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"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,  except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted , shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction." –Thirteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution

When the 13 th  amendment was ratified in 1865, its drafters left themselves a large, very exploitable loophole in the guise of an easily missed clause in its definition. That clause, which converts slavery from a legal business model to an equally legal method of punishment for criminals, is the subject of the Netflix documentary “13th.” Premiering tonight at the New York Film Festival, “13th” is the first documentary to open the festival in its 54 year history. Director Ava DuVernay ’s takes an unflinching, well-informed and thoroughly researched look at the American system of incarceration, specifically how the prison industrial complex affects people of color. Her analysis could not be more timely nor more infuriating. The film builds its case piece by shattering piece, inspiring levels of shock and outrage that stun the viewer, leaving one shaken and disturbed before closing out on a visual note of hope designed to keep us on the hook as advocates for change.

“13th” begins with an alarming statistic: One out of four African-American males will serve prison time at one point or another in their lives. Our journey begins from there, with a slew of familiar and occasionally surprising talking heads filling the frame and providing information. DuVernay not only interviews liberal scholars and activists for the cause like Angela Davis , Henry Louis Gates and Van Jones, she also devotes screen time to conservatives such as Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. Each interviewee is shot in a location that evokes an industrial setting, which visually supports the theme of prison as a factory churning out the free labor that the 13th Amendment supposedly dismantled when it abolished slavery.

We’re told that, after the Civil War, the economy of the former Confederate States of America was decimated. Their primary source of income, slaves, were no longer obligated to line Southerners’ pockets with their blood, sweat and tears. Unless, of course, they were criminals. “Except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted” reads the loophole in the law. In the first iteration of a “Southern strategy,” hundreds of newly emancipated slaves were re-enlisted into free, legal servitude courtesy of minor or trumped-up charges. The duly convicted part may have been questionable, but by no means did it need to be justifiably proven.

So begins a cycle that DuVernay examines in each of its evolving iterations; when one method of subservience-based terror falls out of favor, another takes its place. The list feels endless and includes lynching, Jim Crow, Nixon’s presidential campaign, Reagan’s War on Drugs, Bill Clinton ’s Three Strikes and mandatory sentencing laws and the current cash-for-prisoners model that generates millions for private bail and incarceration firms.

That last item is a major point of discussion in “13th”, with an onscreen graphic keeping tally of the number of prisoners in the system as the years pass. Starting in the 1940’s, the curve of the prisoner count graph begins rising slowly though steeply. A meteoric rise began during the Civil Rights movement and continued into the current day. As this statistic rises, so does the level of decimation of families of color. The stronger the protest for rights, the harder the system fights back against it with means of incarceration. Profit becomes the major by-product of this cycle, with an organization called ALEC providing a scary, sinister influence on building laws that make its corporate members richer.

Several times throughout “13th” there is a shock cut to the word CRIMINAL, which stands alone against a black background and is centered on the huge movie screen. It serves as a reminder that far too often, people of color are seen as simply that, regardless of who they are. Starting with D.W. Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation”, DuVernay traces the myth of the scary Black felon with supernatural levels of strength and deviant sexual potency, a myth designed to terrify the majority into believing that only White people were truly human and deserving of proper treatment. This dehumanization allowed for the acceptance of laws and ideas that had more than a hint of bias. We see higher sentences given for crack vs. cocaine possession and plea bargains accepted by innocent people too terrified to go to trial. We also learn that a troubling percentage of people remain in jail because they’re too poor to post their own bail. And regardless of your color, if you’re a felon, you can no longer vote to change the laws that may have unfairly prosecuted you. You lose a primary right all Americans have.

“13th” covers a lot of ground as it works its way to the current days of Black Lives Matter and the terrifying videos of the endless list of African-Americans being shot by police or folks who supposedly “stood their ground.” On her journey to this point, DuVernay doesn’t let either political party off the hook, nor does she ignore the fact that many people of color bought into the “law and order” philosophies that led to the current situation. We see Hillary Clinton talking about “super-predators” and Donald Trump ’s full-page ad advocating the death penalty for the Central Park Five (who, as a reminder, were all innocent). We also see people like African-American congressman Charlie Rangel, who originally was on board with the tough on crime laws President Clinton signed into law.

By the time we get to the montage of the deaths of Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and others (not to mention the huge, screen-covering graphic of names of African-Americans shot by law enforcement), “13th” has already proven its thesis on how such events can not only occur, but can also seem sadly like “business as usual.” It’s a devastating finale to the film, one that follows an onscreen discussion about whether or not the destruction of Black bodies should be run ad nauseum on cable news programs. DuVernay opts to show the footage, with an onscreen disclaimer that it’s being shown with permission by the families of the victims, something she did not need to seek but did so out of respect.

Between the lines, “13th” boldly asks the question if African-Americans were actually ever truly “free” in this country. We are freer, as this generation has it a lot easier than our ancestors who were enslaved, but the question of being as completely “free” as our White compatriots hangs in the air. If not, will the day come when all things will be equal? The final takeaway of “13th” is that change must come not from politicians, but from the hearts and minds of the American people.

