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Poster for Cellmates

Cellmates

2012 · 1h 25m · N/A Comedy, Drama
Directed by Jesse Baget

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Overview

Leroy Lowe, grand dragon of the Texas Ku Klux Klan confronts everything he's been taught to hate when he's sentenced to three years of hard labor on a prison work farm, where Warden Merville, dead set on rehabilitating Leroy, chooses Emilio, a Hispanic field worker imprisoned for fighting for labor rights, to be his cell-mate. Leroy, confined in a small cell with the enemy, far from the KKK comrades who deserted him, finds the chatty Emilio slowly chipping away at his anger and prejudice. His weekly rehabilitation meetings with the warden, barely tolerable as the man drones on about farm labor and field crops, take on a different meaning when Madalena, a beautiful Mexican maid is hired to clean the warden's office. An unconventional love story develops that opens Leroy's eyes to the possibility of a different life. And a man who was a born and bred racist finds himself heading down a completely different path to salvation.

Director and cast

Critics on Rotten Tomatoes

Top critics, in their words

All reviews
47%
Tomatometer
Rotten

If you find the moral conversion of a militant lifelong bigot difficult to imagine, try the casting of the burly, fraying Mr. Sizemore as a romantic leading man.

Andy Webster, New York Times
Rotten

A near complete exercise in mirthlessness and atonal satire, "Cellmates" is a sentence, all right.

Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times
Rotten

It's all grimly, predictably plotted without ever once being interesting.

Ernest Hardy, Village Voice

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