"This isn’t so much a movie as it is a galvanizing force. So rarely is there such unambiguous demarcation between good and evil, and all the more so in a documentary. There’s so much here that you can’t believe you’re seeing so close: pickup trucks crunching into strikers’ feet away from the camera, billy-club cracks you can hear. The characters couldn’t be painted with brighter colors, as if they were drawn with Truman Capote’s pen. The baddies are cartoonishly bad: the emotionless Duke Power executives, their burned and disfigured power attorney, and the henchman Basil Collins, more grinning snake than man (greatest villain in film history?). The hero miners shine, still covered in coal dust. Black and white folks fighting together—if ever a movie could get you up out of your seat cheering on the protagonists . . . And for sure these are country people, but they’re canny too. That they know the danger they face is confirmed when one of the miners’ wives reaches into her ample bosom to pull a pistol out from her brassiere. If this weren’t a documentary, it wouldn’t be believed."