In his 1982 stand-up special “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip,” the comedian addressed stories of an accident he had with a pithy joke. In 1980, it had been reported that Pryor accidentally set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine. On stage, he referenced the many people who made light of the incident by lighting a match and dramatically waving it around. “What’s that? Richard Pryor running down the street!” He himself followed suit, turning the entire affair into an elaborate, comedic explanation for how he came to be ablaze. But in 1986, he would confess during an interview with Barbara Walters that it was, in fact, a suicide attempt. 

Between that special and that interview, Pryor co-wrote, directed, and starred in “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling,” a semi-autobiographical dramatization of the fire and a raw rumination of the life that led to it. The film opens with Jo Jo Dancer (Pryor in all but name) crawling around on the floor looking for any straggler rock remnants he has yet to smoke. He calls his old dealer to score, but when the dealer reminds him that he’s supposed to be clean, he pretends the call was to invite him to a party that does not in fact exist. After, there’s a powerful shot where he catches his reflection in the mirror. He sees himself, a grown man of noticeable wealth scrounging on the carpet on all floors like an animal for a taste of what he’s just pretended he no longer needs. The realization seems to spark something profound until he does, in fact, find an unsmoked rock. 

From there, we immediately cut to an intense sequence of Dancer in a hospital being treated for third-degree burns all over his body. It presents all the detailed realism of an “ER” episode, with all the hospital jargon and hurried line deliveries necessary to make it clear Dancer might not make it. At this point, his inner soul, also played by Pryor, separates itself from his charred corporeal form and begins a walk through Dancer’s past. The journey stretches from his childhood spent growing up in a brothel to his escape from his abusive father to his sojourn to a nearby city to pursue comedy, all the way through to the suffocating aftereffects of his success. 

The approach is a fascinating one. We’ve experienced tons of media wherein a protagonist is faced with his past, guided by some spiritual figure, usually watching from afar, unable to interact. But Pryor stages this journey with more elasticity. As the physical embodiment of his own soul, he plainly interacts with people and situations from his past, often giving insight or sincerity from them he never could have gotten or processed at the time. It’s an ongoing conversation between this wounded, free-moving Dancer, who doesn’t understand how it all went wrong, questioning and cajoling the bedridden Dancer. 

There’s one particular sequence where Dancer’s mother begs him for forgiveness while she’s initiating sex with one of her clients, and Dancer turns away to look through the doorway at himself still in the hospital bed. Through the entire interaction leading up to this moment, the ambient noises of the hospital, the beeps and hums of the machines keeping Dancer alive, permeate into this living flashback. It’s stirring stuff.

But it’s clear to see why the movie received such mixed reviews at the time. Placing it within the context of Pryor’s comedic filmography, it is a much tougher watch in tone. It’s still hilarious, but every single bit of humor is still tethered to the pain that inspired it. When Dancer makes it to a new city but is too broke to survive, we watch his stomach grumble on a bus so loudly it feels like a cartoon. It’s framed as a sitcom laugh trigger and a knowing depiction of brokeness, all in the same beat. Even when we see extended pieces of Dancer’s stand-up, it’s him joking about being thrown up on as a baby, or later, addressing the film’s themes so head on, we begin to wonder if this is stand-up or if Dancer has really died and is simply addressing it from the afterlife.

The film is not without its foibles and false notes. There’s a montage of Dancer coming into his own as a performer set to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?” that feels so forced and strange relative to how honest and real the rest of the film reads. Also, when the film delves into his interracial relationships, he admonishes his white lover about her unearned radicalism “You read Malcolm X. I know Malcolm,” he tells her. However, the scene rings a little hollow by not addressing why so many white people surround him at this juncture in his life, to begin with. 

For decades, there’s been a pipeline for funny comics to morph into serious filmmakers (Woody Allen, Louis C.K., Aziz Ansari) or serious pundits (Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, countless others, unfortunately), but Pryor’s attempt at real artistry feels like it was rejected for its rawness. Few filmmakers in this vein bear themselves to this degree, often opting instead to stick to slice-of-life romantic dramas. 

Years later, audiences were more welcoming to Chris Rock’s forays into film directing, like “Top Five” and “I Think I Love My Wife,” mainly because the finished results weren’t that far off from what we expect from his stand-up and the films he’s made for others. But to this day, “Jo Jo Dancer” remains a unique cinematic proposition, the filmic version of watching a man poke at a raw, exposed nerve for your benefit as much as his own.

“Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling” is currently streaming on Tubi and The Roku Channel.

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We recently lost journalist and documentarian Sacha Jenkins, one of the funniest, shrewdest, and most inspiring minds in cultural criticism and art his generation, or any generation since, has ever known. He was a significant influence on this film critic, so I was surprised to discover that his father — Horace B. Jenkins — was a filmmaker whose sole work never saw the light of day until 36 years after his death.

Horace B. Jenkins wrote, directed, and produced “Cane River” in 1982. It was, for the time, a rarity — a film created by, predominantly starring and funded by Black folks. 

Jenkins passed away that December, before the film secured distribution, before falling into obscurity for nearly forty years. But since the film’s rediscovery in 2018 and subsequent release in 2020, it’s been sitting on several streaming platforms, just waiting to be seen by hungry eyes destined to marvel at how ahead of its time it feels. Audiences have craved a film like this for decades, not knowing it existed just beyond our grasp. 

“Cane River” is a romantic drama between two lovers being pulled apart by the weight of the past and the pull of the present. When the film begins, we meet Peter Metoyer (Richard Romain), who is returning home to Cane River Lake in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. He’s met with love and excitement by a big, multigenerational gathering of family members, all the same shade of beige as him. We find out he’s been away at college, where he played football, but has given the sport up to pursue his real dream of being a poet and a writer. (“The closest I’ll get to the pros is the prose I put down with pencil on paper,” he says.)

Initially, it seems Peter is hiding some kind of failure and doesn’t want to disappoint all the people who treat him like a celebrity. But once he runs into Maria Mathis (Tommye Myrick), a gorgeous dark-skinned girl he hits it off with, it becomes clear he isn’t bluffing. Feeling an instant sense of ease around Maria, Peter transforms from the charming but stoic himbo we’ve seen into a passionate, hotheaded motormouth. He explains that he turned down being drafted by the New York Jets because of how the league treats talent and how it felt too much like being on an auction block. The two seem suspiciously smitten early on, given they’re on alternate paths. 

However, the true schism in this potential union is evident from the moment of their first meet-cute. Maria works part-time at a historical site that was once a plantation. Peter sees her while deviating from a tour after insulting the white lady who runs the place. Maria is on a break, reading “The Forgotten People: Cane River’s Creoles of Color,” a book about a well-off family that traces back to Marie Thérèse Coincoin, a formerly enslaved person turned slave owner. She also went by Marie Thérèse Métoyer, the name given to her by the slaver who married her and bought her freedom. Once the connection is made that Peter is a descendant of the controversial family Maria has been reading about, their families become obstacles to their future.

