‘The Harder They Fall’: Inside the Very Real History of Jeymes Samuel’s All-Black Western

Before the opening credits of Jeymes Samuel’s “The Harder They Fall” splash across the screen, outlaw Rufus Buck (Idris Elba) has already murdered two people,  irrevocably changing a young boy’s life and setting the stage for an epic-scale shoot-em-up in the process. Set in the Old West, the Netflix feature has all the bells and whistles of a traditional Hollywood Western, but Samuel’s debut feature isn’t just a new spin on classics of the genre like “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” or “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.” This narrative is grounded in actual history.

Samuel’s world is populated by characters named after real-life Black figures who lived (and sometimes caused chaos) in the Old West. For Samuel and his star Jonathan Majors, who plays the revenge-minded Nat Love, it was about unearthing the true history of the American West and getting into the hearts and minds of lives lived and lost without the narrative of slavery or oppression. Just as essential: finding a way of turning that history, one rarely explored on the big screen, into a brand-new cinematic adventure.

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'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.

'The Mountain Between Us' has beauty, but lacks substance (Review)

Adventure and wilderness films are tough to get right. These movies must have excellent scripts and superb actors to keep the audience engaged with the characters and keyed in with the narrative. This is especially difficult when a film lacks the typical bells and whistles like endless plot points and bustling backgrounds. Director Hany Abu-Assad’s latest venture, The Mountain Between Us — an adaptation of the romance novel by Charles Martin, only has one of the two criteria. (To be fair, Martin’s book isn’t exactly heralded for its prose.) A stunningly shot film set against the snowy white mountains of the Rockies, we meet Alex (portrayed by Kate Winslet) a photographer, journalist and a risk taker. Her latest assignment has left her stranded in a Denver airport the day before her wedding. Idris Elba is Ben, a British neurosurgeon looking to get back to his patient — a 12-year old boy in desperate need of his help. Ben is calm and collected, but there is also a sensitivity there buried underneath his stoic nature.

As soon as Ben and Alex collide in the airport, the film goes off course. Instead of swearing to the universe and snatching up a hotel voucher like the rest of humanity, Alex and Ben decide to charter a tiny plane and make it on their way themselves. Obviously, their plan proves to be disastrous, and their plane comes crashing out of the sky. What's next is a two-hour too long odyssey of two very different people who don't very much like one another. However, they are forced to bond and trust each other if they have any hope of surviving.

We've seen Winslet and Elba shine in various film and TV projects before, but the script for The Mountain Between Us was so predictable and generic that it was nearly comical. Martin's book actually focuses on the difficulties of traditional love and marriage, but those tropes are nowhere to be found here. It didn't help that the veteran actors had nearly zero chemistry — even though they were pretty to look at.

Continue reading at Shadow and Act.