Blood Done Sign My Name

“Blood” may carry us into the past, but the unhappy effects linger today, like pollution darkening a sky that never turned completely blue.

Draws attention to a little-known chapter in the history of the civil-rights movement, but it doesn’t do much to pull that moment into the present, or to pull the audience into the past.

Though it can't quite transcend its filmmaker's earnest intentions, this solemn history lesson offers several powerful moments.

A curious, somewhat ungainly movie. But it is also rich and fascinating. At times you think you are watching a clumsy stage pageant superimposed on a documentary; it’s so stiff, and yet at the same time so real.

You can’t deny the inspirational qualities of the story or Parker’s screen presence, any more than you could accuse the film of subtlety or of masking its conspicuous pro-Christian agenda.

Ultimately, however, the movie is about the fact that there was a civil rights movement at all, and incidents like the murder of Dickie Marrow necessitated that movement--deep into the 1970s and beyond.

Rolls out stiff clichés to tell a familiar story of racial injustice in the South.