Just Mercy Is A Courtroom Drama With Plenty of Empathy And Great Performances

Lawyer Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan) has just graduated from Harvard with a law degree, which means there’s only one clear course of action to take one. That’s right, Stevenson is going to move down to Alabama and create a non-profit law firm that specializes in providing free legal services to death row inmates. It’s a crusade that’s highly unorthodox, to put it gently, especially considering Stevenson is a Black man trying to fight against a justice system that inherently sees people of color as immediately guilt. However, Stevenson wants to use his lawyer's gifts to help the most underserved of American citizens. After all, these are not inhuman monsters, but people who could be anybody. Heck, Stevenson himself observes to his Mother at one point that “It could have been me, Mama”

The Last Black Man in San Francisco is An Emotionally Intoxicating Examination of the Homes That Shape Us

A home is not just a home. Where we're raised becomes a part of ourselves. For good, for ill and for everything in between, wherever we're raised tends to become deeply ingrained into the fabric of who we are as people. We can fight it, we can deny it, but the influences of where we're raised tend to creep in eventually. This part of who we are as people serve as the centerpiece of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a fascinating tale contemplating the relationship between ourselves and the places we call home. For this particular story, the real-life saga of Jimmie Fails (here portrayed by himself in his first ever feature film performance) and his desire for his childhood home is told against the backdrop of San Francisco.

Mudbound Is Compelling Character-Driven Fare That Knows The Power of Well-Written Dialogue

 

The individual characters in Mudbound have their own stories to tell and their own personalities to convey but there are threads that do tie certain characters together. Some of these individuals find themselves connected by the fact that they're a family while a pair of characters find themselves intertwined to one another due to both of them being soldiers returning home from World War II with intense trauma impacting their psyches. But what unites them all, whether they realize it or not, is the soil, the mud on the land they all share. In this harsh environment of rural 1940's Mississippi, you're at the mercy of the very land you live on, a land that entails all kinds of fascinating human beings that populate the new Dee Rees motion picture Mudbound.