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New Streamers: Judas and the Black Messiah, Saint Maud, and The Little Things

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jared Leto in The Little Things; Morfydd Clark in Saint Maud; Daniel Kaluuya in Judas and the Black Messiah

Ordinarily, early February is a cinematic dumping ground. But among the million other things that the COVID-19 pandemic affected, it caused the Oscars to expand their eligibility window by two months, meaning that some high-profile titles just landed on your favorite streaming services. Let’s take a quick run through this past weekend’s newest releases.

Judas and the Black Messiah (HBO Max). The second feature from Shaka King, Judas and the Black Messiah is a contemporary political text that’s also a classical spy thriller. It tells the story of Bill O’Neal (a very fine Lakeith Stanfield), the small-time car thief who became a big-league FBI informant in the late ’60s and infiltrated the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, led by Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya). It isn’t subtle about its allegiance; you don’t need a degree in Christian theology to discern which character corresponds to which half of the title. Read More

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Da 5 Bloods: No Jungle Fever, But the Country’s Still Sick

Jeremy BeckReviews
Clarke Peters and Delroy Lindo in Spike Lee's "Da 5 Bloods"

Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is frequently breathtaking and just as frequently stultifying. It conjures images and sequences of enormous power; it also dilutes that power, thanks to the sloppiness of its storytelling and the willful indiscipline of its creator. This can be frustrating, but it isn’t especially surprising. Lee is a rare director not just for his filmmaking gifts, but for the breadth of his ambition; he’s a crowd-pleaser who wants to make you angry, a fire-breathing preacher who wants to show you a good time. His best movies (Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X, 25th Hour) harmonize these seemingly contradictory impulses, functioning as robust works of eye-catching pulp without sacrificing their thematic relevance or political charge.

Da 5 Bloods is not on their level. Its mixture of entertainment and agitprop is ungainly; the competing ingredients clash rather than complement. Yet it remains a furiously watchable film—heavily flawed, yes, but coursing with energy and personality. You may chafe against its awkward blend of tones, but you are unlikely to forget its vigor or its fury. Read More

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Luce: He’s Black and They’re Proud

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kelvin Harrison Jr. in "Luce"

He’s the valedictorian. His teachers often ask him to give inspirational speeches, which he delivers with disarming sincerity. He’s also a star athlete, a sprinter who runs in the upright style of Michael Johnson. And he excels on the debate team, where he presents his lucid arguments with a confidence that never slips into arrogance. His name is Luce, and as the school principal puts it, he is the very definition of a model student.

And Luce, while an imperfect film, feels similarly paradigmatic. Coursing with energy, insight, and relevance, it is exactly the kind of movie that American audiences should be watching right now, as the world burns and cultures clash. Unashamedly provocative, it is designed not to shame but to stimulate, to inspire discussion and reflection. It asks complex questions—about race, sex, drugs, criminal justice, even the platonic conception of the American dream—and then demands that you hunt for the answers. It holds up a mirror to the country and forces you to confront what you see. Read More

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Us: Meeting the Enemy, and Looking in the Mirror

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lupita Nyong'o in "Us"

Jordan Peele’s Get Out was such a unique and exhilarating blend of images and ideas—a suspenseful horror movie with a pointed political message—that it was easy to tolerate its third-act slide into ordinariness. His follow-up, Us, is not quite as thematically bracing; it feels more like a superlative exemplar of nightmare cinema than a full-on reinvention of the form. But even if Us is more entertaining than extraordinary—and to be clear, it would be deeply unfair to demand that Peele’s encore be equally groundbreaking—it is in some ways a more impressive picture than Get Out, with superior visuals and more consistent follow-through. Minimizing sociopolitical allegory in favor of visceral dread, it finds Peele sharpening his focus and refining his technique. He’s less interested in making you look inward in self-reflection than in forcing you to shut your eyes in fear.

This isn’t to say that Us is altogether silent with respect to race and politics. Its vision of an unseen underclass—a toiling horde of perpetually neglected laborers, à la The Time Machine—isn’t all that far removed from Get Out’s conceit of white aristocrats bidding on black bodies. But the most striking overlap between the two films is their use of the same indelible image: a close-up of a central character’s face, eyes widening in dismay and filling with tears as they perceive the terror of what surrounds them. Read More

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If Beale Street Could Talk: Surges of Passion, Even from Behind Bars

Jeremy BeckReviews
Stephan James and KiKi Layne in "If Beale Street Could Talk"

A movie awash in potent contradictions—intimate vs. operatic, reserved vs. vivacious, hopeful vs. disillusioned, wrongfully accused vs. savagely victimized—If Beale Street Could Talk opens with a quotation from James Baldwin, who wrote the novel upon which the film is based. The selected passage, which discusses “the impossibility and the possibility” (more contradictions!), directs “the reader” to draw certain inferences from what follows. This is a curious instruction, given that what follows is not a book but a movie; we aren’t readers, we’re viewers. It also illuminates the challenge that Barry Jenkins has accepted in choosing to adapt Baldwin’s novel, the tricky task of translating spiky words on a page to the visual language of the screen. In making If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins is attempting both to pay homage to one of the 20th century’s most important authors and to imbue that author’s prose with his own distinctly cinematic voice.

Not having read the novel, I can’t speak to the veracity of the on-screen result. What I can say is that, for the most part, this moving-picture version of If Beale Street Could Talk walks the line nicely, capturing Baldwin’s frustration and rage while also functioning as an honest-to-God movie. There are times when Jenkins’ ambitions get the better of him, and when the sheer scope of his undertaking threatens to overwhelm the particular plight of his characters. Yet even when he struggles to corral his myriad ideas into a tidy package (and to be sure, the film’s lack of tidiness is part of its point), Jenkins flaunts a vigorous command of his medium, breathing bold and colorful life into a story that is, in some ways, fairly black-and-white. Read More

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