Judas and the Black Messiah
Daniel Kaluuya’s portrayal of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton “will be talked about for some time,” said Odie Henderson in Roger Ebert.com. The actor’s performance as the charismatic 21-year-old is so magnetic that it “raises the hairs on the back of your neck.” But Shaka King’s movie about Hampton’s 1969 assassination in Chicago insists on making the young infiltrator who betrayed Hampton the story’s central figure, and though LaKeith Stanfield “gives his all,” his role is simply underwritten. But putting the focus on FBI informant William O’Neal complicates the story in useful ways, said Justin Chang in the Los Angeles Times, and Stanfield’s performance is “a thing of insidious beauty.” O’Neal was a teenage car thief facing prison time when the FBI, tasked with preventing the rise of a black “messiah,” persuaded him to become a mole in the Panthers’ Chicago chapter. As Hampton unites activists in the original Rainbow Coalition and government violence is answered by activist violence, “conscience and cowardice duke it out” in the conflicted mind of our protagonist—until his tips facilitate a police raid and Hampton meets his “cruel, bloody end.” Though Judas and the Black Messiah arrives in February, “it doesn’t feel like a stretch to name it one of 2021’s best films,” said Karen Han in Slate.com. Because it’s a studio film created by black artists and focused on a seminal police killing, “it may be one of the year’s most important movies, too.” (In select theaters and streaming on HBO Max) R
Other new movies French Exit
It’s hard to complain about a film that brings Michelle Pfeiffer back to the screen in “a swirl of Auntie Mame glamour,” said Leah Greenblatt in Entertainment Weekly. The screen icon plays a suddenly cash-poor socialite who escapes to a borrowed home in Paris, taking along her maddeningly meek adult son (Lucas Hedges) and a special cat. Alas, despite its worthy stars, French Exit never gels. It “feels like a sort of droll curiosity, lost in its own je ne sais quoi.” (In select theaters) R
The World to Come
Try to look past the overbearing voice-over, said Jon Frosch in The Hollywood Reporter. This drama about a furtive romance between two 1850s American farmwives otherwise “has much to recommend it.” The winter scenery is majestic, Mona Fastvold’s direction sure-handed, and Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby “deliver mouthfuls of unwieldy period dialogue with dexterity and conviction.” (In select theaters now; on demand March 2) R
Land
Robin Wright’s first film as a director “mostly showcases a good eye for landscape,” said Jacob Oller in PasteMagazine.com. Wright also stars, playing a woman who goes off the grid in the Rockies after a devastating loss. Even when Demián Bichir enters as a handsome and helpful frontiersman, unfortunately “the biggest survival struggle becomes that of your own attention span.” (In theaters now; on demand March 2) PG-13
Two of Us
France’s 2021 Oscar entry is a love story, “but it’s not a cozy one,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Martine Chevallier and Barbara Sukowa co-star as women who have been a couple for years but, because Chevallier’s Madeleine hasn’t come out to her children, are cruelly separated when Madeleine suffers a stroke. Both stars prove “marvelous to watch,” and the suspenseful drama “shakes up everything we think we know, or expect, from stories about women who are well past childbearing age.” ($7 via virtual cinemas) Not rated