It’s fascinating to watch a romance unfold that reckons with the ever-present specter of America’s history and all the ways it impacts future generations, regardless of the distance of time. Both Peter and Maria, at different points to each other and others, fall back on the fact that they weren’t there in the 1700s and bear no personal responsibility for the actions of their ancestors. But as the film unfolds, it becomes increasingly apparent that they can’t simply “why you bringin’ up old stuff” their way out of their tangible realities. 

There’s a particularly damning scene where Peter crashes out after finding out the original home he grew up in and the land it sits on was sold by his aunt to an unscrupulous lawyer. It leads him to finally read the book Maria had — only he skips over all the findings about his ancestors’ complicity in enslaving their people and focuses solely on the importance of land ownership and how modern Blacks aren’t focused enough on accumulating generational wealth. All this forty years before Jay-Z would go on to shame his listeners for not owning any Basquiats or investing in Dumbo when they had the chance!

Don’t allow all this talk about the complexities of racial matters make the film sound like a tough watch. Jenkins, as a storyteller, had a unique sense of humor, and he allowed moments of comedy to breathe throughout the film believably and charmingly. Roy Glover’s score features a variety of songs from New Orleans vocalist Phillip Manuel, and the lyrics have a Randy Newman-esque quality to them, narrating things seen on screen or adding omniscient depth to suggest a more soulful version of a sitcom’s theme. 

Jenkins and cinematographer Gideon Manasseh aren’t reinventing the wheel with the film’s visual language or anything — they’re both comfortable letting scenes expand into long single takes, relying on zooms to segment into close-ups — but they do a phenomenal job capturing the environs of Louisiana. The fields, the waters, day exteriors, and night exteriors — the state provides such a gorgeous backdrop to the proceedings.

Neither lead went on to have the most notable of careers, but some flowers must be given for Romain and Myrick’s performances and their palpable chemistry. Watching “Cane River” in 2025, one can’t help but envision an alternate reality where this really did get a wide release while Jenkins was still alive to accept the praise. Jenkins’ son Sacha inspired a lot of us with his work. One can only wish he had been given the same opportunity.

“Cane River” is currently streaming on Cineverse, Fandor, and Philo but is also available to rent for free on Kanopy using your local library card.

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While it might have been a more potent dramatic exercise as a short film, 2015’s “Naz and Maalik,” the feature directorial debut from documentarian Jay Dockendorf, milks much mileage from its central conceit — that to a nosy FBI agent, two young Muslim men ducking into an empty alleyway to steal a secret kiss look a lot like terrorists.

The titular characters, Naz (Kerwin Johnson Jr.) and Maalik (Curtiss Cook Jr.) are initially presented as platonic best friends, just guys being dudes. They wander around Brooklyn employing a variety of side hustles, whether it be re-selling lottery tickets or hawking perfume oil in tiny vials. But there’s a case being built that there’s something else between them. 

Well, two cases. 

In the film’s opening scene, Naz’s younger sister Cala (Ashleigh Awusie) finds a used condom wrapped in tissue paper in the bathroom trash bin, immediately knowing that her brother has been engaging in haram wickedness. She uses this to blackmail him for $25, so she won’t tell their parents. But the way Naz dodges her questions about who he’s having sex with, it’s clear he’s hiding more from her than she knows. 

At the same time, FBI agent Sarah Mickell (Annie Grier) is convinced these youths are up to something. She’s cooperating with an undercover cop who attempts to sell Naz and Maalik a gun. But when Maalik plays along with the sale as a joke, the officer thinks they might be extremists planning something big. Mickell, with nothing better to do, follows the guys around the way we are as the audience, but only seeing glimpses of their dodgy behavior. Add that to some gnarly confirmation bias, and she becomes obsessed with catching them in the act.

Tellingly, both of these threads culminate in a kiss. The first is when we finally see the pair indulge in the level of carnal contact that the two leads’ palpable chemistry has been teasing throughout. It’s a physical, primal kind of endeavor, one the FBI agent doesn’t see, just two Black men with their heads on a swivel ducking and darting around the Brooklyn streets. The other kiss, more tender and serene on a train, Cala witnesses from another passing car, doomed with the knowledge that her brother isn’t just sexually active, but gay. 

The aftermath of both these revelations proves to be a bit janky, as Dockendorf’s script struggles in the third act. Blending the lived-in, accurately observed slice-of-life vibe with the absurdist, darkly comic concept of being under federal investigation for being in the closet requires delicate storytelling. In this, Dockendorf’s reach exceeds his grasp, making “Naz & Maalik” one of many sub-90-minute independent films that fail to satisfy due to their incomplete, ill-thought-out endings. He is not the first debut filmmaker to have ideas beyond his current skill level and he will not be the last. 

But the reason the film works so well despite its weak third act is right there in the title. The two leads are absolutely magical together. When the film is at its most narratively blank, it is little more than watching Johnson Jr. and Cook Jr. riffing with one another, having the kind of navel-gazing conversations one might expect from a movie like “Before Sunrise.” There’s an ease and comfort between the two that is as adorable as it is freeing to behold. However, the conflict comes from observing them in the first place. 

The two men are constantly walking around together in broad daylight. Still, every time Maalik, the more forward of the two, exhibits any casual intimacy, Naz’s inherent fear frames the tenderness as if under a microscope. The film expresses some of the more interesting perspectives on the surveillance state, where the two main characters are fighting a war on two fronts — having to hide their homosexuality from their friends and family because of their faith and having to obfuscate their faith from the rest of the world that sees them as ontologically evil for the God they pray to.

There’s a scene early on where Naz and Maalik visit a mosque, and an imam leads his prayer by welcoming the NYPD and the FBI, assuming that at least one of those gathered must be there in an undercover capacity. But he sees it as an opportunity for those mystery interlopers to see up close what a beautiful and peaceful faith Islam can be. By that same token, “Naz and Maalik,” in its depiction of MLM romance, offers a window into Black queerness that ought to normalize it for anyone who may, for whatever ungodly reason, still have some issue with it in 2025, much less when the film was released a decade ago.

Alas, it is also a picture that struggles to wrestle with being in the middle of an elaborate, oppressive Venn diagram, getting it from three sides for the color of your skin, who you love, and how you worship, often each direction being contradictory in its animus. But “Naz and Maalik” is worth a watch, if only to spend some time with its two protagonists, who you will fall for.

“Naz & Maalik” is currently streaming on Prime Video, but is also available to rent for free on Kanopy using your local library card.

