Not seventy years have passed since the brutal lynching of Emmett Till. It was only last year that Joe Biden signed into law the legislation that named the means of his murder a hate crime. Till, from Clemency director Chinonye Chukwu, is, then, a timely dramatisation. A difficult to watch but wholly necessary film and one rendered all the more resonant by the powerhouse central performance of The Harder They Fall’s Danielle Deadwyler. As Mamie Till, mother of Emmett and later activist, Deadwyler proves extraordinarily adept in channelling the emotional reality of grief in its most harrowing form. The less shown, the more revealed.
Try not to blink when watching Kasi Lemmons’ spiritual sequel to Bohemian Rhapsody. You’ll miss half a dozen edits and about three months in narrative. Such is the rapid, montage heavy pace of I Wanna Dance With Somebody, the long time coming Whitney Houston story. If Rhapsody was the Wikipedia scribed life and times of Freddie Mercury, Lemmons’ film is the picture pages wedged in the middle of Houston’s authorised biography. No depth, no grit, no analysis. Pretty and competent. Pretty boring too.
Rian Johnson is a disrupter. His directorial debut – 2012’s Looper – broke the back of paradoxical time travel sci-fi. His take on Star Wars five years later – The Last Jedi – threatened to break the Internet. It is, then, with a deliciously wicked sense for the ironic that Johnson’s latest film – Glass Onion – gleefully lambasts the whole notion of disruption as hollow arrogance. That his obnoxiously self-proclaimed “disrupter” protagonists are each wholly at the lap and call of a cultural leach financier only adds to the fun. Netflix forked out $429m solely for the rights to make Glass Onion, a predominantly housebound folly that will little directly provable financial return. They’re disrupters too.
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