Movie Review: G20 (2025)

Genre: Action  

Director: Patricia Riggen  

Starring: Viola Davis  

Running Time: 108 minutes 

Synopsis: US President Danielle Sutton (Viola Davis) first rose to prominence by rescuing a child while serving with the US Army in Fallujah. Now established in the White House, she has a strained relationship with her rebellious teenaged daughter Serena. Danielle has a plan to end poverty in Africa using cryptocurrency, and she is looking for support from other world leaders at the G20 summit in Cape Town. Instead, the event is hijacked by terrorist leader Rutledge (Antony Starr) and his small army. Danielle has to stay alive with help from loyal Secret Service Agent Ruiz (Ramón Rodríguez), and find a way to rescue her family.

What Works Well: Antony Starr would have made for an effective antagonist had his character received any attention beyond cartoon level villainy.

What Does Not Work As Well: An atrocious mash-up of Air Force One, Die Hard, and Olympus Has Fallen, this limp effort wallows in muddy visuals, action scenes edited into incomprehensible fragments, and farcical set-pieces featuring a politician mowing down baddies with an assault rifle then defeating burly professional soldiers in hand-to-hand combat. The premise is ludicrous enough to creep into unintentional satire, not helped by rudimentary writing and wide-eyed acting.

Key Quote:

Serena (referring to her mom, the President): She's kind of a badass.

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Movie Review: Disturbia (2007)

Genre: Thriller  

Director: D.J. Caruso  

Starring: Shia LaBeouf, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Morse, Sarah Roemer, Viola Davis  

Running Time: 105 minutes  

Synopsis: Depressed after losing his father in a car accident, teenager Kale (Shia LaBeouf) strikes his Spanish teacher and earns a sentence of house arrest for three months. With little to keep him occupied, Kale clashes with his mother Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss), but eventually settles down to a routine of spying on the neighbours. Newly arrived girl-next-door Ashley (Sarah Roemer) catches his eye, but more menacing is neighbour Robert Turner (David Morse), who may or may not be a fugitive serial killer.

What Works Well: This reimagining of Hitchcock's Rear Window is formulated for a younger audience, and enjoys a likeable cast led by Shia LaBeouf (understandably glum but sensitive), Sarah Roemer (every teenage boy's dream sexy-and-smart girl-next-door), and Aaron Yoo (as Kale's best friend Ronnie). As they get into deeper trouble snooping on the neighbourhood, co-writers Christopher Landon and Carl Ellsworth sneak in snide commentary about the suburbs as a place where secrets (whether bland or malevolent) hide behind every hedge.

What Does Not Work As Well: Director D.J. Caruso never quite gets the tone right. For too long the plot embraces the light-hearted humorous adventures of a troubled young man and the beginnings of puppy love, but the third act suddenly descends into all-out horror territory. Not enough time is spent with the antagonist, who remains a shell of boogeyman, robbing the climax of impact. 

Conclusion: The curtains and shades are there for a reason.

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Movie Review: Air (2023)

Genre: Biographical Sports Drama

Director: Ben Affleck

Starring: Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Viola Davis, Jason Bateman, Chris Messina

Running Time: 112 minutes

Synopsis: It's 1984, and Nike is best known as a running shoe company. Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon) is a talent spotter in the fledgling, under-budgeted basketball division. He recognizes the potential of new NBA recruit Michael Jordan, and decides to stake his reputation on signing him to an endorsement deal. Sonny has to convince skeptical Nike boss Phil Knight (Ben Affleck) that competitors Adidas and Converse can be out-maneuvered. He decides to reach out directly to Jordan's mother Deloris (Viola Davis), bypassing obstructive agent Rob Strasser (Chris Messina), but convincing the Jordans to even just meet with Nike will require an unprecedented effort.

What Works Well: The remarkable behind-the-scenes story of Air Jordan is a reminder that Nike was once the scrappy underdog on the basketball court. But one deal can change - and make - fortunes, and Sonny Vaccaro's persistence rewrote the rule book on sports superstar celebrity endorsements. Alex Convery's script is always alert to opportunities for humour drawn from audacity and character quirks, and director Ben Affleck maintains focus on the essential human connections residing at the deal's heart.

What Does Not Work As Well: The washed-out colour palette is unnecessarily sickly, and only so much drama can be squeezed out of a series of meetings with a well-known outcome.