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By the time you read this, “Sinners,” the new film from “Black Panther” director Ryan Coogler, will have made it through its sixth weekend of release, having crossed the $300 million mark at the global box office. It’s not just a rarity for an R-rated film or one predominantly created by and featuring Black talent, but one based on an original idea and not some piece of pre-existing intellectual property. It has held its own in the theatrical marketplace against an enormous movie based on a popular video game (“A Minecraft Movie”) and the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (“Thunderbolts”). 

Set in 1932, the film follows frequent Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, a pair of WWI veterans and gangsters who return to their home in the Mississippi Delta from a seven-year excursion in Chicago. The duo plan to open a juke joint, enlisting the help of their young cousin Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton) and blues veteran Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) for the music, Smoke’s ex Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) for the food, old friend Cornbread (Omar Miller) for protection, and Grace & Bo Chow (Li Jun Li & Yao) for signage and supplies. But their grand opening is derailed by the presence of vampires, led by Remmick (Jack O’Connell), himself drawn to their new establishment by the power of Sammie’s guitar playing. 

Suspense, carnage, action, and a whole lot else unfold in the ensuing drama, making it one of the most thematically dense and ambitious pictures of its kind. In addition to being one of the most statistically crowd-pleasing feature films of this century, it has been something of a firebrand for discourse of all types. 

Though a largely straightforward genre picture in the vein of ’90s throwbacks like “From Dusk Till Dawn” and the works of horror icon John Carpenter, “Sinners” has inspired spirited artistic overanalysis the likes of which the internet hasn’t seen since Childish Gambino released the music video for “This Is America,” or more recently, anything Kendrick Lamar has said or done since March 26, 2024.

The film is meticulously layered with a bevy of different ideas, concepts, and emotions, all born from Coogler’s extensive research of the period and his inspiration from his deceased uncle’s real life. When folks make expansive threads on X outlining the rich texture of Hannah Beachler’s production design or noting fascinating details in Ruth Carter’s costume work, it feels additive to the experience of seeing the film. But when those less experienced in critical analysis or lacking in media literacy extrapolate seemingly random details about the film to suit engagement bait and truly dangerous rhetoric, it’s easy to see how the burgeoning fandom for the film has quickly lost the plot. 

When dissecting Black art, there is a frustrating tendency to project an unassailable level of greatness upon well-liked work, regardless of the subjectivity in asserting quality. As “Sinners” has grown more popular, dissent of any kind has been characterized as trying to tear down Coogler himself. People who seem to consider themselves fans of this very talented young man have cast him in the light of an underdog — a man who has helmed two separate billion-dollar blockbusters for Disney! The strictures of “Black excellence” are so limiting that they become shackles, erasing the nuance and subtlety necessary to push the form forward truly. 

We may have to work twice as hard to get half as much as our white counterparts. Still, true progress would be allowing a piece of Black art to exist outside of the insecure need to insist that something flawed is literal perfection, robbing it of the chance to exist as anything less than a victory lap against the establishment.

When I first reviewed “Sinners” for another publication, Looper, I logged my piece on Rotten Tomatoes, where the film, at that moment, had a 98% critic rating, “certified fresh.” That initial review, written hastily an hour removed from the press screening I had attended for publication the very next morning, had a simple conclusion. I personally rated the film 7.5/10, or slightly higher than 3.5 stars. I used 3.5 to mean “really good, but not great,” and remarked then about how the film takes many big swings, hitting more often than it misses. But seeing the film again, five weeks later, after thinking about it often, after debating various friends, colleagues and strangers on the internet, I find myself having one major issue with the film, and with those insisting any criticism of the film is little more than nitpicking.

For Coogler the director, “Sinners” is a blistering triumph. He feels more confident and assured in his framing, in the way he composes shots, and seems to be having so much fun with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw utilizing the large format cameras they were given access to. The result is a gorgeous picture with memorable images, striking visuals, and the sort of end product theatrical exhibitors are dying for. It truly begs to be seen on the biggest screen possible. 

But for Coogler the screenwriter, “Sinners” feels like such a mixed bag that we have to wonder when this one creative discipline will catch up to the other. The movie is obviously a success for him as a writer. In 25 years, the copyright for the movie reverts to him from the studio, a contract feat usually only reserved for Quentin Tarantino. But unlike Tarantino, a filmmaker who wears his influences on his sleeve and loves to mix and match various genres into his own specific brand, Coogler has bitten off more than he can chew. 

Though the film’s premise is simple enough, in the telling of this tale, Coogler has so many irons in the fire that it always feels like you’re longing for more of the threads to actually unravel, rather than be awkwardly juggled for the next creative impulse that takes its place. When discussing Coogler’s work in the MCU for the “Black Panther” franchise, both entries had a similarly messy feeling, but it was always chalked up to working within that strict studio system, trying to serve many masters at once. He was applauded for being the one filmmaker, save for “Eternals” helmer Chloé Zhao, to maintain his authorial identity within that world essentially.

So, what’s the excuse here? In a film that itself seems to be about the importance of ownership and equity, how can we watch a man who has final cut approval and full creative control then hand-wave away how unfocused and meandering his finished project feels? Watching “Sinners,” it feels as though Coogler is moving like he’s never going to get to make a movie ever again, and so, wants to shoehorn in everything he wants all at once, with little care given for balancing all the disparate elements. One can forgive the film’s polyamorous approach to courting multiple genres. Who doesn’t want a little western, a little gangster movie, a little historical drama in their expensive vampire picture?

But it becomes less forgivable when it comes to unraveling the themes and ideas. There’s so many different ways to interpret what “Sinners” thinks about the nature of racial solidarity, about the predatory ways Black music can be exploited, and about whether or not Black Capitalism is the answer to our people’s ills, but many of those conclusions feel contradictory, their metaphors tortured and rickety. In what could be considered his most personal work yet, it’s hard to know who Coogler really is. 

Normally, one would be excited at the prospect of his next original script building upon and refining these ideas, having learned from what did and didn’t work about this film. But according to the majority who champion “Sinners,” he has no reason to improve or grow. This one is perfect, remember? And even if Coogler wasn’t poisoned by the endless procession of lazy praise, he’s got “Black Panther 3” to look forward to. Who knows when he’ll get around to making something for himself again?

That just makes the film more poignant, in its sad way. At its core, “Sinners” works best when dramatizing the pursuit of freedom, of a meaningful break from the rigors of daily life and, if only for one night, a sense of ownership for folks for whom that level of control is rarer than most. It’s just buried under so many other half-baked ideas. And now he’ll be returning to the IP fields.

“Sinners” is playing exclusively in theaters. It will likely be available on VOD this June, with a streaming release to Max later this summer.

