White Riot

Through contemporary and vintage interviews, animation and live footage, White Riot insightfully and vividly details RAR’s reclamation of young Britain’s soul.

What’s most unsettling and provocative about White Riot is how current it feels. Because of this, perhaps White Riot’s greatest achievement is that it takes something that can cause sneers and eye-rolling—committed cultural and political action—and make it feel both necessary and triumphant.

The filmmaker has given us a pitch-perfect, punk-as-fuck portrait of a movement. She’s also reminded us that, regardless of bygone victories, the fight still goes on. Here’s a blueprint for resistance.

Rubika Shah’s smart, spirited feature debut is a whistle-stop tour of a DIY uprising.

An excellent brief documentary about a heroic grassroots political movement whose importance reveals itself more clearly in retrospect with every year that passes.

White Riot is a belligerently hopeful film: Shah vividly depicts the insidious violence of racism, but she also renders its futility in the face of community, and of music’s limitless power to unite and strengthen.

White Riot is a timely, engaging exercise in social and cultural history, but a wider focus might have given it deeper context and broader marketability.