Now streaming: Three takes on true crimes

And yet, Lindholm’s work is not without merit. “The Good Nurse” is, at least, cleareyed on the performance elements. After her ingratiating and inexplicably Oscar winning turn in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” it is so wonderful to be reminded what Jessica Chastain can do when working in a performance that is free of tics and preciousness. Her work here is lacking in affectation and is instead genuine and earnest. In her hands, Amy is not an angelic figure but a woman who feels real and contemplative amidst the reality of the horror she stumbles upon. Eddie Redmayne, playing a figure written too vaguely for his monstrousness to feel visceral, manages to find clarity in a role that could be so indistinct. The cast beyond them is equally compelling – from Kim Dickens as that of bureaucratic monstrosity, to Nnamdi Asomugha and Noah Emmerich’s excellently trenchant policemen and Maria Dizzia, in a single scene as Amy’s former co-worker. These performances feel vivid and lived in so much that some of the credit surely must go to Lindholm. Why then does “The Good Nurse” still feel like a footnote in film form? Like a facsimile of a prestige drama but with no point of view? How strange that the film most temporally close to us of the trio, “The Good Nurse,” also feels like the haziest?

The question of haziness does not apply to writer-director Chinonye Chukwu’s “Till”, a film that sits a bit unnaturally against “Amsterdam” and “The Good Nurse”. The open wound of Emmett Till’s murder, immediately feels harder to parse than the other historical interrogations. That wound is excavated by a story that traces how his mother, Mamie Till (Danielle Deadwyler), confronts the murder of her son and becomes a beacon of the civil rights movement.

In 2019, Chukwu directed the wonderful “Clemency”, about a prison warden whose fate is tested when an inmate tries for a last-minute clemency plea ahead of a potential execution. In “Clemency”, Chukwu directed Alfre Woodard, one of the best actresses alive, to one of the finest performances of her career. The sharp precision of the film was overlooked due to bad promotion from the studio, even as “Clemency” reckoned with issues of race and politics in startling intelligent fashion. “Till”, Chukwu’s third feature film, seems to have gained traction where “Clemency” did not and it’s that recognition that I wrestle with. The fact that the story of Emmett, or Mamie Till has not been brought to the screen in a proper way before is not just a sign of Hollywood’s poor history on race but also speaks to the difficulty of this story – how to avoid the lurid and what to do to make a film that has an artistic thrust rather than a documentary of pain. Like “Amsterdam”, “Till” played for a week in cinemas here to an audience of a handful. Were audiences, too consumed with real world tragedies, unwilling to sit through the trauma??

Perhaps. And even as “Till” feels more muted, and less ambitious than the stellar work of “Clemency” it still offers an important next step in Chukwu’s career. She remains ever perceptive about the dynamics of performance and offers Danielle Deadwyler a role that allows her room for a dynamism that ties the film together. The story of Emmett Till, a young boy murdered by white supremacists in Mississippi in 1955, is one those familiar with the American Civil Rights Movement know. “Till” is obviously weighed by its responsibility, and it lends a tidiness to things that sometimes becomes obtrusive. It is at its best when it lets the anger of its story stir in imagistic moments of silence rather than in speechifying. So, it is the images that feel most cogent, like the camera drawing back to reveal Emmett’s body, or a shot of Mamie and her fiancé Gene that turns into a newspaper clipping, or a shot of a farmhouse from a distance as we hear, but not see, the atrocities that set the film off. There is enough here in craft to emphasise Chukwu’s gifts. Even when the language of the film (co-written with Michael Reilly and Keith Beauchamp) feels too knowing or on the nose (like a final speech from Mamie), “Till” also feels actively engaged in thinking through dynamics of how history plays out on film – how it mutates what we know, and think we know. It is a film made with thought and care.

Yet, I find musing on the way the “importance” of this story is what finally gets Chinonye Chukwu considered by the mainstream when she’s shown so much talent earlier. I cannot help but feel it sends the message that a specific kind of Black story is what gives a Black filmmaker the limelight and it’s that awareness that seems to filter through this specific story of trauma, leaving “Till” bound to a historical event that feels almost too big for a single film.

“The Good Nurse” is streaming on Netflix; “Till” and “Amsterdam” are available to rent on Prime Video and other platforms.