Conclusion: Vision, courage, and grit combine to just do it.



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Movie Review: Solaris (2002)

Genre: Psychological Science Fiction

Director: Steven Soderbergh

Starring: George Clooney, Natascha McElhone, Viola Davis

Running Time: 99 minutes

Synopsis: Psychologist Dr. Chris Kelvin (George Clooney) is summoned to the space station orbiting the mysterious planet Solaris, to help the crew deal with inexplicable events. Once on board he finds his friend Gibarian (Ulrich Tukur) has already committed suicide, and surviving crew members Snow (Jeremy Davies) and Dr. Gordon (Viola Davis) traumatized. Chris is then startled when his wife Rhea (Natascha McElhone) joins him at the space station, although she has been dead for years. 

What Works Well: Writer and director Steven Soderbergh's adaptation of Stanisław Lem's novel focuses on Chris' interactions with his deceased wife, who reappears in real and self-conscious form at the Solaris space station. Themes of grief, guilt, regret, and the essence of how humans perceive each other surface through thoughtful discourse, supplemented by dreamy visuals and flashbacks. The pacing is slow and deliberate, but the compact running length maintains engagement. 

What Does Not Work Well: The metaphysical subject matter is a tough environment for the cinematic medium, and ultimately the metaphorical influence of the planet is largely sidelined.

Conclusion: Sufficiently thought provoking without quite soaring.



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Movie Review: The Unforgivable (2021)

A drama about the search for redemption, The Unforgivable is a human-centred and character-rich story about past mistakes casting a dark shadow on the present.

After serving 20 years for murdering a cop, Ruth Slater (Sandra Bullock) is released from prison. Parole officer Vincent Cross (Rob Morgan) sets her up at a dingy halfway house in Seattle's Chinatown and finds her a job at a fisheries plant, where she meets the amiable Blake (Jon Bernthal). Ruth is determined to find her younger sister Katherine (Aisling Franciosi), who was five years old when the murder happened. Katherine was subsequently adopted and raised by Rachel and Michael Malcolm, who also have a younger daughter Emily (Emma Nelson).

Ruth visits the farmhouse where the cop shooting happened and meets current occupants John and Liz Ingram (Vincent D'Onofrio and Viola Davis). John is a lawyer and offers to help Ruth track down Katherine. Meanwhile, brothers Keith and Steve Whalen are the grown sons of the slain police officer. Keith is furious Ruth is now free and plots a revenge, but Steve has a young family to think about. With emotions running high, the lives of Ruth, the Malcolms, the Ingrams, and the Whalen brothers are inexorably drawn together.

An adaptation of a British miniseries, The Unforgivable is a superbly constructed and unpredictable drama. The screenplay (by Peter Craig, Hillary Seitz, and Courtenay Miles) embraces a diverse set of well-drawn characters propelled by conflicting motivations, and launches them on different trajectories but all headed towards inevitable collisions. Breezy surprises abound: on more than one occasion, initially less prominent characters emerge as key plot participants, upturning expectations.

Narrative strength is derived from a range of emotions all tied to the same incident. Ruth's quest for reunification with her sister only gains resonance as more is revealed about their past. The sons of the slain police officer have every right to feel aggrieved the murderer is free in their community. The Malcolms raised Katherine as their daughter, but also suspect her lingering mental struggles are related to her childhood. Katherine's younger sister Emily starts at the margins but will not stay there, while the Ingrams learn they are living in a house with a past, and are now drawn into a tragedy's next chapter.

Hans Zimmer contributes a soulfully haunting soundtrack to enhance both the emotional twists and the host aesthetics. Mostly filmed in the Vancouver area standing-in for Seattle, the dreary and damp northwest landscape captures Ruth's dour mood. Sandra Bullock is suitably deglamorized and stays faithful to a character hardened by 20 years in prison, but also does not need to stretch much beyond a traditional pain-behind-the-eyes stance.

In an assured feature film debut, director Nora Fingscheidt introduces the characters with both depth and brevity. She demonstrates confidence with brief flashbacks to the pivotal shooting incident and its immediate aftermath while rotating multiple perspectives in the present. Some characters are therefore paused for relatively long periods, but step forward to make an impact on cue.

The complex and ultimately emotionally exhausting drama wraps up in under two hours. The Unforgivable is impressively expansive in scope, marvellously efficient in execution.

