JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH tells a heightened version of a story that everyone should know, and tells it with righteous anger. Unfortunately some elements of the film’s abundant style do admittedly get in the way, like the depiction of the real shoot-outs as flashily violent Scorsese-esque set-pieces, losing grounding in the process. Why they wanted Martin Sheen under distracting prosthetics as J Edgar Hoover instead of casting someone who actually looked like him is perplexing as well. Daniel Kaluuya is mesmeric as young Black Panther leader Fred Hampton but it is LaKeith Stanfield as reluctant FBI informer Bill O’Neal who has the tougher, more restrained role and is tasked with keeping the whole thing on the tracks. Reconstructions of O’Neal’s only TV interview are powerfully employed to reinforce the imagined but plausible scenes and so we end up with a slippery and difficult portrayal of complicated men. SSP
Review in Brief: Judas and the Black Messiah (2020)
Review in Brief: Minari (2020)
There’s no debate, MINARI is an American film – what could be more American than a tale of a family buying a farm and dreaming of living off the land? It’s astounding that the film features two of the first Korean (and the first lead of East Asian descent) acting nominations in the history of the Oscars with Steven Yeun and Youn Yuh-jung, and there’s no weak link in this effortlessly grounded ensemble. The way the beautiful arable imagery is captured reinforces the romance of the American Dream just as what this family has to go through almost completely shatters it. The observational family domestic scenes gently enthral, the themes are universal and the wider socio-political context packs a punch. About the only thing that doesn’t seem completely necessary is the added jeopardy of the finale, though director Lee Isaac Chung waiting to go out with a bang with his story is understandable. SSP
Godzilla vs Kong (2021) Review
Review in Brief: Ammonite (2020)
AMMONITE is a labour-intensive, impeccably detailed and tender film, the second from tactile master Francis Lee. This is a story of passions, of the agony of being starved of them, of being kept from them. Direct comparisons to PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE would be lazy, but both films do notably feature two women (here Kate Winslet and Saoirse Ronan) in a relationship liberated by the brief absence of smothering patriarchy. Everyone looks convincingly cold and uncomfortable for the time period, Winslet’s performance as palaeontologist Mary Anning is all-consuming, hunkered-down and punctuated by telling physical tics, usually in the way her hands, her invaluable tools, move. There’s no reason to presume historical figures with no documented relationships were heterosexual, and Mary and Charlotte’s passionate time together feels convincing and honest. Ammonite’s final ten minutes delivers an emotional gut-punch to rival Lee’s GODS OWN COUNTRY, even if the rest of the film isn’t quite as transcendent. SSP
Review in Brief: Life in a Day 2020 (2021)
Despite a worldwide pandemic, in 2020 life went on. Ten years on from crowd-sourced documentary LIFE IN A DAY Kevin Macdonald and his team did it again, this time picking 25 July 2020 as the date of record. This world-spanning journey proceeds chronologically from sunrise to sunset, stories grouped by subject, predominant emotion or theme, all held together with neat editing and a beautiful but unobtrusive score. We meet an opera-singing surgeon belting out an aria before pulling up his mask to resume his duties, and a couple undergoing IVF treatment hitting heartbreaking setback. We see the particular extra challenge Covid deaths impose on predominantly Muslim countries with the religious importance of cleansing every body before burial. We reconnect with one contributor to the original Life in a Day whose teenage son has passed away in the intervening years, and in the year of George Floyd’s murder an African American woman tells the story of how she has lost three brothers to the police. Even though it gives us some upsetting sights, LIAD 2020 is ultimately a hopeful and universal document of the resilience of humanity in the most trying of times. SSP
Fugitive Dreams (2020) Review – MANIFF
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Review in Brief: Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)
Exhausted as so many of us might be by all the needlessly aggressive online discourse attached to this, it’s finally here, what is apparently the closest we are ever going to get to seeing Zack Snyder’s original vision for JUSTICE LEAGUE. The weaknesses of Joss Whedon’s scattershot cut stand out all the starker in comparison, and while this is by any measure too long and portentous, there are some vast improvements on show in this superior version. The development and character arcs of the Flash (Ezra Miller) and especially Cyborg (Ray Fisher) become the films strongest and most connective passages and the final act especially is now more entertaining and impactful. We still have some jarring character popping against CG backgrounds, Batman (Ben Affleck) using more guns than ever before and an egregious dark epilogue, but this does end up standing on the better end of the DCEU quality scale (take that how you will). SSP
Review in Brief: Space Sweepers (2021)
SPACE SWEEPERS is an ambitious, vibrant, zongo Korean space opera that runs a bit long and perhaps suffers from being overstuffed with too many ideas, but you go with it because you grow to love this dysfunctional crew/family of misfits (lead by Kim Tae-ri). The influence of the sci-fi of Luc Besson, Joss Whedon and James Gunn in addition to countless anime touchstones on director Jo Sung-hee is obvious, but the archetypal characters win you over with warm relationship stuff and committed energy throughout. No, I’ve no idea why the big bad (Richard Armitage) occasionally goes red and veiny and gains a reverb on his voice – it’s probably one of half a dozen more ideas would need a TV series to explain. Unwieldy it may be, but Space Sweepers gets more than enough right and does action and humour with gusto to hope for more Korean filmmakers to head into the realms of big-budget sci-fi. SSP
SSP Thinks Film 