Precious and The Blind Side renew the debate: Where does an honest portrayal of black lives stop, and exploitation start?

People who look at movies strictly as entertainment brush off questions about their content and societal impact. But to minorities who've historically grappled with questions of self-esteem, image is a nuclear issue. It comes up whenever they see themselves on the big screen—especially given Hollywood's less than stellar history of depicting non-white life and history.

Lee Daniels' Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire and John Lee Hancock's The Blind Side, both opening Friday, are drastically different variations on the same theme. What that theme is, though, is attracting no small amount of argument. To the films' admirers, they're ultimately uplifting stories of black protagonists triumphing over adversity, succeeding against the odds induced by poverty and suffering.

That's not how detractors see it. The films' critics, black and white, see them as peddling black people as either helpless victims or heartless victimizers, unable to find the light without the intervention of noble light-skinned saviors. In some ways, this is the flipside of the criticism a few years back of "Magic Negro" movies such as The Green Mile and The Legend of Bagger Vance, in which white characters looked to black figures idealized beyond human recognition for salvation.

Stylistically, dramatically, the two new films could scarcely be less similar. The Blind Side is a striking true-life story polished to fit the Hollywood rags-to-riches template, albeit with a racial angle that's neither overlooked nor fully addressed. Precious is the smaller, riskier film, with forays into fantasy and even a nod to Italian neo-realism. But it's Precious that is generating enormous media exposure and a wave of critical praise—countered by a small but significant backlash. Its critics see even the movie's groundswell of Oscar buzz as proof of its bad faith.

As a media event, Precious has the added punch of being co-presented by Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey. Based on the 1996 novel Push by poet/performance artist and novelist Sapphire, it's a gritty and graphic tale of life in 1987 Harlem through the eyes of a young, overweight black female teen (the brilliant Gabourey Sidibe) whose suffering and pain are so visceral at times that there were few dry eyes among the small contingent at the preview screening.

Caught between a raging, verbally abusive mother (Mo' Nique in an amazing performance) and the seldom seen sexual-predator father who twice impregnates her, Precious struggles to discover a sense of affirmation and self-worth while living in abject poverty and striving to educate herself against overwhelming odds. Ironically, Daniels' decision to make this scenario brutally reflective of late '80s (or present day) inner-city reality has triggered the latest chapter in an ongoing debate within black communities over whether this type of film merits praise or disdain.

"It's a well directed, psychologically disturbing, overblown fairy tale," says jeff obafemi carr, writer/director/actor and artistic director of Amun Ra Theatre. "It's stocked with larger-than-life 'hood archetypes, with enough bitches, MF's and concerned sympathetic white figures and visual overstimulation to ensure multiple Oscar affirmation of black pathology."

Carr echoes the condemnation of New York Press critic Armond White, who had to go back almost a century to find an equally egregious example of cinematic racism. "Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious," White writes. "Full of brazenly racist clichés (Precious steals and eats an entire bucket of fried chicken), it is a sociological horror show....The spectacle warps how people perceive black American life—perhaps even replacing their instincts for compassion with fear and loathing."

But Nashville actress Chandra Walton calls Precious "one of the truest stories I've ever seen," adding "it's so real and so vivid." "I don't think it demeans black women," Walton says. "Yes, it does show stereotypes and it does show angry black women, but it also emphasizes education and how much Precious yearns for it, how she sees it as her ultimate goal. It's a heartbreaking, powerful film."

Both these views have some truth. Daniels showcases many characters and sequences that are discomforting, to put it mildly. Precious shoehorns so much trauma into its punishing narrative—incest, rape, child abuse, teen pregnancy, poverty—that it approaches misery overload. Yet the compensating element is Precious' refusal to be defeated by circumstances, ridicule or mistreatment. It is an astonishing, stirring and troubling film, one designed to irritate and anger as much as inspire.

There's no question about The Blind Side's intent: Despite some momentarily upsetting sequences, its mission to inspire is as single-minded as a linebacker bearing down on a fumble. It uses material from Michael Lewis' 2006 book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game to relay the fact-based story of Michael Oher, the uneducated teenage son of a black drug-addict mother, who was adopted from poverty by the white, well-off Memphis couple Sean and Leigh Ann Tuohy. He studied, made decent grades and eventually became an All-American lineman at Ole Miss and first-round draft choice of the Baltimore Ravens.

Quinton Aaron is quite good as Oher, but The Blind Side is more a showcase for Sandra Bullock, who plays his adoptive mother (opposite Tim McGraw as her husband). Bullock's star power takes over the movie, and it's a confident, crowd-pleasing turn, right down to a credible Southern accent. The end result, however, intended or not, is that it tips the movie's scales away from Oher. Thus the story of a lower-class black teen who finds his way to a new life with a white family's help becomes the story of an upper-class white family ennobled by their interaction with him. Maybe cross-racial adoption, in this case, went as smoothly in real life as the movie portrays. But if Precious' flaw is too much traumatic incident, The Blind Side's is being merely bland and inoffensive.