Armond White on Isaac Julien's "Baltimore" :
"Julien comments on the Matrix phenomenon in Baltimore when Van Peebles’ perambulations cross paths with the stylish Sister’s. In a bit of sci-fi whimsy, the Sister is able to make Van Peebles materialize out of the ether; later, she levitates in one of the museums that feature paintings by Piero della Francesca. Julien’s caprice asserts the power of black imagination within the European institution. He doesn’t merely use black figures to market an old genre the way black performers, including professor Cornel West, are used in the Matrix movies. Julien’s sense of pop history and political necessity emboldens him to assert their presence, their art, as legitimate. (Perhaps the most splendid f/x in any movie this year is a blue plume that mysteriously streaks across all three screens; it’s like an acrylic aerosol spray of graffiti–rude and beautiful ingenuity–made against Baltimore’s concrete-and-clay cityscape.) "