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Movie Review: Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

An action thriller, Law Abiding Citizen poses tough questions about the justice system then wades into a murky puddle of muddled loyalties.

In Philadelphia, government employee Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) witnesses the murder of his wife and daughter in a violent home invasion by criminals Ames and Darby. The assailants are arrested and charged; Ames is sentenced to death, but as a result of a plea bargain approved by prosecuting attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), Darby escapes with nothing more than a five year prison sentence.

Ten years later, Ames suffers a painful death in a botched execution by lethal injection. Darby is kidnaped and tortured to death by Clyde, who then surrenders. Nick and his boss District Attorney Jonas Cantrell (Bruce McGill) try to extract a confession, but Clyde is just starting an elaborate revenge plot targeting Nick and the entire flawed justice system. 

Half of an entertaining vigilante thriller, Law Abiding Citizen starts with a bang. Director F. Gary Gray and writer Kurt Wimmer create an unflinching nightmare as, in short order, Clyde loses everything then suffers again at the hands of a misfiring judicial process. The 10-year zip forward is effective, and the uncompromising revenge extracted upon the home invaders sets up what should have been a hard-hitting second half.

But towards the middle of the film Gray loses control. Law Abiding Citizen stalls in a series of increasingly far-fetched murders and atrocities veering well away from any rational vendetta. Clyde psychologically drifts from likeable victim seeking elaborate but morally justified revenge towards a mayhem-loving psychopath, while an awkward and ultimately unsuccessful U-turn attempts to place Nick at the plot's sympathetic centre. The unsatisfying climax short-changes both men and challenges time and space logic.

Despite the notable fade, many memorable moments are on offer, including a gotcha courtroom meltdown, a bloody jail cell episode, and a dangerous phone call in a judge's office. Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx contribute plenty of presence without needing to stretch. They are well supported by Leslie Bibb as an up-and-coming prosecutor, Regina Hall as Nick's wife, and Viola Davis as a Mayor increasingly concerned by the explosion of violence in her city.

Law Abiding Citizen is first a man with a plan, then pain without gain.



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Movie Review: Doubt (2008)

A drama about possible misconduct involving a priest, Doubt boasts a talented cast but is firmly trapped in sterile stage origins.

The setting is 1964 in the Bronx. At a Catholic church also serving as a school for the community, the stern and old-fashioned principal Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep) keeps a close watch on the children's behaviour. She also notices when Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) delivers a sermon about doubt, and airs her thoughts to the younger Sister James (Amy Adams), the school's eighth grade history teacher.

Sister James then observes Flynn interacting, perhaps inappropriately but she is not quite sure, with the school's only black child, altar boy Donald Miller. She confides in Sister Beauvier, who decides to confront Flynn and accuse him of improper behaviour. He denies any wrongdoing. Sister Beauvier continues to investigate, and reaches out to the boy's mother Mrs. Miller (Viola Davis) to better understand his home environment.

Directed and written by John Patrick Shanley based on his play, Doubt is a series of verbal clashes all taking place in and around the Catholic school. Barely rising above the status of a filmed play, Doubt leans heavily on the Seriousness of the Topic and the star actors to salvage some level of cinematic drama.

Streep, Hoffman, Adams, and Davis (who gets just the one scene) step forward and offer their theatrical best, but it's not enough. Shanley endlessly circles the same drain of Beauvier having her doubts about Flynn's behaviour but not quite the evidence she needs, and so they spar, then spar again, and then spar some more, repeating the same couched accusations and the same offended denials. Her rage and his defensiveness both escalate, but the power dynamics are wayward and the words fail to spark.

Sister James and Mrs. Miller are relegated to side-characters and observers, their attitudes perhaps indicative of the era but still far from helpful. Sister James naively bends with the wind, and Mrs. Miller hints her son should tough it out and accept mistreatment as long as he graduates.

The running time is padded with irrelevant details from Sister James' classroom, featuring boys and girls trying to be boys and girls but stifled by rigid codes of conduct enforced with relish by Sister Beauvier.

Almost as a late afterthought Doubt works its way to the rot eating away at a Catholic church allowing serial offenders to thrive, and the futility of women speaking out against a centuries-old male-dominated hierarchy. The topic is of tragic importance, here fumbled into cold, static discourse.



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Movie Review: Knight And Day (2010)

A humorous spy action thriller, Knight And Day demands brain dis-engagement then provides a fun dose of non-stop adventure.

