Akilla s Escape Review: Past and Present Converge in Moody but Murky Toronto-Set Crime Drama Akilla s Escape Review: Past and Present Converge in Moody but Murky Toronto-Set Crime Drama
Toronto s Jamaican community lends a vibrant sociocultural backdrop to Charles Officer s timeline-hopping thriller, but a dour, convoluted script weighs it down.
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Director: Charles Officer
With: Saul Williams, Thamela Mpumlwana, Donisha Prendergast, Vic Mensa, Bruce Ramsay, Shomari Downey, Ronnie Rowe Jr., Olunike Adeliyi, Theresa Tova.
Running time: Running time: 90 MIN.
1996-98 AccuSoft Inc., All right
The weathered, storied face of rapper-actor Saul Williams does the heaviest lifting in “Akilla’s Escape,” an exceedingly solemn crime drama from Canadian filmmaker Charles Officer that benefits from every ounce of his natural gravitas. As a Toronto drug trader facing the ugly roots of his underworld life in the wake of a botched deal, Will
Akilla s Escape has smarts and streetsmarts in equal measure nationalpost.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nationalpost.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The highly-anticipated movie adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights is available to stream on HBO Max, along with several new movies like Netflix’s Skater Girl, Holler starring Jessica Barden, the neo-noir thriller Akilla’s Escape, the sci-fi action movie Occupation: Rainfall, and more available to stream this weekend.
A premiere at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Charles Officer’s latest feature
Akilla’s Escape follows poet, musician, and actor Saul Williams as our title character as he navigates the criminal underworld of Toronto. After a robbery went awry, he finds himself sucked back into the turbulent violence he has fought so long to escape. With a soundtrack by Saul Williams and Massive Attack’s 3D, the first trailer has now landed ahead of a June 11 release.
Christopher Schobert said in his TIFF review, “There is a palpable sense of exhaustion and an air of dread over nearly every scene in
I m doing this my way… Vertical Ent. has released the official trailer for
Akilla s Escape, an acclaimed crime noir film that originally premiered at last year s Toronto Film Festival last fall. The second feature from Jamaica-Canadian filmmaker Charles Officer (also of
Nurse.Fighter.Boy), the film is about the modern urban child-soldier.
Saul Williams stars as Akilla Brown, who is about to cash out of his cannabis growing business. He then captures a fifteen-year-old Jamaican boy in the aftermath of an armed robbery at his place. Over one grueling night, Akilla confronts a cycle of generational violence he thought he escaped. The cast includes