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He hath shown thee, O man, what is good: and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God? -Micah 6:8 Just Mercy is based on the lives of two black men: Harvard-educated lawyer Bryan Stevenson (played by Michael B. Jordan), who started the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative. The organization was designed to provide free legal assistance to death row inmates, far too many of whom could not afford a lawyer to...
When Indian Horse opens on a Native family fleeing with white settlers in a canoe, you'd be excused for thinking this takes place several hundred years ago. After his brother dies and his parents leave to seek a Christian burial for their child, Saul Indian Horse and his grandmother struggle to survive the harsh Canadian winter. It's not until a '50s era Ford rolls into the frame that the actual time period becomes clear; this is taking place decades, not centuries, ago. The...
Alfonso Cuarón is one of my favorite directors. He made the best Harry Potter films, The Prisoner of Azkaban; the fantastic and memorable Children of Men, which is, at least on one level, a retelling of the Christmas story, and the thrilling, head-spinning Gravity. These movies are so different from each other, it's basically impossible to pin down a signature style or trademark. Cuarón just makes great films, plain and simple. Roma, a domestic drama about a middle-class M...
Sweet Country is a ponderous, brutal, and powerful movie about life in the Australian Outback in the 1920s. It is a very fine piece of filmmaking that I recommend with caution: those who have experienced trauma will find plenty of triggers here. This is a tragedy. From the very beginning, there's a sense of dread hanging over every scene, a feeling that something bad will happen-it's inevitable, and no one can do anything about it. You almost don't want anything good to...
There's a decent movie buried under the mess that is Paul, Apostle of Christ. There might even be two decent movies here. The trouble is, first-time director Andrew Hyatt and the filmmakers at Affirm Films can't decide which of these movies to make, and trying to cram all of them and then some extra stuff into less than two hours just doesn't work. There are hints of an interesting character study of the author of more than half of the New Testament. Luke (Jim Caviezel, who...
First Reformed is a puzzling, provocative, powerful movie. Ethan Hawke stars as Ernst Toller, the rector of a very small, very old Dutch Reformed church somewhere in upstate New York. About ten people attend his Sunday services, and Hawke's time is mostly occupied with giving tours of the historical church grounds-including its expansive graveyard and secret compartment where escaped slaves along the Underground Railroad sought refuge-and selling souvenirs (the pastor across...
It took me a while to get ahold of the narrative tone of The Hostiles, because, when it opens on a white family living alone on the frontier in 1892, I saw trespassers-not good honest people. And when the landowners ride up to ask you what you're doing on their land, and you answer the door with a gun in your hand, well, you can't really expect them to be very neighborly. But then it's made clear that these aren't the "good" Indians, these are the kind who kill children....
Te Ata feels like a Hallmark production, if Hallmark were ever even slightly willing to be critical of the United States government and its Indian policies. It is a well-meaning tribute to Chickasaw storyteller Mary Francis Thompson, whose stage name was Te Ata. According to the film, that name means "Bearer of the Morning," and her grandmother gave it to her when she was a baby because she wailed so loudly at dawn. Thompson (Q'orianka Kilcher) grew up in Oklahoma in the early...
While Fences was released on Christmas Day in 2016, our reviewer, Will Krischke, feels if you haven't seen it yet-or even if you have-it's a perfect movie to pop into your DVD player or stream at any time. As it opens, Fences feels like it's going to be a film about overt systemic racism in the '50s. Troy (Denzel Washington) plays a garbage man who has complained, perhaps a little too loudly, about how black folks are always on the back of the truck while white folks are...