June Havens (Cameron Diaz) restores classic cars for a living. While catching a flight to attend her sister's wedding, she bumps into Roy Miller (Tom Cruise). On the plane he subdues a team of assassins and crash lands into a cornfield. June realizes Roy is a CIA agent and she is now mixed-up in his wild world.

Roy has seized a small perpetual energy battery developed by genius scientist Simon Feck (Paul Dano), to prevent his evil ex-partner agent John Fitzgerald (Peter Sarsgaard) from selling it to an international arms dealer. But Fitzgerald has convinced his boss CIA Director Isabel George (Viola Davis) that Roy has gone rogue. In the globe-trotting adventure that ensues, Roy has to keep June and Simon safe while revealing Fitzgerald's motives and ensuring the battery does not fall into the wrong hands.

Directed by James Mangold and written by Patrick O'Neill, Knight And Day is a glitzy frolic. While undoubtedly entertaining as an almost old-fashioned star vehicle for Cruise and Diaz, this is also an artificial and relatively soulless exercise, often overpowered by special effects and lacking in anything resembling character depth.

The plot is a classic and most basic MacGuffin escapade, a new and barely explained perpetual energy battery enough of a device to instigate numerous chases around the globe. The logic holes are glaring, but the set-piece highlights are plentiful and spiked with humour, including the fight on the plane followed by a raucous crash landing, a stunt-filled freeway chase and shootout, and a re-invention of the running with the bulls. All are well executed despite erring on the side of bloat, Mangold using a running joke about Roy drugging June to get her out of jams as a shortcut to not even bother with some of the narrow escapes. Cruise again throws himself into the stunt work to enhance the awe factor.

In terms of performances, Cruise and Diaz are celebrities enjoying themselves while trading on their pre-established personas and unburdened by the need to act. So little is revealed about Roy and June they may as well be glossy magazine cut-outs thrown onto the same page. Paul Dano, Peter Sarsgaard, and Viola Davis are wasted with even broader sketch strokes.

Knight And Day has all the planes, trains, automobiles, and motorcycles to create a festival of flashy kinetics, the toys plentiful even if the heart is missing.



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Movie Review: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020)

A drama set in the music world, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom exposes generational rifts and scars carried by Black performers. Superlative lead performances compensate for otherwise limited cinematic joy.

Chicago, 1927. Flamboyant blues star Ma Rainey (Viola Davis), a legend in the South, is in town for a recording session supervised by her nervous manager Irvin (Jeremy Shamos) and money-pinching record company boss Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne). Her back-up band includes cocky young trumpeter Levee Green (Chadwick Boseman), who writes music and dreams of creating his own troupe to record more modern, upbeat tunes.

While the band is rehearsing, differences of opinion flare up between the brazen Levee and the other older, more circumspect members, including Cutler (Colman Domingo) and Toledo (Glynn Turman). Ma finally arrives along with her nephew Sylvester and back-up singer/lover Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige), and immediately imposes her will on the recording session, further heightening tensions in the studio.

An adaptation of the August Wilson play co-produced by Denzel Washington, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (the title refers to the name of one of her more famous songs) stays close to its stage origins. A colourful prelude is set at an audience show in rural Georgia, but subsequently director George C. Wolfe allows the theatrical milieu to dominate both in setting (two rooms of the recording studio) and performance tones (dominated by showy monologues). Stylistically, the film settles down as not much more than a filmed play.

The subject matter is uneven. Some dialogue exchanges extend into profound observations on the Black experience in America, including Levee revealing the heartrending story of his parents tangling with violent bigots, and Ma expressing frustration that her voice is monetarily revered by the likes of Irwin, while as a person she is ignored.

But too many conversations are repetitive or trivial, the arguments between Levee and the other band members endlessly going around in circles and covering the same topics, his cockiness and shiny new shoes generating the most verbiage. At a running length of just 94 minutes, all the talk means the musical content is surprisingly limited. Frustration builds as the tiresome bickering keeps interrupting or delaying the music, and Ma is relegated to a secondary character, albeit still larger than life.

Despite the surrounding limitations, Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman deliver powerhouse performances. Davis portrays Ma as a force of nature with an unbendable will, refusing to accept grief or excuses from anyone. Boseman adds the exuberance of a man seeking a better future and supremely confident both in his talent and his ability to manipulate the system to his advantage.

