When They See Us Is A Sprawling And Appropriately Harrowing Artistic Accomplishment

CW: Discussions of sexual assault, racism 

One of the core tenants of Ava DuVernay's filmmaking is her ability to transport the viewer directly into history. Under her directing, the works of Ava DuVernay have an ability to bring you into the past to a harrowing degree, as most notably seen in one of the most emotionally devastating scenes of Selma where Martin Luther King Jr. meets with a man whose son was just killed in a racist hate crime. It's an intimate scene and one where DuVernay captures it with such a raw quality that lays out the emotions of the characters bare that you feel like you're in that same room with that grieving father and Martin Luther King Jr. DuVernay's works like Selma, The 13th or her newest directorial effort When They See Us explore people of color dehumanized in their own eras of American history and proceed to make cinema about those same individuals so powerful that we're right there next to them in their moments of joy, in their struggles and in their humanity.

Mute Silences All of It's Potential

In their 28 month long period of doing feature films, Netflix has released a bunch of high-quality smaller-scale films like The 13th, Blue Jay and Mudbound that show the streaming service is quite capable of putting out some top-notch cinema. If only such quality extended to their attempts to release more high-profile blockbuster fare, as those (admittedly few) attempts have fared quite poorly. Bright was, of course, a disaster and now comes another subpar bigger-budgeted effort from the studio in the form of Mute, which hails from director Duncan Jones, a man responsible for two of the best science-fiction films (Moon and Source Code) of the last decade.