“In a festival that rarely wants for political currency,” writes Justin Chang in a dispatch from Sundance to the Los Angeles Times, “it’s surely no coincidence that Blindspotting and Monsters and Men, the first two films to screen in this year’s American dramatic competition, are both predicated on the same attention-grabbing plot point: the killing of a black man by a white police officer. . . . Directed with impressive restraint and assurance by the first-time filmmaker Reinaldo Marcus Green, [Monsters] tells a triptych of stories unfolding in present-day Brooklyn . . . Green plays out each of these stories to slow, steadily absorbing effect, avoiding every impulse toward either phony contrivance or pat resolution. Patrick Scola’s cinematography is flowing, alert and remarkably expressive.”
“On a balmy summer night, a young Nuyorican man named Manny (Anthony Ramos) witnesses a policeman killing an unarmed man whose only crime was selling loose cigarettes on a street corner,” writes Vanity Fair’s Richard Lawson. Green “first follows Manny, who recorded the incident on his phone, as he weighs whether or not to post the video online. . . . The film’s second part switches perspectives and zeroes in on a black patrol officer, Dennis (John David Washington), whose principled loyalty to police work conflicts with his lived experience. . . . The film’s final third is a poignant portrait of a teenage baseball star, Zee (Kelvin Harrison, Jr.), at the dawning of his social and political consciousness. One could see this segment as a gently rousing call to action, and it is, in a way. But the film is careful to frame Zee’s awakening as its own kind of tragedy.”
“Green seems to know that Zee’s story holds the most weight,” suggests IndieWire’s Eric Kohn. “Monsters and Men kicks into high gear with the young man’s decision to take a stand even as his career gains momentum, and a protest rally that veers from poetically inspired to terrifying is the most cinematic paean to the fervor of Black Lives Matter since the movement was born.”
“What's most notable” for David Rooney in the Hollywood Reporter “is the skill with which the writer-director shapes these real-life elements into a shattering ripple-effect narrative, somber and rigorously focused, that illustrates with quiet eloquence and moral complexity how the consequences touch all of us. . . . The story builds to a powerfully muted climax that's open-ended and provocative rather than predictably tragic, molded every step of the way by the smooth cutting of editors Scott Cummings and Justin Chan, and measured use of a quiet, pensive score by Kris Bowers.”
“If Monsters and Men seems to raise more questions than it answers, that’s true,” argues Variety’s Peter Debruge, “although too many involve an overall lack of clarity. Mixing ‘gritty’ handheld camerawork with an almost zen-like kind of restraint, Green’s approach is frustratingly thin on the kind of specifics that make for rich drama, leaving audiences to fill in the gaps.”
“We never get any resolution,” confirms Mike Ryan at Uproxx, but for him, that’s an asset: “This is a huge risk for a first-time filmmaker, and he nails it beautifully.”
There’s no byline on Screen’s review of “this surprisingly fresh and deft debut feature,” but there is this observation: “If Spike Lee’s Bed-Stuy was a brightly-colored, comic-book hip-hop vision, Green’s is an authentic and genuine space, of communal street corners and close-knit families, where the residents, after all these years, are still trying to do the right thing—even if the society doesn’t.”
“My endurance was certainly tested—it felt more like training for the Olympics than a yearly championship,” Green tells Filmmaker. “From script to screen has taken about two and half years, which in movie time, is actually pretty fast. But that’s still two and half years of grinding every day, full throttle, and with an incredible amount of support.”
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