The post A second opinion on ‘Sinners’ appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

When it was announced that Gene Hackman — one of the greatest American actors the big screen has ever seen — passed away last month, movie lovers sprinted to their watchlists to find films of his to dig into. Boxers get ten-bell salutes. Actors get a sea of their greatest works logged on Letterboxd. Many folks seemed to go for “The Conversation,” Hackman’s 1974 paranoid thriller, or “The Royal Tenenbaums” from 2001, his last truly great role. But a few years before this, in 1998, he teamed up with Will Smith in Tony Scott’s “Enemy of the State,” the kind of critically and commercially successful blockbuster Hollywood seldom makes anymore.

At the time of its release, though well received, the film was considered more low culture than the 1974 film it homages. But with the passage of time, the wholesale degradation of the industry, and our minds cursed by the knowledge of present-day politics, “Enemy of the State” feels both prescient and comforting. It’s more than a little bit scary how ahead of its time the film was.

The film’s central plot surrounds a new piece of legislation that would grant the NSA the ability to trample on civil liberties under the guise of preventing terrorism. Jason Robards, in a small role as a congressman, rejects the false binary the bill calls for: that citizens must sacrifice their privacy in order to ensure their safety. For his troubles and refusal to support this cause, he is murdered by goons at the behest of Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight), an NSA assistant director who cares more about how forcing this bill into law will advance his career than how it might affect the national landscape.

Bird watcher Daniel Zavitz (Jason Lee) throws a wrench into their scheme when he accidentally captures footage of the killing on camera. Reynolds tasks an operation of his upper-tier goons (Barry Pepper and Loren Dean), doofus ex-military types (Jake Busey and Scott Caan), and a small army of tech nerds (Jack Black, Seth Green, and Jamie Kennedy) to hunt this man down and retrieve the evidence. But when Zavitz surreptitiously passes the tape off to a former college friend, this entire apparatus transfers onto him instead. This is where Will Smith comes in as Robert Dean, a labor lawyer in Washington, D.C., who becomes wrapped up in an elaborate web of surveillance, misinformation and blackmail, all in the pursuit of crucial intel that he doesn’t even know he has. 

The film is structured like one of Alfred Hitchcock’s “wrong man” thrillers on steroids. Hitch’s arch pacing and shrewd compositions are replaced by director Tony Scott’s frenetic and chaotic staging, capturing the visual identity of the millennium’s end with accuracy and verve. (It also makes the most of its location, shooting between D.C. and Baltimore to capture the district and its surrounding eras better than most political thrillers.) Few action films can pull off storylines this nuanced and fast-paced without devolving into a sludgy hodgepodge of plot holes and questionable character decisions. But writer David Marconi’s script benefits from key punch ups from “Andor” showrunner Tony Gilroy and “The West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, providing better storytelling and dialogue than many similar Jerry Bruckheimer productions of the era.

Smith is exemplary as a charming, easy-to-root-for protagonist. He goes to bed one night not caring about the surveillance bill when his wife Carla (Regina King) rails against it on the news, only to wake up in a unique nightmare that doubles as a cartoon hypothetical about why she was right in the first place. When Carla asks if he wants the government listening in on his phone calls, Dean responds “I’m not planning on blowing up the country.” “But how do we know,’ she says, “Until we’ve aired out your dirty little secrets?” In quick succession, everything from his antagonism towards the mob in his day job to an affair he had with his college ex Rachel (Lisa Bonet) comes back to bite him. 

Through every meticulous detail, the film doubles as an exploded diagram of how little privacy the viewer really has. Scott constantly intersperses his footage of the scenes themselves with angles from security cameras, bird’s eye satellite footage of the city’s grid, and kaleidoscopic images from inside various computers and systems. There’s a scene where the techies are watching Dean and making remarks about his expensive belongings, sounding like snarky pocket watchers or just nerds marveling at his wealth and swag. But later, it’s revealed they were carefully cataloging items to be replaced by doppelgangers with surveillance equipment hidden inside, from his shoes to his watch and his pen. 

It’s even crazier to watch this film in 2025 and realize how prophetic the (then fictional and exaggerated) proceedings really were. Everything outlined in this made-up legislation was codified in The Patriot Act three years after its release in the wake of 9/11, which, completely by coincidence, appears to be the villain’s birthdate when we see an image of his ID. This was a fun, summer-style blockbuster released in the fall, and it casually depicts a level of unsettling overreach from the “deep state” that 1: we would soon come to know as the reality of modern life, and 2: would eventually beget its own ouroboros of new, pervasive conspiracies as well. But there’s one thing that makes it all go down a lot smoother, and that’s Hackman’s presence.

The film doesn’t fully come to life until the midway mark when Dean has to team up with “Brill” (Hackman), a former intelligence spook he occasionally contracts for surveillance work through Rachel. One of the quiet tragedies of modern Hollywood and the death of the traditional movie star is that audiences no longer get to see vaunted veterans mix it up on screen with their younger, newer counterparts. But there is so much power in the chemistry between Smith and Hackman. Perhaps the “training” he got from going toe to toe with Tommy Lee Jones the previous year for “Men in Black” teed him up for this, but every moment they spend on screen disparaging one another before begrudgingly developing a sense of kinship and mutual respect is a delight. 

On the page, watching the everyman — abused by this panopticon of callous spooks — turn the tables on his opps and get revenge on them using their own methods is a treat on its own. It’s even more fun to watch Smith in his absolute prime and Hackman, playing an implied echo of his character from “The Conversation” (they use an image from that film when showing an old ID for his character here), executing guerilla tactics on all the evil suits we’ve seen insist that privacy deserves to be a thing of the past. 

They still make movies that try to hold up a mirror to America’s jagged visage, but seldom do they remember to include the requisite escapism to allow for a truly cathartic break from the awful truth. Hackman and Smith’s enviable buddy energy is a spoonful of sugar to help the harsh themes go down smoothly.

“Enemy of the State” is currently streaming on Prime Video

The post It’s a good time to revisit ‘Enemy of the State’ appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Speaking on the impact and influence of our greatest musicians can feel like a fruitless endeavor. Some artists, like R&B legend Luther Vandross, shine a light so bright that attempts to measure its luminance through text amount to little more than waving a small flashlight around in the dark. 

It’s impossible not to fall for someone so brazenly dedicated to a life in song, destined to exist in the shimmering glow of stage lighting. In the documentary “Luther: Never Too Much,” there’s a particularly humorous anecdote about him forcing the collaborators from his first group, Shades of Jade, to wear matching green leather shoes. When they couldn’t convince their mothers to aid in the $23 expenditure, Luther successfully pleaded on their behalf. In his own words, his origin hinges on attending a fateful Dionne Warwick show in his youth. He devoted his life to making people feel how she made him feel that day.

Director Dawn Porter (2020’s “John Lewis: Good Trouble”) reminds us how thoroughly Luther succeeded at that goal. Her film succeeds where most fictional or otherwise films fail when tackling insurmountably superlative icons. Rather than getting caught up in the rigors of hyperbole or the quicksand trap of cliche, she has arranged the telling of a life mainly through the artist’s words and enduring art.

