Phillip Youmans Makes A Thoughtful Filmmaking Debut With Burning Cane

When I was seventeen years old, I was attending a Texas High School and struggling to figure out how people asked other people out for a date. When Phillip Youmans was seventeen years old, he directed a motion picture entitled Burning Cane starring Wendell Pierce that managed to not only debut at the Tribeca Film Festival, but also win the festival's equivalent to a Best Picture award. Well played Phillip Youmans, well played. It's utterly impressive to see someone manage to create any piece of cinema, let alone one garnering this much acclaim, at such a young age, but Burning Cane has plenty of positive attributes to talk about beyond the age of its director.

North Texas Film Festival 2019: Clemency Provides One of the Best and Most Harrowing Movies of 2019

Warden Bernadine Williams (Alfre Woodard) is surrounded by death. In her time as the Warden of her all-male prison, she's overseen the execution of twelve different human beings, the most recent of which went horribly awry. Williams maintains her composure on the outside to a steely degree, she's convinced she's got to. But on the inside, she's shaken up, visions of that execution chamber float into her brain during the day and haunt her nightmares. The detached emotional state she uses to cope with her employment is starting to test her marriage to Jonathan (Wendell Pierce) and is going into overdrive with the impending execution of Anthony Woods (Aldis Hodge), a man who's been on death row for 15 years for a crime he maintains he did not commit.