with UK law (the Protection of Children Act 1978), a number of images in the opening sequence of this film have been obscured." Reception Critical response Critical response was mixed. Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times described the film as "a series of stark, earthy vignettes, Van Peebles evokes the vitality, humor, pain, despair and omnipresent fear that is life for so many African-Americans". Stephen Holden in The New York Times called it "an innovative, yet politically inflammatory film". The film website Rotten Tomatoes, which compiles reviews from a wide range of critics, gives the film a score of 75% "Fresh" from 28 reviews. The end of the film was shocking to Black viewers who had expected that Sweetback would perish at the hands of the police—a common, even inevitable, fate of Black men "on the run" in prior films. Film critic Roger Ebert cited the ending as a reason for the film not to be labeled as an exploitation film. The New York Times critic Clayton Riley viewed the film favorably, commenting on its aesthetic innovation, but stated of the character of Sweetback that he "is the ultimate sexualist in whose seemingly vacant eyes and unrevealing mouth are written the protocols of American domestic colonialism". In another review, Riley explained that "Sweetback, the profane sexual athlete and fugitive, is based on a reality that is Black. We may not want him to exist but he does." Critic Donald Bogle states in a New York Times interview that the film in some ways met the Black audience's compensatory needs after years of asexual, Sidney Poitier-type characters and that they wanted a "viable, sexual, assertive, arrogant black male hero". In a compendium about the Museum of Modern Art's film and media collection, curator Steven Higgins describes the film's place in history: "Not since Oscar Micheaux had an African-American filmmaker taken such complete control of the creative process, turning out a work so deeply connected to his own personal and cultural reality that he was not surprised when the white critical establishment professed bewilderment...[it] depends less on its story of a superstud running from the police than it does on its disinterest in referencing white culture and its radically new understanding of how style and substance inform each other." Metroactives Nicky Baxter's response is mixed: "Sweet Sweetback introduced the biggest and baddest buck of the [blaxploitation era]. Warts and all, the