'Concrete Cowboy' is Warm, but not Quite Riveting

Cowboys are deeply embedded in American popular culture. After all, the Western genre dominated Hollywood box offices for years. Films like Once Upon A Time in the West and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly have become the standard for idyllic versions of the heroic cattle-header. Though his legacy stretches from the streets of South Central LA to North Philadelphia, the Black cowboy has been erased from the history books. However, with his coming-age-story, Concrete Cowboy, first-time feature filmmaker Ricky Staub is unveiling an underworld often overlooked while highlighting a young teen’s fragile road to manhood. 

Based on Greg Neri’s novel, Ghetto Cowboy — Concrete Cowboy follows Cole (a gripping Caleb McLaughlin), a teen boy living in Detroit with his single mother. Terrified for her son’s life and out of options following yet another school expulsion, Cole’s mother packs his clothing in garbage bags and drives the near 600 miles from Detroit to Philly. 

Continue reading at Showbiz Cheatsheet.

'MLK/FBI' Strips Back the Legend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To Reveal a Man With Strengths and Flaws

Sam Pollard’s MLK/FBI opens in 1963 at the March on Washington. It was just five years before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s death and eight years after he was thrust onto the global stage as America’s moral leader. It was an arduous role for anyone to carry, certainly for a Black man who rose and fell amid some of the most tumultuous decades in our nation’s history. Yet, whether he was ready to shoulder this burden or not, Dr. King did so despite drastic attempts to undermine him at every turn. 

Using historian David Garrow’s book, The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr., as a framework and some of the FBI’s declassified files on King, Pollard unveils the FBI’s crusade against Dr. King the did not end until the day he died. Through stunning archival footage and modern-day audio interviews from people like Civil Rights leaders Clarence B. Jones and Andrew Young and historians like Garrow and Beverly Gage, MLK/FBI is as much about Dr. King is it is about J. Edgar Hoover and W.C. Sullivans’s obsession with him. The FBI was intent on dehumanizing King with a five-year-long campaign that involved wiretappings, secret recordings, and spying to ruin his public persona. It is a saga of a government agency gone rogue. 

Continue reading at Showbiz Cheatsheet.

'Akilla's Escape' Is a Masterclass in the Duality of Manhood

The past has its way of catching up with us. It’s something Akilla Brown (Saul Williams) has always known, and in many ways, he’s accepted his fate. In Charles Officer’s fast-paced neo-noir, Akilla’s Escape, the director turns his lens on two versions of the same man. In the present, Akilla flies through Toronto’s underworld as a notorious supplier, increasingly wary of his high-risk lifestyle. In the past, Akilla is a 15-year old living in Brooklyn in the ’90s, terrorized by his menacing gangster father, Clinton (Ronnie Rowe), and helpless to help his broken mother, Thetis (Olunike Adeliyi), find a way out. 

‘Akilla’s Escape’ forces the past to collide with the present

At 40, the exhausted drug supplier can sense that his time is running out; he just doesn’t quite know when. Though he’s making plans to shutter his Toronto-based marijuana farm to go legit and open a dispensary, his boss and business partners are not on board. Still, troubled by memories of his childhood and determined to move in a different direction than he’s done for the past 25 years, Akilla’s mind made up. Everything changes for him one night when his past comes barreling into him. 

Continue reading at Showbiz Cheatsheet.

Regina King's 'One Night in Miami' is Immaculate

Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown, Sam Cooke, and Malcolm X were towering men with different ideologies, but they were also good friends. In her feature film debut, One Night in Miami, Regina King reaches back some fifty-plus years in the past to extend her lens and capture these men at various points and stages in their lives. In a well-imagined, thoughtful, and beautifully shot movie, she pulls them inward toward one another on an ordinary evening just before everything changed. 

One Night in Miami opens in 1963. Ali — known then as Cassius Clay, is in the boxing ring in London raging against Henry Cooper. Halfway across the world, Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) can feel his star power starting to wane after a less than stellar performance at New York City’s Copacabana. Down South, Brown (Aldis Hodge) has returned home to St. Simons Island, Georgia, to seek advice from whom he perceives to be an old friend. In Queens, X is trying to determine how to distance himself from the Nation of Islam and his mentor, Elijah Muhammad. 

Continue reading at Showbiz Cheatsheet.