A rare screening of Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger will bring one of American cinema’s most quietly mesmerizing dramas to the Bill Cosford Cinema in Coral Gables on Sunday, June 29 at 1pm. The 1990 feature, starring Danny Glover in a performance of eerie stillness and depth, explores the fault lines within a South Central Los Angeles family when a familiar stranger appears at their door and refuses to leave.
Part domestic drama, part folklore-tinged parable, To Sleep with Anger stands as one of the most original works of late-20th-century American filmmaking. Long admired by critics and scholars, the film remains underseen—its deliberate pacing and cultural specificity resisting commercial formulas. But for those who value cinema that lingers long after the credits roll, this screening offers something rare: the chance to share silence, tension, and revelation with others in a darkened room.
The film centers on Harry, played by Glover, a southern drifter who re-enters the lives of old friends without warning or explanation. At first, he’s all smiles and stories—soft-spoken, well-dressed, polite. But as days pass, the atmosphere in the house begins to change. Minor disagreements sharpen into arguments. Long-settled routines falter. And Harry, who rarely raises his voice, starts to feel less like a guest and more like a curse.
Roger Ebert, in his four-star review, called it “a subtle kind of horror movie.” He wrote, “Harry is played in the movie by Danny Glover, who usually plays the most pleasant of men… Here his very pleasantness makes him more sinister. His good manners turn oily, somehow… Glover is an actor of considerable presence, and here he lets us know his character is from hell, and hardly has to raise his voice.”
The horror, such as it is, comes not from violence but from spiritual imbalance. Burnett doesn’t rely on jump scares or supernatural effects. Instead, he draws from African American folk traditions, Christian iconography, and the textures of daily life to evoke a slow unraveling. The threat is existential, not external.
Shot with lyrical precision and scored with strains of gospel and blues, the film channels a deeply American storytelling tradition that rarely reaches multiplexes. Burnett, a central figure in the L.A. Rebellion movement of Black independent filmmakers, brings a patient, observational eye to the screen. His focus is not on plot twists, but on how people speak, hold silence, and avoid one another in tight spaces. The drama builds not through spectacle, but through friction.
Underneath its quiet surface, To Sleep with Anger examines generational conflict, cultural displacement, and the uneasy coexistence of modernity and inherited tradition. The characters navigate invisible forces—social, spiritual, psychological—without the language to name them. As Harry settles in, the family is forced to confront not just him, but each other.
The cast includes Paul Butler, Mary Alice, Carl Lumbly, and Sheryl Lee Ralph, each delivering grounded performances that allow the tension to accumulate in glances and gestures. The ensemble, like Burnett’s direction, respects the audience’s intelligence and attention.
Watching the film in a theater enhances its subtle power. The long silences, the flickers of expression, the shifting mood of each room—these register more deeply when experienced communally. In an era of algorithmic viewing and streaming fatigue, To Sleep with Anger reminds us what cinema can still do: it can haunt quietly, and with purpose.
The screening takes place at the Bill Cosford Cinema, located on the University of Miami campus. Tickets are $6. The film runs 1 hour and 42 minutes and is rated PG for adult themes.
For those unfamiliar with Burnett’s work, this is a rare entry point. For those who already know it, this is a chance to see it properly—projected, with strangers, in stillness. Some films ask to be seen. This one waits.