Though this doc takes the same cradle-to-the-grave approach most musical biopics follow, there is a sense you’re moving through history without taking the same tired route every episode of “Behind the Music” once subjected us to. The film employs the usual use of talking heads, but rather than heavily relying on cultural critics and historians, most of the people interviewed are Luther’s longtime friends and collaborators. They all do a much more intimate and entertaining job of making the viewer feel closer to the subject.

If you are, like me, something of a Luther neophyte, you may have a pretty thin understanding of the scope and breadth of his work. Perhaps you’ll recognize most of his ’80s output as the soundtrack to your mother cleaning on Sundays. Through pop cultural osmosis, you’ll know about his extreme weight fluctuations (Cedric The Entertainer’s infamous “I don’t do Lil Luther”) or his alleged penchant for eating hamburgers with donuts for buns (“The Boondocks” and Grandpa’s Luther Burger.) But “Never Too Much” provides much welcome context, detail and texture.

The early segments that focus on Luther’s youth as a Patti LaBelle superfan growing up in the ’60s are perhaps the most charming. As presented, his dedication to his favorite singers feels like the nontoxic precursor to modern-day pop stan culture. Where listeners of the present fall into cancerous idolatry, Luther and his contemporaries obsessed over the music itself, with multiple friends quoted as saying their relationships began while watching The Supremes together on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” 

In his youth, Luther embarked on a strange but glorious journey to superstardom. Dropping out of college before Kanye, he decided he didn’t want a plan B. If he failed, he would keep at it, resigned to being 80 years old and still trying to make it if fate awaited him. Instead of toiling, his unique gifts as a vocalist, arranger, writer and producer gave him multiple avenues into the public consciousness. 

Throughout the ’70s, he appeared on the first season of “Sesame Street” with his group Listen My Brother, worked with David Bowie on his seminal “Young Americans” album, cut his teeth opening for Bette Midler, wrote music for “The Wiz,” and simultaneously became the industry’s most sought-after back-up singer and its most illustrious writer of jingles. This man sang tunes promoting Miller High Life, Juicy Fruit gum, and Gino’s Pizza that were catchier, more tactile, and more affecting than some artists’ entire discographies!

But that expansive time in varied background capacities collapsed into the singularity of “Never Too Much,” the first official single and title of Luther’s first solo album. From the moment we hear that quirky but unmistakable bassline and the glittering string arrangements, it is clear we’re hearing not only one of the greatest songs of all time in any genre but the birth of a bona fide star who will no longer be denied or relegated to the periphery.

Like any story outlining the arc of a famous career, there’s a passage where Luther Vandross becomes an indestructible entity. Back-to-back platinum albums, writing and producing songs for his idols like Aretha Franklin and Warwick, headlining sold-out shows that are the product of his own inimitable vision. 

We get to see backstage footage of him rehearsing with his tight-knit crew of collaborators. We see how he arranges the backing vocalists so effortlessly, with one former bandmate saying his gifts made him “like a film director for your ears.” The matching, hand-beaded garments, the opulent regalia, inspired staging and choreographed movements were all above and beyond what most of his listeners, in their own words, required — but Luther, having grown up on television performances, wasn’t content to stand around and croon. 

Then, what most would consider his height begins to feel like a cage he’s trapped in. Luther was desperate to cross into the mainstream as some Black artists often endure. The world of Quiet Storm radio and R&B became a racial albatross around Luther’s neck. Similarly, the doc has us watch him lose Grammys to the likes of Terence Trent D’Arby, endlessly iced out of that full acceptance he so craved. By the time he finally won, he was still fighting to reach wider audiences. Though his earlier career saw him cross genres and explore a variety of sounds, being the “love song” guy became an impediment. There’s a scene where Jamie Foxx recounts putting his phone up to the radio when a Luther song came on so the music could woo whatever girl he was pursuing. 

But by all accounts, so much of the love Luther’s music inspired among his listeners seemed to elude him throughout his life. Early on, the doc takes time to allow his closest confidants to point out that he was too Black and too heavy to take center stage in his youth. Once out front, he had a difficult relationship with food, and he saw his size careen between extremes throughout his public life. Eddie Murphy famously called Luther a “Kentucky Fried Chicken-eating MF” in “Delirious.” Seeing Murphy’s name on the guest list for one of his shows, Luther responded by bringing out a human-size KFC bucket and serenading jingles to it. Initially, he seems in good humor about it, but it’s clear he’s frustrated with even needing to acknowledge the comedian’s needling.

He was notoriously private about his sexuality, something the documentary covers but, respectfully, chooses not to labor over. But it does come back to one point repeatedly that makes even the rapturous togetherness of his funeral, where countless contemporaries came together in song to grieve his loss, feel so very tragic.

Luther, in archival footage from an appearance on Oprah’s old show, tells a fan that his favorite song of his is “Any Love.” The film blends him lightly cooing it to her on the show with other performances of the song, allowing the viewer to get caught up in what a dulcet and touching ballad it ultimately is. Then it cuts to Luther’s former assistant saying how it used to be his favorite song too, until he got to know Luther and realized what an aching, pleading ode to seeking connection it was for him. 

In an interview, Luther’s niece says that her uncle had an obligation on this Earth and fulfilled it, as if performing a cosmic task you never asked for should be, in itself, a great triumph. But now that I know more about him than ever before, I find it so hard to listen to songs I once adored and not feel a deep sense of frustration that someone could be such a boundless fountain of love for others and still find themselves dying of thirst.

“Luther: Never Too Much” is currently streaming on Max and CNN+.

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After winning four Academy Awards for “Parasite” in 2020, including the first Best Picture statuette awarded to a non-English-language film, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon Ho had a blank check in his pocket. Statistically, he will never be better situated to do whatever he wants. So, what has he chosen to do with that cultural cache? With his latest and most mainstream release, “Mickey 17,” he has blown over $100 million of Warner Brothers Discovery’s money on a quirky, meandering and unsellable sci-fi comedy with little chance of recouping its budget. And that’s pretty rad!

WBD studio head David Zaslav, in his tenure, has single-handedly devastated Warner’s history and legacy as an artist-friendly outfit, driving Christopher Nolan to the loving arms of Universal and shelving fan-favorite projects like “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs. Acme” for tax write-offs. You can then see why they would make the perfect target for an auteur looking for maximum creative freedom and minimal interest in fiduciary responsibility. What Joon Ho has helped execute here is one of the most amusing heists in recent memory. Whether or not his latest film’s charms will woo you depends entirely on how compelling you find Robert Pattinson doing pratfalls in space.

