In the long history of revenge movies, not often has the prospect of taking revenge felt genuinely frightening. And not in the sense of the protagonists being caught and facing tangible consequence for what they consider a righteous goal but society at large will not; no, in a moral sense of doing harm and the horror of that, no matter what harmful act beget the whole idea entirely. It’s a very interesting theme that sets Aleshea Harris’s Is God Is apart from other movies of its type, and gives it a tension so many revenge thrillers don’t bother to address. I’m especially curious about how it comes across on stage, Harris’s filmmaking debut being an adaptation of her own off-Broadway play that won a handful of Obie Awards in 2018. Certainly through stretches of this movie you wouldn’t be able to tell it was crafted for a more visually limited medium -although other aspects certainly bear the hallmarks (a series of ESP exchanges that likely originate as asides). But the themes are clea...
From the moment that critic Robert Daniels’s one-star review of the movie Michael was shared on Twitter, he was harangued by a tidal wave of backlash from both intense fans of Michael Jackson and ordinary users who merely liked the film he panned. His critiques were broadly comparable to other critics: aimed at the conflict-of-interest oversight of the Jackson family on the movie’s production, the bland characterization of the singer’s life and family, and the hagiographic attitude sapping away any dimension from Jackson along with his flaws. “A filmed playlist in search of a story” he characterizes it sharply. Against the furor, he stood his ground and engaged with some comments, most of which were in bad faith. It was blatantly obvious that a lot of them hadn’t actually read the review, assuming Daniels took issue with the movie’s omission of Jackson’s later controversies, legal issues, and pedophilia allegations -things he barely alludes to. Daniels was not alone in this -critics ...