Talkin' Bout Revolution: JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH

A key sequence in Judas and the Black Messiah is a rally in which a charismatic leader of the Black Panther party, Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), has the audience totally in his control. It’s the moment to which all emotional and dramatic through-lines in the tough, serious, and sensitive historical picture have built, and it’s the moment from which all of the major players are soon in position for the inevitable tragic end. His speech is a work of impassioned rhetoric, powerfully incantatory, delivered in commanding staccato and deep rumbling righteousness, sweat beading on his brow, building to climactic call-and-response. “I am! A revolutionary! I am! A revolutionary!” The crowd erupts, awoken with fiery political fervor renewed and refreshed. Among their number: Hampton’s pregnant fiancee (Dominique Fishback), his head of security (Lakeith Stanfield), and the FBI agent (Jesse Plemons) who has already put in motion the events that will, with information from a mole in the Panthers, bring this whole chapter to a bloody end. Told with the high-gloss appeal of any Hollywood true-story epic animated by politics, social upheaval, and startling tragedy — swooping camera, copious period detail, polished historicity, patient accumulation of cause and effect — director and co-writer Shaka King illuminates this pivotal moment in gripping characterization and mournful engagement.

It’s a Civil Rights story shorn of the usual white lenses that come with telling these stories at a level of studio prestige. (Not since Spike Lee's Malcolm X, really.) This film is alive with the particulars of injustice from the clear and angry perspective of the oppressed. Drawing the story in vivid recreation, King builds a portrait of a time through small spaces — intimate meetings, quiet dialogues, tense strategizing — as the Chicago headquarters of the Illinois Panthers slowly builds power. We see persuasive speeches, attempts to grow their base by teaming up with other mistreated groups in the city, time spent building programs for free breakfast for kids and free healthcare for seniors. We also see the growing suspicion of law enforcement, who somehow see the group as a challenge to their power — a reflection of violent racial and political prejudice. The film then positions itself at a point of view in the crucible between these poles. Caught impersonating an FBI agent in order to steal a car, a troubled young man (Stanfield) is hauled into the bureau’s local office and given an ultimatum: become a paid informant or go to prison for years. He takes the job. Thus he’s the bomb under the table, in the Hitchcockian sense, as he’s at first reluctantly, but then quite legitimately becoming a member of the Panthers. He was told they’re dangerous, but he sees the good they do and grows increasingly conflicted, torn between his growing political convictions and his sense of self-preservation.

As the film builds to its wrenching finale, King keeps the performances central to the powerful effect. We see the yearning for justice in the young men and women who are drawn into Hampton’s project. We see the older-than-his-years confidence of Hampton’s powerful presence; it’s easy to see why so many would place their confidence, their hope in him. We see, too, how he was made a scapegoat, how dogged the feds were in making him another figure to be brought down. Even if you don’t know your history, you know this story is moving nowhere good. With great clarity, the film consistently brushes past a legacy of easy historical assumptions and cliched Black Panther portrayals. King lingers generously in soft moments—a romantic interlude, an impromptu community restoration project, a poem gently read—before smashing into cruelty—a shootout with vindictive cops, or a vise-tightening moment of casual prejudice between high-ranking agents. The film is convincing in every moment, the ensemble so uniformly tuned into the tone of the endeavor. Its prestige pleasures of crackling design and grainy cinematography — Sean Bobbit catching beauty and grit with equally dexterous use of shadow and light — extend to a parade of great character turns in even small parts, like Lil Rel Howery in a fur coat like out of a blaxploitation classic as a shady dealer, or Alysia Joy Powell as a grieving mother. By centering the humanity of all the major players, and extending that grace to even one-scene figures, this becomes a film of impeccable craft that’s more than a reenactment; it’s an embodiment of these interpersonal stakes that exploded into something momentous for a movement.

Frame Story: THE PHOTOGRAPH

The first pleasant surprise of The Photograph is to find it a major Hollywood studio’s attempt to give us a romantic drama about believable people in real situations. How infrequently these days are we confronted with movies at this level of gloss and polish that purport to be about recognizable human emotion. The second pleasant surprise is that it works all the old genre tropes and trappings while allowing its characters space to breathe. Here’s a movie about grownups falling in love, a process that’s halting and takes its own shape, allowing the contours of their interests and careers to take them on a circuitous path back to each other. Is there a happy ending? Surprisingly, whether it’s destined for weepy, triumphant, or somewhere bittersweet between remains uncertain right up until the final moments before the credits roll. What a likable spot to find yourself, in a wide release movie where the lives of the characters dictate the development of the plot instead of the other way around. In the leads are two fine young talents who brew up good chemistry together. Issa Rae plays a precise professional in mourning; her photographer mother has recently passed away, leaving the young woman to curate a retrospective. Lakeith Stanfield is the aspiring journalist who finds his way to the story and hopes to woo her into an interview. One electric look between the two of them, and it’s clear there more wooing to do. And yet because they each have their professional concerns, the attraction and the dating has to find its way shyly into tender spaces and stolen moments. They’re full lives looking to make room for one more.

