American Pimp

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Supple and engrossing, a liquid-smooth street-rap testimonial.

Mr. Showbiz Kevin Maynard

Never less than riveting.

Portland Oregonian Kim Morgan

Entertaining, disturbing, sad, outrageous and often hilarious.

Chicago Tribune Mark Caro

Eighty-six minutes proves to be more than enough time to spend with these characters, but the Hughes Brothers make the case that this is a subculture as compelling as it is repellent.

New York Daily News Elizabeth Weitzman

Genuinely entertaining and, thanks to a well of self-deluded quotes from the men, shockingly funny.

Baltimore Sun Ann Hornaday

A lively, compulsively watchable but ultimately sobering film about the men who make their living off prostitution.

The New York Times Stephen Holden

What we are left with is a mildly entertaining "man on the street" gloss, seasoned with fragments from blaxploitation movies and music by Isaac Hayes, Marvin Gaye and others.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Alternately mind-expanding and brain-numbing.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Unfortunately, you really only hear about prostitution from the side of the pimp.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

Most of American Pimp feels like you've been slipped a Mickey.

Boston Globe Jay Carr

American Pimp, if not quite a self-serving orgy of self-justification, can hardly be thought of as a searching look at the skin trade.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

One gets a pungent look at what makes being a pimp look attractive to some people in certain circumstances.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

It's funny stuff, though most of the pimps seem like such buffoons it's hard to imagine how they actually make a living.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Fascinating, partly because of its originality.

San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann

Lushly entertaining, and its subjects are terrific storytellers with style to burn.

Los Angeles Times Kevin Thomas

The dehumanizing aspect of pimping is what's scariest about the Hughes brothers' investigation--so powerful the filmmakers realize they need only to record it.

Time Richard Schickel

Loutishness without self-awareness remains loutishness--and it is finally depressing.

LA Weekly Erin Aubry

Credit the Hugheses for plunging headfirst into a deeply taboo topic, but they're doing it for the wrong reasons and thus playing into the worst of public stereotypes, namely that all black men are hustlers.

Film.com Ernest Hardy

Appalling because it never transcends its adolescent-boy glee at being allowed entry to the highly sexualized arena of prostitution.