SUNDANCE Film Festival 2018 Jan 18, 2018 – Jan 28

[Chris Knipp]

Monsters and Men

More Sundance: two urban films focused on race.

Switching to the LA Times, which now has Justin Chang, former head critic for Variety, at the center of its movie reviewing, we find Blindspotting, first feature of Carlos López Estrada, a movie delivering a lovingly spot-on picture of the San Francisco Bay Area, especially Oakland, "envisioned here as both a locus of fast-encroaching gentrification and a seething cauldron of racial anxiety." The focus is on two men, played by the joint authors of the screenplay, Daveed Diggs and Rafael Casal, as best friends and moving-van driver co-workers, united by a love of hip-hop, who're trying to avoid contact with the police. Diggs is a star of Hamilton, and the movie is almost a "a full-on slamming, rhyming musical." It's a little too over-explanatory and exaggerated, Chang thinks, but is "conceptually audacious" and "bristling with energy and ambition."

Monsters and Men "covers some of the same ground to less attention-grabbing but quietly superior effect" and is "tough-minded and boldly unresolved." By another first-time filmmaker, Reinaldo Marcus Green, this is "a triptych of stories unfolding in present-day Brooklyn, each set in motion by another fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man." A video of one killing is posted online. Peaceful protests follow but also anti-police violence. The focus settles on Dennis (John David Washington), a black cop caught between two worlds, profiled by white cops when off duty, criticized by family for being part of the problem. Three men of color are "posed at a moral crossroads."