Pattinson stars as Mickey Barnes, a broke and not-too-bright loser living in a near future where late-stage capitalism has begun driving humans to the stars from a pillaged Earth further on its way to being inhabitable. On the run from an esoteric loan shark who enjoys filming the torture of his clientele more than he does being repaid, Mickey jumps the line onto a colony ship by signing up for the Expendable program. He skips the fine print that says they’re going to experiment on him and turn him into a clonable grunt whose sole existence is to straddle the line between human-size guinea pig and bottom-rung gofer. 

Every time Mickey goes on a suicide mission, future technology simply reprints his body and redownloads his memories and personality into new meat recycled from trash and feces. Each new Mickey receives a new number. His life in space is a thankless one, but he has love, at least, with security agent Nasha Barridge (Naomi Ackie), the epitome of the kind of woman who will fight for her mousy beau when they put pickles on his plain hamburger. (Theoretically, anyway. They live on a spaceship where everyone eats calorically rationed slop and paste.)

One day, Mickey, on his 17th iteration, survives being eaten by a “creeper,” the indigent life form on the ice planet Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo doing something akin to a Trump impression) is trying to colonize. The creepers save his life, only for him to make it back onto a ship to find Mickey 18 (also Pattinson) canoodling with Nasha. Multiples are illegal, so if the two are seen together, they both will be executed. There’s more at play with Marshall and his insane wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) and their mini-media presence on their tortuous journey to form a “pure” new civilization built on the backs of a diverse, poor workforce. 

But the picture’s heart is genuinely The Robert Pattinson Show. No other actor in Hollywood could have brought this much life, verve, and entertainment value to the twin portraits of dueling Mickies. 17, a nebbish who passively accepts all of life’s abuse because, deep down, he’s been conditioned to believe he deserves it. And 18, a more actualized self who, having seen from the outside how servile he has been his entire life, grows a backbone and becomes radicalized by his predicament rather than victim to it. Between the two performances, Pattinson has name-checked ’90s cartoon “Ren & Stimpy,” “Jackass” stars Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O, and most importantly, Jim Carrey in “Liar Liar,” as inspirations. It is, without a doubt, one of the most selfless and dynamic screen performances in recent memory. 

Pattinson’s elastic facial expressions and rubber-band body physics provide a Looney Tunes kind of energy to every moment but are tempered by a subtly tragic interiority. Within his turn lives perhaps the finest portrayal of the modern worker’s plight, which drives the larger picture in a believable and affecting way. But “Mickey 17” is also two and a half hours long. And as much fun as it is to watch Bong Joon Ho careen to and fro in a luxury car on an icy road, the longer the run time lasts, the less you’re enticed by the possibility he crashes it into a fiery crescendo and the more it begins to feel like dicking around for dicking around’s sake.

Ruffalo’s nowhere near as lively as he was the other year in “Poor Things” playing a similar scoundrel-type role, and he seems to be walking in Pedro Pascal’s “Wonder Woman 1984” steps. Such is the difficulty in sending up a figure like Trump, who is already the world’s most grotesque and perfect cartoon. Any real parody or impression will only pale. But Joon-ho’s vision, aided by cinematographer Darius Khondji’s sickly yellow- and green-tinted visuals, captures more of our present-day predicament’s essence in the images than showing Marshall’s supporters wearing red hats. 

Early in the film, there’s a harrowing composition as Mickey looks up at the long line to get onto a colony ship. It lopes around in off-kilter circles higher and higher above his vantage point while sandstorms outside threaten to overtake the entire structure. Individuals move forward a step, and the whole snake-like procession lurches so imperceptibly that they may as well all be standing still.

As fun as “Mickey 17” is, it’s in these fleeting moments of ecological despair that it rings the truest and in its brief bursts of justifiable rage at the state of the world around us. It may have been unintentional, but in letting his freak flag fly and doing whatever he wanted with this picture, Joon Ho has made a film whose structural weaknesses feel like purposeful recreations of the absurdity we all experience whenever we try to make sense of the news these days. 

Perhaps that’s why when Mickey 18 snaps at 17 telling him about how poorly a dinner with Marshall has gone, the camera is positioned so that his ranting about taking some action isn’t aimed at his fellow clone-in-arms but at the viewer themselves. Whether this film is seen in droves enough for audience members to walk out wanting to do what 18 ultimately does, well … that remains to be seen.

“Mickey 17” is currently playing exclusively in theaters, and a streaming release on Max is expected soon.

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When it came time to write the follow-up to his 2016 novel “The Underground Railroad,” a magical alternate history take on the Antebellum South, Colson Whitehead initially wanted to write something lighter. He hesitated to dive back into a project that required reckoning with the heaviness of Black American history. But this was the beginning of the first Trump administration. Reality compelled him to take his fiction in that other direction, birthing 2019’s “Nickel Boys,” a fictional exploration of the systemic abuse Black boys endured at the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, a reform school in Marianna, Florida.

Bringing to life the novel’s central conceit: that there was an intricate system of trains and conductors ferrying runaway slaves through the countryside, Barry Jenkins’ miniseries adaptation of “The Underground Railroad” was the perhaps most unsung piece of Black media of the post-Floyd era. This time around, Director RaMell Ross, a Peabody award-winning documentarian, made the pivot to scripted features to turn Whitehead’s “Nickel Boys” into the first capital G-great film of the post-DEI era.

“Nickel Boys” is a difficult drama that splits its setting between two periods. Much of the narrative takes place in the 1960s, following a teenager named Elwood (Ethan Herisse) as he attends the Nickel Academy, a fictional stand-in for the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. It intercuts with time jumps to the 2010s, where an adult Elwood learns that a mass grave was discovered on the school’s grounds.

While at first glance, it might seem that “Nickel Boys” joins a long list of productions exploiting Black pain for awards season plaudits, director Ross and cinematographer Jomo Fray’s execution of the film’s storytelling proves otherwise. Throughout the first hour or so, the camera is positioned so that viewers can experience the film from Elwood’s point of view. Early on, the visuals are abstract and poetic, like a child’s interpretation of the grownup world around him. But as Elwood reaches high school age, we see that he’s perceived as a grown man by white adults.Through this stylistic conceit, we realize it’s us that they’re looking at.

Elwood is radicalized and inspired by the nascent civil rights movement, wanting to be more involved, but his grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) cautions him to be careful about making himself a target. There’s a haunting scene where Elwood talks to her about his ambitions, and while she steers their conversation in a pragmatic direction, a pamphlet for the Melvin Griggs Technical School slowly slides down the refrigerator door, the magnet securing it too weak to uphold its weight. It’s his plan to attend this school that ultimately dooms Elwood. “Imagine a textbook with nothing to cross out,” Elwood’s mentor, Mr. Hill (Jimmie Fails), pitches, not long after handing him a Sharpie to cross slurs and profane graffiti out of a school textbook. A previous owner has used its frayed corners to sketch a dark flipbook depicting a lynching.

