Today is a special day for Safia, a silent mother who lives in the shadow of her husband, Malek. For the first time in months, she is preparing to host the family of her eldest son for dinner. A moment she awaits as much as she dreads... When the doorbell finally rings, Safia puts a smile on her face, determined to confront her own family.
“To be universal, you have to get specific”: while the film does not attempt to provoke discussions about queerness or race, those watching closely may find something resonant in Sorrentino’s love letter to the Naples of his youth.
Eddington attempts to capture how media is intertwined with the uncomfortable present.
The Gates, John Burr’s new thriller film, is a disturbingly realistic portrayal of three Black twenty-somethings - Derek (Mason Gooding), Kevin (Algee Smith), and Tyon (Keith Powers), as they accidentally take a wrong turn into a gated community that’s more like a modern-day sundown town. The three friends witness a variety of crimes in their new surroundings, including an attempted homicide and an attempted rape. As they attempt to alert the authorities and do the right thing, they are thwarted at every turn by the worst horror stories of American conservatism - racist white suburbanites, reckless gun violence, corrupt police, religious mania, and a megalomaniacal pastor.
The justice system in the United States of America is supposed to operate as you are deemed innocent until proven guilty. But "When They See Us" shows what happens for Black people is they are deemed guilty until proven innocent.
Despite the film’s efforts to reframe its heroine with modern complexity, a certain emotional distance lingers.
In all actuality, “Just Mercy” should be labeled a “wall punching narrative.” Constantly, the flick throws high forms of adversity our way, amping up our most inner levels of discomfort. Filmmaker Destin Daniel Cretton wonderfully paces the film in such a way that replicates the slow-burn nature of justice.
