Critics reviews

Personal Problems is a piece of work that seeks not to be the Black version of anything but a world in and of itself, which only someone named Johnnie Mae Brown could occupy and share with us.

No cinematic experience this year can equal the nourishment I received from this 165-minute collaboration between a host of beautiful black minds: the director Bill Gunn, the writer Ishmael Reed, the poet/producer Steve Cannon, and a cross-generational cast with deep roots in black history (headlined by Vertamae Grosvenor).

PERSONAL PROBLEMS shows that Gunn was also adept at chamber drama—the movie conveys keen psychological insight and showcases several powerful performances. . . . The movie raises more questions about the characters than it can possibly resolve, which is exactly the point—it’s a work intended to make you more curious about the world you inhabit.

A captivating snapshot of Harlem in the days leading up to Ronald Reagan's inauguration, it presages Spike Lee's movies with its warm jazz score and Tyler Perry's with its feminine emotional perspective.

It’s among those rare, quietly unassuming avant-garde works that takes the trouble to be genuinely entertaining while pushing formal and textual boundaries.

With its elliptical leaps between scenes and long, unbroken stretches of often-hectic overlapping dialogue that serve no function in advancing exposition, Personal Problems would likely be deemed bad television by most any network executive with an eye for the bottom line—either in 1980 or today—and it is also a startling, totally idiosyncratic work of art.

One doesn’t watch Personal Problems for its technical superiority, one watches it for the problems that still persist, to draw a line of legacy for A Wrinkle in Time, Black Panther and Mudbound that have been made on the backs of Ishmael Reed, Bill Gunn, Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor and their tribe, and are products of a very old and tiring struggle. One watches it for the poetry, and to be dazzled.

“Personal Problems” contains not a single shot that can be called beautiful, but there’s also not a genuinely wrong-footed view in the whole work. It’s as if the camera is negotiating with reality, trying to find a place at the characters’ tables. The viewer gets a wide window into African-American life in New York at this time; it’s intimate to the point of awkwardness.

Billed as a “meta-soap opera,” Personal Problems is nothing less than an explosion of the television form. . . . We're accustomed to “perfection”—in Blu-ray releases of classic films, and particularly in prestige television shows. . . . The gritty materiality of Personal Problems is initially a shock but soon proves to be a font of exaltation.

It becomes apparent that Gunn's motion picture is inventing its language as it goes along—a series of building blocks of different shapes, tones, and materials creating a homemade Cubist mosaic.