Brash but confined, Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is bottled-up boldness.



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Movie Review: Blackhat (2015)

A laborious techno thriller, Blackhat clicks all the wrong commands and hacks its way to a failure of entertainment.

An unknown hacker uploads malware, blowing up a Chinese nuclear reactor and manipulating the Chicago mercantile exchange to yield instant profit. The Chinese government appoints Captain Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang) to collaborate with the FBI's Agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis) to track down and stop the hacker. Chen brings along his tech-savvy sister Chen Lien (Tang Wei), and once in the US insists that master hacker Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) be released from prison to help out.

The investigation leads to Hong Kong and ruthless Lebanese middle man Elias Kassar (Ritchie Coster), who is doing the dirty work for the techno crime lord. Hathaway and Lien fall in love as the pursuit picks up pace, with Kassar proving a deadly and resilient foe. To track the identity of the mastermind Hathaway infiltrates a National Security Agency system, instantly becoming a fugitive again but leading him to a desolate site in Malaysia and a climax in Indonesia.

Despite a potentially compelling and topical hacking premise, director Michael Mann manages to almost get everything wrong in Blackhat. At 133 minutes, this is an over-long movie devoid of interesting characters and in love with its own look, Mann returning to his worst Miami Vice tendencies of focusing on wavy hair, cool shades and colour compositions while the core of the film disintegrates all around the pretty pictures.

A lame and derivative script does not help. The central crime is familiar since Goldfinger, and is here punctuated by plot holes and asked to lean heavily on the criminal-helping-out cliche done to death in movies like The Rock and The Jackal. Once again, a subject matter expert is released from prison to help stop a crime, and once again, the convict is somehow much more proficient in all aspects of crime fighting than all the assembled law enforcement professionals.

The film suffers a stunning blow when the plot details are revealed, a really? moment that pauses to reflect on the irreversible damage to the film's credibility whereby an attack on a nuclear facility is just a test run for...flooding remote river beds to corner the tin market? Compounding matters is the cardinal sin of never introducing the antagonist as a character, the mastermind behind the dumbfounding plan to attack the trading price of a cheap metal never even given the courtesy of a decent introduction. He's just a guy with a bad haircut and worse wardrobe.

A couple of signature Mann action scenes featuring plenty of gunfire help alleviate the tedium, and Blackhat does have an attractive multicultural cast in its favour, and goes out of its way to promote US-Sino cooperation. But while Tang Wei emerges as a possibly interesting character, Chris Hemsworth sucks the charisma out of the film with a dour one-note performance, and all too often grabs Tang's arm and pulls her along in a nauseatingly old-fashioned display of faux male authority. Viola Davis is utterly wasted in an underwritten role.

A disappointing combination of boring and asinine, Blackhat deserves a dose of its own malware.

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Movie Review: Ender's Game (2013)

A science fiction war adventure, Ender's Game is a hopelessly inept Boys' Own debacle filled with video-game special effects, snarling bullies and little else.

In the future, humanity has repelled an alien invasion by the marauding Formics, an ant-like species intent on colonizing Earth. Preparations for a follow-up war are underway, and children are being groomed as military commanders due to the clarity of their mind and ability to think like the enemy. Colonel Hyrum Graff (Harrison Ford) spots the leadership potential in young teenager Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield), although psychologist Major Gwen Anderson (Viola Davis) is not so sure.

Under Hyrum's guidance Ender is pushed through the stages of the space-based military training academy, where he meets various other trainees including the sympathetic Petra (Hailee Steinfeld) and aggressive Bonzo. Ender has to prove himself at every turn, and misses his sister Val (Abigail Breslin). As the preparations for an impending war become more intense, he starts to question everything around him as he struggles to understand the motivations of the Formics.

An adaptation of the book series by Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game carries precious little appeal outside the target demographic of young teenaged boys. The film is a mind-numbing series of rudimentary bully conflicts experienced by young Ender, jazzed up by CGI mostly featuring kids floating around a "Battle Room" firing lights at each other. Any relationship between "training" involving games of tag and the reality of commanding massive battleships is tenuous at best.

Most of what passes as action happens on screens within screens, from Ender experiencing a seemingly profound search for the truth through an ipad game all the way to the climactic battle that entirely surrenders to an incomprehensible pixel show. Director and writer Gavin Hood is unable to elevate the material to anything other than over-elaborate fireworks. The sudden eruption of emotional displays are more embarrassing than effective.