On his first day of classes, Elwood accepts a ride to school from a stranger, not knowing that the vehicle they’re both in has been stolen. An accessory to the crime, his only recourse for staying out of prison is to attend Nickel Academy, a lesser fate his grandmother celebrates by offering him a final slice of angel food cake before he unwittingly descends into Hell. He is driven to the school grounds with a pair of white delinquents, who are dropped off at a large, palatial house. The driver then heads down a gravel road to a glorified hut, where Elwood is to spend an indeterminate amount of time obeying his way into a freedom that does not exist.

Here, he meets his only friend, Turner (Brandon Wilson), and the film’s use of perspective truly comes alive. Through Turner’s eyes, we get to see Elwood in full for the first time. Before, we had only seen glimpses of him on reflective surfaces, like his grandmother’s iron. The two young men are a dichotomy in every way. Elwood is darker-skinned, naive, optimistic, and, through all the pain he will endure at this establishment, determined to be better for himself and for his peers. Turner, who has lighter skin, is relentlessly cynical after enduring his first stint at Nickel. He’s made peace with the horrors of this reality and is trying to navigate his place within it.

Despite the boys’ differences, one of the film’s few comforts comes in their camaraderie. The film takes on a conspiratorial tone as the camera plays with their dueling perspectives. Elwood and Turner can always find each other’s gaze. It’s as if they’re in an awkward office meeting, their eyes darting across the room to meet those of their one other Black co-worker. While critical, those brief moments of brotherhood do little to combat the sense of dread that “life” at Nickel brings.

Nickel Students are essentially prison laborers. There’s a scene early on where Elwood watches as white students play football during recess, before being reminded that this luxury is not offered to Black students at Nickel. The film accentuates this point via a Mexican student who boomerangs between the school’s Black and white campuses because staff can’t figure out where he belongs. While the film never thoroughly plumbs the depths of what these boys endure, choosing instead to suggest and imply, the way Ross’ camera embodies their visions makes it feel like a found footage horror film for Jim Crow. At one point, we witness a profound instance of violence and abuse from Spencer (Hamish Linklater), the school’s corrupt administrator. The moments leading up to his unique brand of punishment—while waiting for the blows to thud—were harrowing.

But the depths aren’t what matters most. It’s the chasm between how low these boys are brought and how high they could have flown in a better, more just world. There’s a brief scene, before Elwood ends up at Nickel, where we watch as he reads “Silver Surfer” comics and listens to a radio discussion about putting a man on the moon. It’s not long before his dreams are snatched away, and we learn why Elwood hitched a ride to school with a complete stranger. Just moments before this, a pickup truck passed him, its flatbed dragging an enormous wooden cross, skidding sparks across the asphalt.

As an adult, Elwood encounters a former classmate who orders a drink before expressing a long list of what he could have achieved if not for the torment they suffered.

The scene calls back to a lecture they received when they were still children, from Blakely, the “house father” of the Nickel dorms and the only Black man among the adults in charge. Blakely tells them, “dreams don’t matter if God wants you to be a trashman.”

But what if God wants something else? How are you supposed to function in a system that doesn’t want you to exist?

There’s a moment back at Nickel where Elwood and Turner are attending a boxing match between Nickel’s strongest Black student and his white opponent from up the road. Though he knows the match is rigged in favor of the white boxer, Turner loses himself in the violence, shedding his too-cool and detached persona to indulge in this display of vengeance.

Elwood cautions him. “This isn’t the fight.” Unfortunately, everything else is.

“Nickel Boys” is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video and will be available on MGM+ on February 28.

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In the ‘90s, before the recent proliferation of OnlyFans and similarly-minded platforms, lonely and undersexed men in society would turn toward premium-rate phone numbers where anonymous women performed elaborate role-play through the landline. Modern viewers with internet-tortured attention spans may struggle to see the appeal in the lack of visuals, but perhaps a revisit of Spike Lee’s criminally underrated 1996 film “Girl 6” can rectify that misconception. 

Though not known primarily for his ability to stage alluring sex scenes, Lee has quietly been one of America’s more successfully horned up auteurs since his debut “She’s Gotta Have It.” All of his earlier pictures feature prominent eroticism on screen, but “Girl 6,” in dramatizing the fertile ground of conjuring images through speech, shows Lee presenting the world of fantasy with equal measures of whimsy and caution. 

“Girl 6” features Theresa Randle as Judy, an aspiring actress who turns to work as a phone sex operator to make ends meet. The story wrestles with both the morality and the practicality of her newfound vocation, although far less conservatively than one might expect from a Lee film. Much of that is owed to playwright Suzan-Lori Parks who penned the screenplay, the first time in his career that Lee would put someone’s words other than his own on the big screen. One needs only to force themselves through colossally questionable Lee features like “She Hate Me” and “Chi-Raq” to see what an outlier “Girl 6” is with its perspective on gender politics and sex. 

While the moralizing unc voice is present (voiced through Lee himself as Judy’s best friend and landlord no less), “Girl 6” is a thematically complex work that celebrates female agency while painting its intersection with capitalism as a recipe for horror rather than freedom. The very nature of fantasy, the film seems to posit, is one of our most dangerous constructs. Judy moves from one kind of make-believe — wanting to be an actress — to a different kind of dress-up. Lee captures the glee she feels with his usual stylish flair and wall-to-wall Prince tunes.

Throughout the picture, we see literalizations of the fantasy characters Judy creates for her callers, but also incongruous flights of fancy showing her inner world and her aspirations. We might see her become a girl next door for some thirsty customer one moment, then Dorothy Dandridge in “Carmen Jones” the next. But it’s all her, and most importantly, it’s hers. Pointedly, the inciting incident for her even pursuing this comes in the film’s opening scene, an audition for a hotshot director played by Quentin Tarantino who demands she bare her breasts. This experience frames her work as Girl #6 as a reclamation of her body.

But as her skills improve and the money grows, transforming into interchangeable dream girls becomes as much an escape for Judy as her fantasies are for her clients. She doesn’t have to engage with her acting career being stuck at the starting line, or revisit her last relationship with a kleptomaniac ex (Isaiah Washington) whose very attraction to her makes her feel limited and small. It’s why she begins to develop an unhealthy connection to “Bob” (Peter Berg), one of her regulars whose niceness and relative normalcy makes her forget that he’s not a real suitor. It only gets worse when she installs a private line at home and starts working for a new boss (Madonna) who indulges her urges to go further down the rabbit hole of sex work. 

