I AM still a frequent moviegoer. By that I mean I still like to go to a movie theatre to view a movie on the big screen.

Despite the advent of DVDs, videos and personal home movie theatres that can be built right in your own house like the screening rooms that Hollywood movie moguls had in the 1930s and '40s, I still enjoy the feeling you get seeing a movie with an audience - the shared emotions, the shared reactions.

Having said that there are not many movies which have the kind of impact that can still move me months or years after I have seen them. Mostly they are just celluloid dreams - pure entertainment. And, of course, that is by design because the Hollywood film industry still subscribes to the old theory that if you can't lose money by underestimating the taste of the public, then you certainly can't make any money by overestimating the public's critical faculties.

That is why I always look with interest at the line-up at the Bermuda International Film Festival. I enjoy seeing independent fare made far from Hollywood and its restrictions and conventions, films that tell stories from different points of views.

THERE is no doubt that Hollywood leads the world in special effects and the technical proficiency that goes into the making of big-budget movies. But even so, you may feel like I do - fed up with a constant diet of interchangeable action films and science fiction epics that are carried by eye-popping special effects rather than plots or solid acting. I don't know about you, but I yearn to see more films that aren't sequels or witless crowd-pleasers made to the usual Hollywood formula.

But every now and then a major studio releases a picture that not so much breaks as shatters the standard Hollywood mould. The movie Antwone Fisher, opening today at the Neptune Cinema in Dockyard after two weeks at the Liberty Theatre in Hamilton, is one such movie. Based on a true story, this movie marks the directorial debut of actor and two-time Oscar winner Denzel Washington.

It is unfortunate that African-Americans have only been able to make their mark in acting and movie making in the recent times. At last year's Academy Awards ceremony, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry became the first blacks to win Oscars in leading roles since Sidney Poitier accomplished that feat in the 1960s for his classic performance in Lilies of the Field (although performers like Louis Gossett Jr., Cuba Gooding, Jr., Whoopi Goldberg and Denzel Washington himself won Best Supporting Actor and Actress statuettes in the intervening 30-something years).

Sadly, in the real heyday of movie making - between the late 1930s and the early 1960s - when we saw some really great movies come along with strong acting and good storylines, the on-screen African-American presence in substantive roles was next to non-existent.

There seemed to be a standard rule of thumb for a black person appearing in a movie. Either they played very minuscule parts (usually as domestic servants) or they were sacrificial lambs, sure to be killed off before the end of the movie. I remember the African-American actor Woody Strode, who appeared in any of number of movies in the 1960s, mostly Westerns and the odd war movie. He had a pretty good role in the critically acclaimed movie Spartacus about the slave revolt that shook the Roman empire (Gladiator was a remake in all but name - and nowhere near as good as its source material).

But just when you warmed to Strode's character - an African slave cum gladiator who joins Spartacus' rebellion - he suddenly appears hanging upside down, crucified by the Romans! The disappointment was such that I still remember that scene to this day, years after I first saw the movie. Heck, blacks were not even allowed to play leading roles in the old Tarzan movies which took place in Africa, after all. Only the odd witch doctor got a look-in and, of course, he did not last too long once Tarzan got hold of him. Foolishly, many black people were found to be cheering the actions of the so-called Lord of the Jungle, just as we cheered the Seventh Cavalry in its big screen battles against the so-called Indians (ironically, Edgar Rice Burroughs - author of the original Tarzan novels - featured Africans in far more prominent and dignified roles in his stories, somewhat surprising given the books were written between 1912 and 1944. In the novels Tarzan is an honorary member of the Waziri - a fictional warrior tribe obviously modelled on the Massai of Kenya and Tanzania. They are his allies and friends and Tarzan never treats the natives as anything less than equals. Before writing the Tarzan stories, Burroughs - unusually progressive for a white, middle-class American of his age - was briefly notorious for a scathing send-up of Kipling's White Man's Burden entitled TheBlack Man's Burden which attacked the pseudo-scientific concept of white superiority and a supposed manifest destiny that translated into imperialism. Sample verse: "Take up the white man's burden/Poor simple folk and free/Abandon nature's freedom/Embrace his 'Liberty'/The goddess of the white man/Who makes you free in name/But in her heart your colour/Will brand you 'slave the same.")

Only in recent decades have we seen blacks playing more substantial roles in movies, although there are too many comedies for my liking and the so-called white/black "buddy" movies often, in my view, get too much play as opposed to realistic films dealing with issues facing the black community.

The movie Antwone Fisher deals with some important issues that shape the human condition.

APART from showing what can happen to a person who has experienced an abusive childhood, which is a universal theme, the movie deals with an aspect of child molestation from a point of view that is rarely (if ever) portrayed on screen. I am talking about scenarios where the perpetrator is female and a young boy is the victim; it is usually the other way around, with men being portrayed as the perpetrators and females the victim.

There was another aspect of the movie that pertained specifically to black people and this had to do with personal relationships among African-Americans and the destructive impact of self-hatred, an issue many are reluctant to address.

The movie's view of African-American life was rich, multi-layered and complex, a true-to-life account rather than a Hollywoodised version of the Afro-American experience.

Antwone Fisher tells the story of an angry young black man and how he got that way. It talks about the need for young black boys to have their fathers in their life and, as Denzel Washington warns in an Essence interview, women should not cut their sons off from their fathers "whatever the issues are between you and their fathers . . ." Denzel notes in the same interview that even if in the real Antwone Fisher's life it was mostly women who abused him (beginning when his mother, who abandoned him) it was other women who eventually save him.

I thought the movie was an important one, one of the better to come out of Hollywood that portrayed some important aspects of life.

But I fear for this intelligent, sensitive film's fate at the box office, just as I voiced concern about the highly acclaimed Eve's Bayou, which underperformed in terms of grosses. If such movies don't make money at the box office, then there will no incentive for Hollywood to continue to make such movies in the future - even if a superstar like Denzel Washington is willing and ready to direct and act in it.

Antwone Fisher has received rave reviews and is doing well at the box office. But the verdict is still out as to whether this will be a major popular - as opposed to critical - hit.