The performances match the material, Harrison Ford and Viola Davis delivering plastic line readings devoid of context, and young Asa Butterfield hamstrung by a never ending series of loner cliches.

After clumsily appending a post-genocidal u-turn towards an exasperating quest for interspecies harmony within a narrative void, Ender's Game cannot end soon enough.

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Movie Review: Widows (2018)

A crime-and-corruption thriller, Widows offers a character-rich and intricate story mixing heist thrills with political connivance.

In Chicago, Harry Rawlings (Liam Neeson) and his gang are ambushed and annihilated after a botched heist to steal $2 million in cash from mobster and wannabe politician Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry). The money went up in flames, and Harry's widow Veronica (Viola Davis) is immediately under pressure from Jamal and his vicious brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya) to pay back their losses.

Jamal is competing with Jack Mulligan (Colin Farrell) for a city council seat left open by the resignation of Jack's father Tom (Robert Duvall). In a city rife with corruption the Mulligans have always held power. Now the Mannings want in, while Jack is much less interested than his father in the machinations of local politics. Meanwhile Veronica is desperate to raise money to pay back Jamal, and recruits the widows of Harry's gang, including Linda (Michelle Rodriguez) and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki), to attempt a $5 million heist using detailed plans Harry left behind.

Directed by Steve McQueen who also co-wrote the script with Gillian Flynn, Widows is an engrossing, multi-layered story overflowing with subtext. Featuring overlapping plots, the action sequences are short, sharp and sudden, injecting large boosts of energy at crucial junctures, then making way for the many compelling characters to take over and develop.

The film tackles several weighty themes.Women emerging from the shadows of their husbands is the thread carried by Veronica, Linda and Alice, and all three have powerful growth arcs triggered by the near-total loss they each suffer at the outset. The three women have plenty to prove, first and foremost to themselves. Veronica was enjoying a comfortable life in a cushy and expensive apartment. Linda unknowingly allowed her man to run her small business into the ground. Alice was accepting of a relationship filled with abuse.

Now they have to snap out of passivity and rely on their own guile to extricate themselves out of a jam created by their men. All three will find resilience and resourcefulness, often at unexpected times and places.

The intersection of corruption, racial tension, and politics is the second major motif weaving through the film. This is the domain of men seeking to preserve power in the case of the father and son Mulligan duo, or to wrest control, as pursued by the brothers Manning. Whether white privilege hanging on or black influence rising, none of the characters even pretend to work for the good of the citizenry. The superficial community speeches are a thin cloak to hide naked grabs for money and influence.

Jack Mulligan pursuing political office while barely disguising his disgust is another interesting angle explored by Widows. Here the sins of the old-school father are imposed on a slick son not nearly as comfortable with the games politicians play in public, but more than happy to partake in backroom deal making.

Grief emerges slowly as an initially invisible but ultimately hugely influential emotion propelling the narrative. Veronica and Harry are suffering through the consequences of a family devastation brought forth by their racially mixed household, and the fog of loss profoundly haunts their marriage.

Veronica's plight will collide almost head-on with the election campaign, as McQueen and Flynn introduce more than one clever twist to enrich the film's texture. By the time the women have grabbed hold of their destiny they will unknowingly but violently shake the ground below the men, and for all the careful plotting by both criminals in masks and criminals in suits, the film climaxes with a succession of unplanned real and metaphorical power shifts.

The astounding cast is in top form. Viola Davis and Colin Farrell lead the way with composed performances, ably assisted by some quietly astute and nuanced work from Elizabeth Debicki and Daniel Kaluuya's startling venom.

Widows is a masterful achievement, an intelligent film where visible and invisible crimes abound, as do the opportunities to grab and define new destinies.

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Movie Review: Fences (2016)

A social drama about the black working class experience, Fences benefits from strong performances but is overlong and hopelessly stagebound.

In Pittsburgh of the 1950s, Troy (Denzel Washington) is a rubbish collector married to Rose (Viola Davis). They live in a modest home paid for by a government payout to Troy's brother Gabriel (Mykelti Williamson), who sustained head injuries during the war and is now mentally impaired. Troy is proud of his life achievements, having survived a broken home and an abusive father. However, he remains deeply resentful that his skin colour prevented him from pursuing a big league baseball career.

