Detroit (15)

Set during the race riots that erupted on the streets of Detroit in July 1967, Kathryn Bigelow’s new film is an incendiary, complex, unflinching dissection of police brutality, systemic racism and appalling injustice that’s as depressingly relevant as its in-the-moment docudrama aesthetic suggests. Kicking off with a context-setting history lesson, it wastes no time dropping us into the midst of a city ready to explode – a place where soldiers patrol the streets, armoured vehicles block the roads and twitching curtains are readily mistaken for non-existent snipers hiding out in tenement blocks. In the style of The Hurt Locker and Zero

Dark Thirty, Bigelow films it all with a documentarian’s eye for detail while zeroing in on a few key figures as they converge upon the Algiers Motel, a party spot in the west of the city that became the setting for one of the most notorious incidents of the riots after a trio of racist cops descended upon the hotel and proceed to brutalise its mostly black patrons. Bigelow’s dramatisation of this is unbearably intense and tough to take, but it’s precisely the dogged nature of the portrayal that makes the film such a powerful indictment of institutionalised racism, both then and now.