24 ARTS Review of reviews: Film & Home Media
Warner^ Bros.Daniel Kaluuya’s portrayal of Black Panther
leader Fred Hampton “will be talked about for
some time,” said Odie Henderson in Roger
Ebert.com. The actor’s performance as the
charismatic 21-year-old is so magnetic that it
“raises the hairs on the back of your neck.” But
Shaka King’s movie about Hampton’s 1969
assassination in Chicago insists on making
the young infiltrator who betrayed Hampton
the story’s central figure, and though LaKeith
Stanfield “gives his all,” his role is simply
underwritten. But putting the focus on FBI
informant William O’Neal complicates the
story in useful ways, said Justin Chang in
the Los Angeles Times, and Stanfield’s per-
formance is “a thing of insidious beauty.”
O’Neal was a teenage car thief facing prison
time when the FBI, tasked with preventing the
rise of a black “messiah,” persuaded him to
become a mole in the Panthers’ Chicago chap-
ter. As Hampton unites activists in the original
Rainbow Coalition and government violence
is answered by activist violence, “conscience
and cowardice duke it out” in the conflicted
mind of our protagonist—until his tips facilitate
a police raid and Hampton meets his “cruel,
bloody end.” Though Judas and the Black Mes-
siah arrives in February, “it doesn’t feel like a
stretch to name it one of 2021’s best films,” said
Karen Han in Slate.com. Because it’s a studio
film created by black artists and focused on
a seminal police killing, “it may be one of the
year’s most important movies, too.” (In select
theaters and streaming on HBO Max) R
Other new movies
French Exit
It’s hard to complain about a film that brings
Michelle Pfeiffer back to the screen in “a swirl
of Auntie Mame glamour,” said Leah Greenblatt
in Entertainment Weekly. The screen icon
plays a suddenly cash-poor socialite who
escapes to a borrowed home in Paris, taking
along her maddeningly meek adult son (Lucas
Hedges) and a special cat. Alas, despite its
worthy stars, French Exit never gels. It “feels
like a sort of droll curiosity, lost in its own je
ne sais quoi.” (In select theaters) R
The World to Come
Try to look past the overbearing voice-over,Judas and the
Black Messiah
++++
Kaluuya: Revolutionary charismasaid Jon Frosch in The Hollywood Reporter.
This drama about a furtive romance between
two 1850s American farmwives otherwise
“has much to recommend it.” The winter
scenery is majestic, Mona Fastvold’s direc-
tion sure-handed, and Katherine Waterston
and Vanessa Kirby “deliver mouthfuls of
unwieldy period dialogue with dexterity
and conviction.” (In select theaters now; on
demand March 2) R
Land
Robin Wright’s first film as a director “mostly
showcases a good eye for landscape,” said
Jacob Oller in PasteMagazine.com. Wright
also stars, playing a woman who goes off
the grid in the Rockies after a devastat-
ing loss. Even when Demián Bichir enters
as a handsome and helpful frontiersman,
unfortunately “the biggest survival struggle
becomes that of your own attention span.”
(In theaters now; on demand March 2) PG-13
Two of Us
France’s 2021 Oscar entry is a love story, “but
it’s not a cozy one,” said Stephanie Zacharek in
Time. Martine Chevallier and Barbara Sukowa
co-star as women who have been a couple
for years but, because Chevallier’s Madeleine
hasn’t come out to her children, are cruelly
separated when Madeleine suffers a stroke.
Both stars prove “marvelous to watch,” and
the suspenseful drama “shakes up everything
we think we know, or expect, from stories
about women who are well past childbearing
age.” ($7 via virtual cinemas) Not ratedCyber Shadow
“There’s a fine line between challenging
games and frustrating ones,” said Austen
Goslin in Polygon.com. In the mid-1980s,
2D arcade-style platformer games such as
Metroid, Castlevania, Megaman, and Ninja
Gaiden “didn’t seem to care whether you
enjoyed them.” Instead, they “found charm
in making you stick around through each
punishing death.” This new 8-bit plat-
former honors the legacy of those “ultradif-
ficult” Nintendo classics, but it also man-
ages to be “approachable and fair.” Playing
as a cyborg ninja, you make your way
through the apocalyptic ruins of a futuristic
city, slicing through robots and uncover-
ing clues about what’s befallen the rest of
your ninja clan. “Despite its retro style,
Cyber Shadow never feels old.” The tight
control it gives you over your ninja’s fluid
movements “proves that with a few smart,
modern twists, it’s possible to make a retro-
style platformer with all the difficulty of the
past, and few of the frustrations.” Nintendo
Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox
Carrion
Carrion is the rare game that lets you revel
in being the monster, said John Walker in
Cyber Shadow’s cyborg ninjaKotaku.com. In this “wonderfully maca-
bre and grotesque” twist on traditional
Metroid- and Castlevania-style platformers,
you play as an amorphous, tentacled beast
that rampages through an underground
research facility. Your pixelated creature’s
bloody, dripping biomass of tendrils and
teeth continues to grow as you crawl and
slide from room to room with “sublime
and revolting grace,” devouring all of the
well-armed humans in your path. “You
feel so villainous, so evil, so intenselybad.” Carrion is “much more than just the
gore,” though, beginning with its “finely
crafted” puzzles and “haunting, malevo-
lent” soundtrack. “But, ho boy, the gore.”
Nintendo Switch, PC, Xbox One
Spelunky 2
Don’t let the cute, cartoon look of this plat-
former fool you, said Mitchell Saltzman in
IGN.com. Like its predecessor, a 2008 cult
classic, Spelunky 2 is a seemingly simple yet
“brutally difficult” 2D platformer in which
every 16-bit backdrop is randomly gener-
ated. As a result, you have to improvise as
you go. You play as a treasure-collecting
cave diver who must get from point A to
point B while dodging snakes, bats, spiders,
ghosts, spike traps, falling boulders, “and
approximately 999 other ways to die hor-
ribly.” Because you need to read the room
quickly in order to survive, it’s “exception-
ally satisfying” when you do make progress
in Spelunky 2. “Yes, it’s often hilariously
difficult, but if you can learn enough of
its secrets to push through that, you’ll be
hard-pressed to find a game as consis-
tently rewarding and endlessly engaging.”
PlayStation 4 and PC; coming to Nintendo
Switch this summerVideo games: Three throwbacks to the arcade age