Troy has a difficult relationship with his two sons. Lyons (Russell Hornsby) is an aspiring musician now in his mid-thirties, but Troy thinks he is wasting his time chasing an elusive dream. Cory (Jovan Adepo) is in high school and on track to secure a football scholarship, but Troy does not believe that black athletes will ever be given a fair chance, and demands that Cory focus on finding a job instead. While Rose is the rock in Troy's life, he is keeping a secret from her that will shake their marriage.

An adaptation of the August Wilson play directed by Washington, Fences delves into past, present and future hopes, dreams, and generational divides from the perspective of a small black family and particularly one man doing the best he knows how. With America on the cusp of social upheaval, Troy has pulled himself and his family into the outer ranks of respectability, but is now oblivious to the forthcoming seismic changes that will alter the future landscape of economic possibilities.

Meanwhile his wife and sons sense a coming era where skin colour will start to matter less and economic opportunities will expand. The conflict between defining a constrained destiny anchored in the past or embracing the tantalizing but uncertain promises of a different future lies at the heart of the film.

Troy revels in storytelling and dishing out uncompromising life advice, with his neighbour and co-worker Bono (Stephen Henderson) a frequent audience member along with the family members. The film is essentially a series of conversations, many of them monologues, taking place in Troy's backyard. Despite the potency of the material, at 2 hours and 20 minutes the film is significantly longer than it needs to be.

Both Troy and the meandering Gabriel are partially obsessed with death, and while frequent talk of battling the devil's legions and the armies of the grim reaper is colourful, the metaphysical distractions take away from the core familial drama.

Denzel Washington and Viola Davis deliver fully invested performances, the walls of the small house often shaking along with the turbulent prose of husband and wife. The dialogue and the acting are solidly on the theatrical side of the line, and while the naturalness is missing, the passion is palpable.

Fences is about what is allowed in and what gets left out in a couple's life. Troy defines his domain with robust wooden planks, for better or for worse.

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Movie Review: Nights In Rodanthe (2008)

A romantic drama, Nights In Rodanthe brings two damaged souls together in an idyllic beachfront house, but the film overflows with frothy emotions at every turn.

Harried mom Adrienne Willis (Diane Lane) is separated from husband Jack (Christopher Meloni), who had an affair but now wants to get back together. Adrienne agrees to help her friend Jean (Viola Davis) look after a scenic beachfront bed and breakfast in Rodanthe, North Carolina. The only guest is handsome plastic surgeon Dr. Paul Flanner (Richard Gere), who is going through a trauma of his own. Paul had an elderly patient die on the operating table, and he is in Rodanthe to meet the deceased woman's grieving husband Robert Torrelson (Scott Glenn). Paul is also planning a trip to Ecuador to try and reconnect with his estranged son Mark (James Franco in an uncredited role).

With a storm approaching, Adrienne and Paul start to get to know each other, and then fall deeply in love. He reawakens her to life's opportunities, and she helps him to come to terms with the Torrelson tragedy. But Adrienne still has to sort out her personal life and Paul needs to embark on his South American trip, causing a painful separation.

An adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel directed by George C. Wolfe, Nights In Rodanthe enjoys decent production values but cannot overcome the weak source material despite a talented cast. This is a romance where characters scream at each other one moment then fall into each other's arms the next, where the storm outside mimics the histrionics inside, and all the men, women and children, from the major characters to the minor, are quick to overflow with a display of overheated fervor at every opportunity.

There are some positives. The scenery at the character waterfront house makes up for some of the runaway emoting, and the search for an ending that avoids the obvious is laudable. There are hints of good intentions in exploring a troubled but evolving relationship between Adrienne and her teenaged daughter Amanda (Mae Whitman). Viola Davis shows up as Adrienne's best friend Jean (owner of the bed and breakfast) and adds an element of flighty fun.

In the central roles Richard Gere and Diane Lane do their best with the material, but are hampered with a script that emphasizes the obvious and shuns any attempt at nuance. The moods of Nights In Rodanthe are either black and stormy or bright and sunny, in a vivid demonstration of filmmaking by thick crayons.

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Movie Review: Prisoners (2013)

A harrowing and intense child abduction drama, Prisoners ratchets up the tension early and never lets up. A magnificent cast and an atmosphere of quiet yet unpredictable dread creates a superlative experience.

