The name ‘sunshine’ comes from a cure-all elixir called "A Taste of Sunshine" that Ivan Sonnenschein’s (Ralph Fiennes - Quiz Show) great-grandfather Emmanuelle (David de Keyser - Golda) used to create the family’s fortune before tragedy struck him down. Ivan’s voice permeates the movie, divulging his previous two generations’ family chronicle until the story catches up to his own role in fully realizing his own personal identity in regard to his family and troubled search for liberty. Fiennes plays all three generations with a deft expertise that few actors are capable. The British actor performs three films worth of acting work in exacting roles to brilliant effect.

Ivan’s grandfather Ignatz becomes a powerful judge after marrying his free-spirited cousin Valerie (Jennifer Ehle - recent Tony Award winner for The Real Thing). The incestuous nature of the couple’s relationship haunts the story as merely the first in a series of ill-advised pairings that each generation will make. Ignatz chooses to change his Jewish family name to a "more Hungarian name" of Sors (pronounced Shorz) in order to rise in power within Hungary’s monarchy. As social revolution separates Ignatz from his proletariat-leaning wife and brother, Ignatz’ son Adam takes over the story as a champion fencer fated to win at the Nazi occupied 1936 Olympics after his decision to convert to Christianity in order to join an elite private fencing team. When Adam is discovered as a Jew during the Nazi crackdown on Jews in Hungary, and taken off to a Nazi prison camp with his son Ivan, the story pivots into an radical vision of the very source of misplaced anger, disenfranchisement, and anxiety ridden ideals that troubled Hungary in the 20th century.

Sunshine is a movie full of scenic and character idiosyncrasies that ballast the story’s leaps across bouts of social turmoil that yank and tear the family apart. Szabo is careful to include details of political turmoil and frank sexual representation in disclosing motivations beneath his character’s actions. Black and white newsreel footage of Budapest during the Communist invasion, which crushed the city in 1956, is used to great effect in expressing the degree of suffering Hungarians of the time endured. All throughout the film are furtive glimpses and sidelong glances of partially hidden emotions and wishful ideas that percolate beside the immediate dialogue.

Unlike dramatically divisive films such as Schindler’s List, Sunshine exists as an historical document germane to a specific family vision that reaches through generations. It’s through each family member’s specific choices to compromise their own individuality for acceptance from shifting political regimes that leads to a moral destruction as severe as the physical ruin that temporarily swallowed Hungary itself. Hungarians have a joke that they won all of their battles, but lost every war. In Sunshine, the Sonnenschein family does indeed just that. It’s a three-hour film that beckons repeated viewing.

"Pimping" is a lifestyle that most Americans don’t understand or comprehend beyond a vague idea that pimps exploit women with violence and drugs. The fact that some women will prostitute themselves for pimps, giving them 100% of the money they earn, is a bit of oddly reciprocal capitalism that defies conventional logic. Inspired by Iceberg Slim’s book, Pimp: The Story of My Life, twin brothers Allen and Albert Hughes (Menace II Society, Dead Presidents) spent two-and-a-half years interviewing 30 real-life pimps from 15 cities, with names like Rosebudd ("With two D’s for a dose of this double pimping."), Fillmore Slim, Payroll, Charm, Bishop Don Magic Juan, and Gorgeous Dre, to conjure a ‘hybrid documentary’ that serves as a powerful sociological study of a very specific black urban tradition for obtaining large quantities of cash.

Interspersed with telling scenes from ’70s blaxploitation films like The Mack (1973) and Willie Dynamite (1974), along with clips from television shows, American Pimp emphasizes gaudy images of pimps that inspired certain black men to seek out older pimps/macks to learn the rules to a game of controlling women for vast quantities of cash. "Anybody can control a woman’s body, but the key is to control her mind." This idea, shared by pimps from Washington D.C. to San Francisco to Hawaii, emerges with a constant vocabulary of "bitch," "ho," "my money," and "you know what I’m saying?" However most of the pimps interviewed are disarmingly charismatic, expressive, and unexpectedly chose to eschew violence and the use of drugs or alcohol. The Hughes brothers can’t avoid framing their pimp interviewees as anti-hero protagonist kings in an underground game that goes on in every major city in America. When one pimp says: "any man can kill — any woman can be turned out," it sends a shiver of dark truth.

By the time names like Hugh Hefner and Heidi Fleiss are mentioned as examples of successful mainstream business exploiters of women, American Pimp stakes out pimps, macks, and players as savvy entrepreneurs lording over prostitutes who would be prostituting themselves regardless of weather or not they were involved in a dysfunctional pimp/ho relationship. The practice of pimping is traced back to the days of slave owners and share crop masters who would obtain sex from slave girls. Capitalist thinking black men of the time advised the girls to ask the estate owner for a cash reward once the deed was done and hand over the pay. "When it became known that black men were making a lot of money and not paying taxes, that’s when pimping became a dreaded thing."

The definitions of "pimp" given by a cross-section of people at the beginning of the movie reflect terms that could easily be applied to corporate America and our government system. "Somebody who is abusive and manipulative, that exploits the vulnerabilities of people who don’t have any control over their life." There are certainly plenty of industries in this country that cook their books so that they de facto pay their employees less than zero, and do it without any of the panache that pimps like to exhibit. American Pimp stirred controversy when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival because it is such an audacious look at a criminal business that demands a clarity of acumen as staunch as anything Bill Gates can muster on his best day.

From origins of the pimp to "pimp style" to the practice of "knocking" (stealing another pimp’s prostitute away from him), American Pimp covers a broad scope of the lexicon of pimping. For the completely wrongheaded nature of its subject, the documentary succeeds brilliantly by giving enough voice to prostitutes, and to legal prostitution (Nevada’s "Bunnyranch") to create a natural arc in the revealed fates of some of its pimp subjects. With the aid of editor Doug Pray (HYPE), the Hughes brothers have successfully brought to light the reality behind the mystique of one of America’s strangest phenomenon with a deft soundtrack of music — including "Papa Was A Rolling Stone" — that historically informed pimp reasoning. The movie has a fiercely focused vision due to its skeletal three-man production team. As a study in American sociology, American Pimp is mandatory viewing.