Courtesy photo
JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH
(in theaters and HBO Max)
 During the late 1960s, charismatic leader Fred Hampton (David Kaluuya) serves as the chairman of the Black Panther Party in Chicago.
After getting arrested for stealing cars and posing as an FBI agent, William OâNeal (Lakeith Stanfield) is recruited by the FBI to infiltrate the Black Panthers and to report to FBI Agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) about the activities of Hampton.
Shaka King directs this stunning recreation of the racial inequities of the time with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen) demanding that Panther leaders be captured. Kaluuya gives a powerful performance as young orator Hampton, who exhibits bravery and strength while pursuing justice for Black people.
In this powerful 19th century romance set in the American Northeast, Abigail (Katherine Waterston), a farmer’s wife, and her new neighbor Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) find themselves irrevocably drawn to each other. A grieving Abigail tends to her withdrawn husband Dyer (Casey Affleck) as free-spirit Tallie bristles at the jealous control of her husband Finney (Christopher Abbott), when together their intimacy begins to fill a void in each other's lives they never knew existed. Directed by Mona Fastvold and scripted by Jim Shepard and Ron Hansen, The World To Come explores how isolation is overcome by the intensity of human connection.
The film’s strangely wooden timbre reigns over it to overpowering effect, making you wonder when its lead characters would at long last break out of it.
Historical drama “The World to Come” has so much going for it atmosphere, locations, situational tensions and performances that its lingering diffuseness is puzzling, like a promised but undelivered rain for a well-laid seedbed.
The weight of seasons is a time marker of sorts for this 19th-century lesbian romance between neighboring pioneer wives played by Katherine Waterston and Vanessa Kirby, and in director Mona Fastvold’s stark, attentive movie, the interior weather is as fully expressed as the exterior kind. But in adapting short story maestro Jim Shepard’s tale of intense attraction bred in unforgiving isolation, the movie mistakes wordiness for worthiness and telling for showing.