Movie Review: Night Always Comes (2025)

Genre: Drama  

Director: Benjamin Caron  

Starring: Vanessa Kirby, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Stephan James  

Running Time: 108 minutes  

Synopsis: In Portland, Oregon, financially stressed food server Lynette (Vanessa Kirby) lives with her mother Doreen (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and brother Kenny (Zack Gottsagen), who has Down syndrome. When Doreen blows a house down payment on a car, Lynette has one night to raise $25,000 to rescue the real estate deal. She turns to a businessman who pays for sex, a work colleague (Stephan James) with criminal connections, and a professional escort who owes her money, and the night quickly hurtles out of control.

What Works Well: This poverty drama explores the thin line between desperation and dark impulses, Vanessa Kirby's electrifying presence crackling with Lynette's grim determination to finally shape her destiny. Director Benjamin Caron creates a Portland-at-night aesthetic beset by homelessness, a fate awaiting Lynette as the hours count down and her choices narrow. Every encounter offers confirmation of societal dysfunction taking advantage of the marginalized, a reality where she participates as both perpetrator and victim.

What Does Not Work As Well: Although Lynette's motivations stem from good intentions, her rapid adoption of questionable and troublesome behaviour results in an unrelentingly dour drama built upon layers of malevolence, and apart from Kenny, devoid of sympathetic characters.

Key Quote:

Lynette: Kenny...look at me. We're in it together. We're going to do it for the family.

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Movie Review: 21 Bridges (2019)

A crime thriller, 21 Bridges is a relatively routine action flick enhanced by a good cast and slick production values.

In Brooklyn, hardened criminal Ray Jackson (Taylor Kitsch) and his more circumspect accomplice Michael Trujillo (Stephan James) stumble into a large haul of pure cocaine stashed in the basement of a bar. Police officers unexpectedly interrupt the robbery, and in the ensuing shootout Ray kills seven officers. Police Captain McKenna (J.K. Simmons) is furious at the loss of life in his precinct, while Ray and Michael flee with the drugs into Manhattan. 

Detective Andre Davis (Chadwick Boseman) and narcotics agent Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller) are assigned to the case. Andre is the son of a slain police officer and has a trigger-happy reputation. He now orders all the bridges connecting Manhattan to the outside world closed and floods the borough with police officers. Meanwhile Ray and Michael are desperate to convert their cocaine haul into cash, and connect with money launderer Adi (Alexander Siddig). As Andre closes in on the fugitives, he starts to sense a large-scale corruption conspiracy.

The 21 bridges of the title are little more than an extraneous headline. This is a standard hunt-the-dangerous-bandits plot featuring good guys and bad guys, with a few shades of grey and hidden agendas thrown in to spice up motivations. The action takes place over one long night, the imperative of reopening the bridges by dawn for the city to function creating the time-constrained framework.

Director Brian Kirk has a robust cast to animate the running and gunning. Chadwick Boseman, Sienna Miller and J.K. Simmons never need to move out of their comfortable gears, but add plenty of quality. The criminals are also provided with welcome texture. Taylor Kitsch as the highly strung but still methodical killer is well-matched by Stephan James as his more hesitant accomplice, and their contrasting dynamic opens intriguing avenues for Boseman's detective to exploit.

Cinematographer Paul Cameron makes good use of the nighttime aesthetic, and as one breathless chase follows another, Tim Murrell's editing finds balance between frantic and coherent. The opening shootout is an exhilarating demonstration of advantages afforded by weaponry and military training, while a couple of guns-drawn showdowns between Michael and Andre allow intellect to compete with instinct.

What starts as a robbery-gone-bad morphs into something much more nefarious, and as the night turns to dawn the dead body count rivals the bridge count. If nothing else, 21 Bridges is always happy to run up the score.



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Movie Review: Race (2016)

A biography of sprinter Jesse Owens, Race recreates events before and during the 1936 Olympics as one remarkable man stares down hatred and enters the athletic history books.

It's 1935, and promising black sprinter Jesse Owens (Stephan James) is the first member of his Cleveland-based family to head to college. He leaves girlfriend Ruth (Shanice Banton) and a young daughter behind and heads to Ohio State University in Columbus, where track and field coach Larry Snyder (Jason Sudeikis) immediately spots his potential. Snyder fine-tunes Owens' technique, and despite rampant verbal racial abuse Jesse is soon winning track meets across the country and setting new records.

The 1936 Olympics in Berlin beckon, but Germany is in the grip of Nazi rule and propaganda Minister Goebbels (Barnaby Metschurat) with help from filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (Carice van Houten) wants to use the games to showcase the party's anti-Semitic and racist ideology. Members of the American Olympic committee, including Avery Brundage (Jeremy Irons) and Jeremiah Mahoney (William Hurt), debate a boycott. And as the most famous black athlete in the country, Owens comes under specific pressure to withdraw as a political statement.

A mixture of biography and social history, Race is competent on both fronts. Jesse Owens' record-breaking achievements on the track at the Berlin Olympics are legendary, and so carry little dramatic tension. Director Stephen Hopkins and writers Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse therefore wisely expand the film's scope to capture the broader context of the Nazis setting the stage for the games as a demonstration of white supremacy, highlighting Owens' achievements in both winning on the track and delivering a powerful anti-prejudicial message.

The dilemma confronted by American Olympic officials, torn between punishing their athletes or taking a principled stand against twisted institutionalized hatred, becomes an intriguing subplot. The debate on whether to exert influence through engagement or isolation resonates across generations, and here includes Nazi tactics of minimal appeasement combined with business enticement also serving a useful entrapment purpose.

As for Owens' personal story, Race is a straightforward biography. Jesse's inspirational love for Ruth, reconfirmed after an ill-considered liaison, and the strong bond he forges with coach Snyder are the two pillars of his success. The racist taunts he endures at the University and at every track across the United States serve as a reminder of progress required at home not precluding the imperative to stand up to tyranny abroad.

Stephan James brings Owens to life with determined dignity, and Jason Sudeikis delivers a vivacious performance as Snyder, the coach finally finding a way to experience the glory he missed in his days as an athlete.

Hopkins finds a late moment of poignancy with German athlete Carl Long conjuring an unlikely bond with Owens when it matters most, a reminder of the difference between the German people and their rulers. But overall Race runs the distance with proficiency rather than excellence, the cinematic interpretation of an intrinsically inspiring story more middle of the pack than frontrunner.

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