket its already estimable prestige; in 2022 it landed at #43 on Sight & Sound’s greatest films of all time poll. (Both Barry Jenkins and Lynne Ramsay, among many others, listed it as one of the ten best films ever made.) Befitting its current esteem, Milestone, the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the Criterion Collection achieved a new 4K restoration and in the process cleared more of Burnett’s desired soundtrack for the film. At once a very specific look at a middle-class family in the Watts neighborhood of L.A. in the mid-70s and, almost incidentally, a very relatable depiction of what it’s like to be a child, Killer of Sheep only seems to get better as it ages and viewers have opportunity to see it time and time again.