Ultimately, the film introduces a toxic and terrifying caller (Michael Imperioli) whose threats and targeting snap Judy out of this addictive haze. It’s scary enough to get Judy to leave this chapter behind her and move to LA to go back on auditions, but this time, on her terms and wielding the newfound confidence this excursion brought her. Lee again makes Judy’s inner world literal as she kisses her ex goodbye while various corded phones rain down from the sky, clattering to the concrete and exploding as a definitive end to her former hustle.

These days, those phones are much smaller and fit into pockets and pocketbooks quite easily. The purveyors of those fantasies don’t have to rely on their voices alone when phones come with broadcast-quality camera sensors and the means to project the images they capture all over the globe. The parasocial side of online sex work has made it more lucrative than ever before. But just as it provides a path for the top percentile of workers to own homes and pay down dream lives, the relationship between provider and client, both in crossing the line the way Judy tried to with “Bob” and in fostering malicious intent like with her stalker, have increased a thousandfold. 

“Girl 6,” at times, feels like a charming throwback to an era where women could dabble into a specific brand of sex work that allowed them to keep some distance from their “real” lives. And while it proves a fascinating and enrapturing portrait of a woman taking the sex appeal others want to extract from her and wielding it for her own aims, it feels ahead of its time exploring the many pitfalls of that exercise. 

“Girl 6” is currently not streaming anywhere and is difficult to find on DVD or Blu-Ray. If you have a copy, it’s on Beyond Video’s ongoing wishlist for rental donations!

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Live-action remakes of classic animated Disney projects are no new phenomena. Dating back to 1994’s “The Jungle Book,” the studio has attempted to, with mixed results, double dip into their history. But it wasn’t until 2016’s second attempt at remaking their beloved Kipling adaptation that the advances in CGI technology made it so that no project could be too ambitious to spin the block on. This reviewer distinctly remembers grumbling through a press screening of that Jon Favreau-directed “Jungle Book” and snarking to his plus one about how eager the House of Mouse must be to give this same treatment to “The Lion King.” Three years and one monkey’s paw curl later, 2019’s “The Lion King” felt like a colossal waste of time.

Sure, audiences got a new collection of Beyoncé songs (as well as her visual companion piece “Black is King”), but what did this latest telling of the beloved tale yield outside of $1.6 billion at the global box office? All of these remakes that folks call “live-action” are still primarily animated, albeit eerie, and photorealistic.

In every one of these outings, the exaggerated, cartoon approach to singing and talking animals anthropomorphized into relatable characters is replaced with the uncanny valley of watching a David Attenborough nature documentary with dubbed-over dialogue and musical numbers. 

Much craft and attention to detail are on display to make the animals feel as life-like as possible. 

But “real” or “believable” means nothing without emotional connection. Disney has made trillions off how easy it is for a child to form an emotional connection with a cartoon animal possessing enormous, unrealistic eyes. With this new approach, the result is always a financial success with fleeting cultural relevance. Everyone will take their families out to see a new, shiny, 8K-OLED-HDR-TV-in-the-display-section-of-the-Best-Buy version of the cartoon classics they loved as kids. But once they’ve been subjected to something twice as long and half as resonant, they forget the experience entirely…until there’s a new one.

Enter Barry Jenkins. The Academy Award-winning filmmaker responsible for “Moonlight” had used his newfound critical cache to adapt James Baldwin (“If Beale Street Could Talk”) and Colson Whitehead (Amazon’s excellent series “The Underground Railroad”) and had since reached that zenith all up-and-coming directors reach where they must take a meeting with Disney and get offered their obligatory Marvel or Star Wars project. For whatever unknowable reason, Jenkins chose to take on a sequel to “The Lion King” that would be pitched as “The Godfather Part II” with animals. 

The film was initially reported to split its runtime between continuing the story of Simba (voiced by Donald Glover) and flashbacks to a young Mufasa (Aaron Pierre taking over from the late James Earl Jones.) But after Jones’s passing, it seems that the story hewed closer to the prequel side of things, eschewing the Don/Michael Corleone split for a straightforward framing device where Simba’s daughter Keira (Blue Ivy Carter) is told about grandfather’s origins. This allows the narrative to center around the relationship between Mufasa and his brother Taka (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), who would grow up to be the villainous Scar.

There is something admirable in watching a filmmaker of Jenkins’s caliber try to will a worthwhile motion picture into existence within an otherwise lifeless paradigm. And there are small successes to be found for those with the patience to search for them. While still not particularly distinct, the character designs of the animals themselves allow for more emoting and subtlety. This is highlighted by Jenkins and cinematographer James Laxton’s propensity for portraiture within the fame, bringing the “camera” close enough to each lion’s face that the emotional distance between the subject and the viewer begins to melt away. 

This is best shown when exploring the precarious brotherhood between Mufasa and Taka. The show-stopping tunes penned by Lin-Manuel Miranda try hard to hammer home the more significant ideas and feelings, but Jenkins allows for quieter moments between these two cubs thrust together by tragedy to do the real heavy lifting. In the most touching moment in the picture, Taka, a young prince, tries to take Mufasa into his family after a flood separates him from his people. Taka’s father, Obasi (Lennie James) insists that Mufasa must race Taka for the opportunity. But as Mufasa falls behind, exhausted from traveling through this catastrophe, Taka modulates his pace, telling his new friend, “I’ve always wanted a brother.” 

There are other ideas at play here, with Mufasa unintentionally usurping Taka’s role in the pride and ultimately ascending to being a uniter of the various species. But much of that feels muddled by how big the cast grows and how tedious Timon and Pumba’s (Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner) interruptions feel. It becomes quite clear, in quick succession, that Jenkins’s ambition cannot combat the doomed nature of this endeavor. Despite being gifted young actors, Pierre and Harrison Jr. aren’t particularly strong voice performers. The most enticing element here, the idea of seeing Scar become Scar, is instantly nerfed when Harrison Jr. arbitrarily starts making a truly reprehensible Jeremy Irons impression the moment he’s done performing a song about betraying Mufasa, as if he had the idea to sound more villainous after crossing the chorus.

But even setting aside these gripes, “Mufasa: The Lion King” is a two-hour film that repeatedly devolves into an overactive desktop wallpaper. The sweeping vistas and majestic images of tenderly rendered animals ought to be something to behold, but it feels so repetitive and looks so inert that you would be hard-pressed to differentiate it from one of those new AI models that creates smooth enough video from paragraph-long prompts.

If someone of Jenkins’s pedigree can’t, with all this budgetary power behind him, best some poster on Elon Musk’s X typing “lions fight on mountaintop epic” into Sora, then Hollywood is truly cooked, and there’ll be nothing stopping the fools who think generative AI can usurp traditional filmmaking methods. At this rate, they’re already bent to the will of short-sighted studio groupthink to the point of obsolescence.

“Mufasa: The Lion King” is currently playing exclusively in theaters but will be available to rent or buy from video-on-demand services in February.

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