Writer-director Stella Meghie gives the movie a gentle sensuousness. It is tactile — a box of negatives, a dusty record, a simple radiant yellow dress, a dappling of raindrops, a wineglass coyly sipped — and smooth, layering in a languorous jazzy score as the frames are drinking in a soft smile, a lingering glance, a gentle brush. Is this coupling meant to be, or meant to be fleeting? Their story is set against flashbacks of the photographer mother’s own early struggles with love. As a young woman (Chanté Adams) she too tried balancing the needs of the flesh and the needs of the artist, the desire to be with by her small town lover (Y’lan Noel) and the impulse to move to a big city and create. Placing the generations side by side, Meghie’s screenplay, recalling the best of Gina Prince-Bythewood’s heartfelt relationship dramas,  develops its themes patiently, in well-drawn comparisons and contrasts. The movie is warm and melancholic, allowing its characters to be people — warmly funny, guarded and cautious, flirtatious and alive — with thoughts and ambitions that may not fit the cliched movie romance moments. But isn’t it pretty they might think so?

Cutting Class: KNIVES OUT

One of writer-director Rian Johnson’s greatest qualities is his ability to surprise without sacrificing his trustworthiness as a storyteller. His films are idiosyncratic without being unduly erratic, thoughtfully engaged with their chosen genres without stepping outside of their tropes, capable of grand loop-de-loops surprising audience expectations while making the outcome beautifully air-tight inevitable. He’s a mainstream filmmaker — recently with appealing sci-fi spectacles like moody time-travel assassin thriller Looper and the soulful, satisfying Last Jedi — aware of both the necessary elephantine expressions of recognizable story mechanics and burrowing termite interest of carefully selected specific details. He can take us effortlessly into places we’d never expect, because at every step of the way, we know we’re in good hands. He’s as clever as he is knowledgeable. His new film, Knives Out, is a wickedly well-done murder mystery, indebted indisputably to hundreds of detectives stories of yore, and yet plays out its story so fluidly and delightfully that it feels fresh nonetheless. As the movie begins, an elderly millionaire mystery author (Christopher Plummer) has been found in his study with his throat slit and a knife in his hand. The local cops (Lakeith Stanfield and Noah Segan) are prepared to call it a suicide when a well-known detective (Daniel Craig, with a melodious Southern accent) steps in to consult on the case. He’s prepared to look at every detail again, and scrutinize every member of the dead writer’s squabbling, privileged family. Sure, the case appears open-and-shut, but he just wants to see it with his fresh eyes, eliminating no possibilities and no suspects. Holmes and Poirot and Dupin would be proud. In Johnson’s hugely entertaining screenplay, bristling with witty asides, barbed feints, and prickly offhand political resonance, the family members are interviewed, with plenty of brisk, bantering back-and-forth editing into and out of interlocking flashbacks sketching in the moments leading up to the mysterious death. So many have motives, and so many witnesses weave in and out of other’s stories, that it’ll take a while to untangle the knotty web, to winnow the suspects' bratty rich-kid motives from those capable of murderous intent.

It’s a terrific ensemble, perfectly cast, every person on screen, down to the smallest one-scene roles, quickly, expertly characterized with energetic shorthand and snappy individualism. There’s the regal real estate mogul daughter (Jamie Lee Curtis), her duplicitous husband (Don Johnson), and their entitled grown boy (Chris Evans); a business-manger son (Michael Shannon) and his glowering alt-right offspring (Jaden Martel); a shallow daughter-in-law (Toni Collette) and her differently-shallow daughter (Kathryn Langford); and, in the center of the madness, a home health aide (Ana de Armas) whose sweetness and good heart made her a kind companion to the late old man, but leaves her on the outside looking in as the vultures circle. Whodunnit is of course the primary question, but as Johnson unravels his tale, the why’d-they-dunnit becomes as interesting. As in all good detective stories, the personalities and the accumulation of clues are as deeply pleasurable as the eventual reveals where the puzzle snaps into place, and Johnson places each new piece on the table with stylish verve. The whip-smart cutting and pace stays just ahead of the characters and just behind the mystery’s solution, while never going out of its way to hide its cards or throw up false tangents to shake off the scent. It all falls into place with a logical snap, each payoff set up, even when you didn’t realize it at the time. The production design — a big house full of creaky staircases and teetering bookshelves and morbid knickknacks — is a handsomely cozy setting, fitting such a tale. As one investigator quips, the old man lived in a Clue board. The camera work is energetic and inspired — and, oh, so beautifully textured — without distracting from the cool logic of the proceedings, while the characters are broad yet warm, at once caricatures yet imbued with all-too-understandable humanity. It’s richly developed, never just a film of pawns in a master-mystery-mind’s game. That’s how well this game is played. This is the best film of its kind in quite some time.