Shaft

Quintessential blaxploitation that launched a thousand imitators, Gordon Parks’s Shaft is much more than a rollicking crowd-pleaser, as it’s also a snapshot of a bygone era.

There has been a slew of lesser imitations of Park’s film, but none have cut it close. Shaft has become incontestably Roundtree’s own through a performance that seems not only natural and off-the-cuff but imbued with a sense of street life...

both revolutionary black film with unprecedented imagery of a strong black protagonist and Hollywood product clearly shaped to appeal to both black and white audiences

Pop culture transcendence.