Danielle Deadwyler Archives | Deep Focus Review

40 Acres

Brian Eggert — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 00:48:11 +0000

Listen to the audio version of this review. 40 Acres is another in a long line of post-apocalyptic yarns about survivalists who contend with raiders and cannibals—not to mention their strained family dynamics. The movie combines the sensibilities of an austere drama such as The Road (2009), where a parent will do anything to ensure their child survives, with the coming-of-age trappings of a YA equivalent, where the young protagonist feels compelled to question his world (think The Maze Runner series), including his parents. However oversaturated the story may be with familiar ideas, the movie’s title hints that there’s something more on Canadian director R.T. Thorne’s mind than another formulaic genre exercise. 40 Acres alludes to how, after the Civil War in the United States, the government under Abraham Lincoln vowed to give thousands of formerly enslaved Black families forty acres of farmland and a mule. But Lincoln’s assassination gave way to President Andrew Johnson, who reversed the decision in just one of the many broken promises made to Black communities during the postwar Reconstruction era. Thorne wrote 40 Acres alongside Glenn Taylor, and they weave a shared history by centering on the Freemans, a family whose militarized matriarch, Hailey […]

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The Piano Lesson

Brian Eggert — Fri, 29 Nov 2024 17:04:23 +0000

Denzel Washington continues his project of producing screen adaptations of playwright August Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle with The Piano Lesson, the third of a proposed ten-film series. Each example in Wilson’s thematically linked plays considers the Black experience in a different decade, and the producer, with the support of Wilson’s estate, shows no pattern in selecting which installment comes next. First came Fences (2016), directed by and starring Washington, following a Pittsburgh family in the 1950s. Next came Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020), a vibrant and energetic film about the blues scene of the 1920s—and arguably the best of the adaptations so far. The Piano Lesson takes place in the 1930s and is even stagier than the previous Wilson films. Bringing his family into the mix, the producer taps his eldest son, John David Washington, to star and his youngest, Malcolm Washington, to make his directorial debut. Malcolm Washington also co-wrote the screen version with Virgil Williams (Mudbound, 2017), though it’s debatable whether this film, or any of Wilson’s plays, makes for great cinema. They’re inherently different mediums, and filmmakers often attempt to compensate for the constraints of the stage with the freedom of cinema. How fitting that Washington and sons […]

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I Saw the TV Glow

Brian Eggert — Wed, 15 May 2024 04:38:33 +0000

Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow has a rare power. Watching the film conjured specific memories about my relationship with media during adolescence. More than friends or even a fully formed identity, I had X-Men comic books, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and old movies—obsessions that made me practically unrelatable in ‘90s social cliques, before geekdom and nerdom became so commonplace. Yet, consumed with equal measures of fascination and repetition, they revealed aspects of my personality to me, even if I wasn’t always conscious of what they revealed. TV shows and cinema have that effect on certain individuals; it’s part of what makes media special. You might not be able to articulate what you love about it or why you keep returning to it, but there’s something inside that makes a connection. You might watch your favorite film ten times, but on that eleventh viewing, when you’re 40 years old, suddenly, you realize why you’ve kept coming back for more for so long. That lesson or feeling might become clear at just the right moment, or maybe it never materializes and remains buried in your subconscious. Schoenbrun’s film is about that relationship and, much like their last film, gives […]

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Till

Brian Eggert — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 13:24:07 +0000

Till is a moving dramatization of Emmett Till’s lynching in 1955 and his mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s activism in the wake of her son’s death. This atrocious hate crime in the Jim Crow South reverberated throughout the Civil Rights Movement, so much so that it’s surprising this story hasn’t been turned into a major motion picture before. Although Till’s murder has been the subject of countless documentaries and books, it has never been the subject of a narrative feature. Then again, the historical account took place in a country where a grand jury refused to indict the murderers, who confessed to the crime to Look magazine not long after a jury of all white male Mississippians absolved them of any wrongdoing; where Congress didn’t enact the Emmett Till Antilynching Act until 2022; and where the very notion of thinking critically about America’s history with racism throws a segment of the population into an uproar. To be sure, it’s not altogether surprising that Till’s name goes unexamined in many American school curriculums. Doubtlessly, this will be the first time many viewers learn anything about Emmett Till. But it’s better late than never when it comes to this accessible film, which explores what […]

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The Harder They Fall

Brian Eggert — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 18:35:37 +0000

A lone rider stands on the tracks, waiting for the fast-approaching locomotive. Seeing what lies ahead, the conductor pulls the brake lever, sending squeals and sparks into the air until the train stops at the last moment. Under a long coat and hat, Regina King steps off her horse and stands defiantly. Infuriated, the conductor approaches her and shouts, “The hell are you doing? That ain’t no way to board a train, you damn, stupid n—.” But she stops his slur with a bullet. In one of many wildly entertaining sequences in The Harder They Fall, King appears as Trudy Smith, who has come to free her gang’s leader, Rufus Buck, from a prison transport. Set in a revisionist version of the Wild West, the film follows an incredible roster of Black performers playing real-life outlaws, gunslingers, thieves, and lawmen overlooked by history. But rather than commenting on race in the Old West, the film secures a place in the Western genre for people of color. Historically, Westerns only marginally acknowledge Black people. Yet, The Harder They Fall crafts an escapist, bloody, and stylish film about a rivalry between the Nat Love Gang and the Rufus Buck Gang, who shoot […]

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