In a suburban Pennsylvania community, Keller and Grace Dover (Hugh Jackman and Maria Bello) and their young daughter Anna head over to Thanksgiving dinner at the house of their friends Franklin and Nancy Birch (Terrence Howard and Viola Davis) and their young daughter Joy. Keller is a carpenter and a survivalist, a proudly self-sufficient man. Later in the evening Anna and Joy head back to the Dover's house to play, and go missing. Suspicion immediately surrounds an old-model RV earlier seen parked in the neighbourhood.

Missing persons detective Loki (Jake Gyllenhaal) is immediately on the case, the RV is located, and its driver Alex Jones (Paul Dano) arrested and interrogated. Loki is unable to get anything out of Jones, who has a child's IQ and is barely able to construct sentences. Regardless, a search of the RV reveals no suspicious evidence, and neither does a search of Jones' room at the house of his Aunt Holly (Melissa Leo). Loki is forced to release Jones, which enrages Keller. Loki sets off to track down and question known former child molesters living in the area, a process which uncovers another shocking crime in the community. Meanwhile, Keller takes matters into his own hands, seizing Jones and embarking on his own quest for critical information to find his daughter

Directed by Denis Villeneuve, with stunning Roger Deakins cinematography and a moody music score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, Prisoners is an expertly crafted piece of mature cinema. The story gets to its central drama quickly, with Anna and Joy disappearing inside the first 20 minutes, creating a challenge for Villeneuve to sustain a 153 minute film. Not only does he succeed, he excels beyond any expectations. Prisoners sets off in unpredictable directions that are at once deeply satisfying and insanely disturbing, as Keller Dover's devastation is exploited to sharply veer the film off the well-travelled path of abduction movies and into a morass of complex emotions and moral ambiguities.

Much of the credit goes to Aaron Guzikowski's smart script, which studiously avoids every opportunity to take an easy out. Loki is far from perfect, his dialogue exchanges with Dover lacking in empathy and helping to inflame the grieving father. The character of Alex Jones remains stubbornly opaque, there are no easy revelations, and mental blockages padlocked by years of damage remain infuriatingly stubborn. Tormented parents behave like human beings, torn between incomprehensible grief and a lust for vengeance, all while surrendering to escapes offered by alcohol and pills.

Prisoners is not for the faint of heart. There are scenes of blunt torture, badly deformed faces, decayed human and animal corpses, bloodied children's clothes, and, for an extra kick of ickiness, slithering snakes. Dank, dangerous basements and holes in the ground are explored, all with a matter of factness that strips away cheap horror tactics in favour of a more insidious sense of evil-lives-next-door, and maybe also behind the door after that one. This is a film that tackles the horror that lives within without being a horror film, and as a result is acutely disconcerting.

Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal take on the two central roles and create unforgettable characters. Jackman in particular excels as Keller Dover, humanizing a traumatized father and finding the justification for unjustifiable actions in the face of personal anguish. Gyllenhaal moves Loki away from stock heroism towards belief in process and old-fashioned investigative police work, but with the pressure mounting with every passing hour even his relatively dispassionate approach will be tested.

Paul Dano is quite phenomenal in his few scenes, creating a broken, exasperatingly non-functioning man-child who may or may not hold all, some, or no answers. Viola Davis, Maria Bello, Terrence Howard and Melissa Leo round out the impressive cast, and despite sharing screen time they all create in-depth individuals.

Prisoners stares at the demons that live in the community and inside the soul, waiting to be unleashed to serve causes great and small, just and deranged, and causing immense societal suffering.

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The Movies Of Viola Davis

All movies starring Viola Davis and reviewed on the Ace Black Movie Blog are linked below:

Out Of Sight (1998)

Traffic (2000)

Kate And Leopold (2001)

Far From Heaven (2002)

Solaris (2002)

Syriana (2005, uncredited)

World Trade Center (2006)

Disturbia (2007)

Nights In Rodanthe (2008)

Doubt (2008)

State Of Play (2009)

Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

Knight And Day (2010)

Eat Pray Love (2010)

Trust (2010)

The Help (2011)

Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close (2011)

Prisoners (2013)

Ender's Game (2013)

Blackhat (2015)

Fences (2016)

Widows (2018)

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020)

The Unforgivable (2021)

Air (2023)

G20 (2025)

All Ace Black Movie Blog reviews are here.
The Movie Star Index is here.