‘Monster’ gets a belated Netflix showcase, but the cast is better than the movie
“Monster” represents a minor coup for Netflix, not as much due to the movie’s merits as who’s in it. More than three years after its festival run in 2018, the film arrives with a timely theme and a cast whose stock has soared in the intervening time including Kelvin Harrison Jr., Jharrel Jerome and John David Washington making this one for the time capsule if nothing else.
Adapted from the 1999 book by Walter Dean Myers, the film marks the feature debut of music video director Anthony Mandler, from a script by a trio of writers, among them Radha Blank, who made her directing debut last year with another Netflix acquisition, “The Forty-Year-Old Version.”