Despite the heavy subject matter, DuVernay ends the film with joyful scenes of children and adults of color enjoying themselves in a variety of activities. It reminds us, as she said in her Q&A with NYFF director Kent Jones , that “Black trauma is not our entire lives. There is also Black joy.” That inspiring message, and all the important, educational information provided by this excellent documentary, make “13th” a must-see.

"13th" is currently streaming on Netflix.

Odie Henderson

Odie "Odienator" Henderson has spent over 33 years working in Information Technology. He runs the blogs Big Media Vandalism and Tales of Odienary Madness. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire  here .

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13th (2016)

100 minutes

• Ava DuVernay

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Review: ‘13TH,’ the Journey From Shackles to Prison Bars

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By Manohla Dargis

• Sept. 29, 2016

Powerful, infuriating and at times overwhelming, Ava DuVernay’s documentary “13TH” will get your blood boiling and tear ducts leaking. It shakes you up, but it also challenges your ideas about the intersection of race, justice and mass incarceration in the United States, subject matter that could not sound less cinematic. Yet Ms. DuVernay — best known for “Selma,” and a filmmaker whose art has become increasingly inseparable from her activism — has made a movie that’s as timely as the latest Black Lives Matter protest and the approaching presidential election.

The movie hinges on the 13th Amendment, as the title indicates, in ways that may be surprising, though less so for those familiar with Michelle Alexander’s 2010 best seller, “ The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” Ratified in 1865, the amendment states in full: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” As Ms. Alexander underscores, slavery was abolished for everyone except criminals. (“13TH” opens the New York Film Festival on Friday; it will be in theaters and on Netflix beginning on Oct. 7 .)

In her book, Ms. Alexander (the most charismatic of the movie’s interviewees) argues that mass incarceration exists on a continuum with slavery and Jim Crow. As one of “the three major racialized systems of control adopted in the United States to date,” it ensures “the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race.” Under the old Jim Crow, state laws instituted different rules for blacks and whites, segregating them under the doctrine of separate but equal . Now, with the United States having 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, a disproportionate number of whom are black, mass incarceration has become “metaphorically, the new Jim Crow.”

Written by Ms. DuVernay and Spencer Averick , “13TH” picks up Ms. Alexander’s baton and sprints through the history of American race and incarceration with seamless economy. (Mr. Averick also edited the movie.) In its first 30 minutes, the documentary touches on chattel slavery; D. W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation”; Emmett Till ; the civil rights movement; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Richard M. Nixon; and Ronald Reagan’s declaration of the war on drugs. By the time her movie ends, Ms. DuVernay has delivered a stirring treatise on the prison industrial complex through a nexus of racism, capitalism, policies and politics. It sounds exhausting, but it’s electrifying.

Speed is one reason — you’re racing through history witness by witness, ghastly statistic by statistic — but you’re also charged up by how the movie’s voices rise and converge. It’s like being in a room with the smartest people around, all intent on rocking your world. Ms. DuVernay is working within a familiar documentary idiom that weaves original, handsomely shot talking-head interviews with well-researched, occasionally surprising and gravely disturbing archival material. All these sources, in turn, have been shaped into discrete sections that are introduced with music and animation. Every so often, the animation underscores an interviewee’s point, as in one sequence in which the word “freedom” morphs into flying birds and then the Stars and Stripes and then a slave ship.

With few exceptions, the movie’s voices — including most of its several dozen interviewees — speak in concert. Some (like a galvanizing Angela Davis) are more effective and persuasive than others; at least one — Newt Gingrich, speaking startling truth to power — is a jaw-dropper. Even with its surprise guests, the movie isn’t especially dialectical; it also isn’t mainstream journalism. Ms. DuVernay presents both sides of the story, as it were (racism versus civil rights). Yet she doesn’t call on, say, politicians who have voted against civil rights measures for their thoughts on the history of race in the United States. She begins from the premise that white supremacy has already had its say for centuries.

Ms. Alexander has been criticized for oversimplifying the origins of mass incarceration in “The New Jim Crow.” This may account for why Ms. DuVernay, in perhaps a bid to pre-empt similar criticism, does include a few divergent voices, including the conservative lobbyist Grover Norquist , who frankly comes off as an exemplar of blinkered power and racial myopia. He pops up in a section on the rise off mass incarceration during the 1980s that’s tied to crack cocaine and the racial gap in arrests and sentencing. Mr. Norquist puts the onus for this disparity on politicians (calling out United States Representative Charles B. Rangel, another interviewee), stating that it had nothing to do with — as he puts it — “mean white people.”

The documentary might have benefited from more articulate jaggedly discordant voices than Mr. Norquist’s to enrich the dialogue and as a reminder of the other views on race, history and the criminal justice system, including those in the mainstream. One popular textbook, “The American System of Criminal Justice,” states that the 13th Amendment “had little impact on criminal justice.” And a booklet on the Constitution, “ Know Your Rights ,” available through the Justice Department, reads: “The 13th Amendment protects every person in America — all races and creeds, citizens and noncitizens, children and adults — from the bondage of slavery. It is unconstitutional for slavery to exist in any form or by any name.”

Ms. DuVernay forcefully and sorrowfully challenges that confident assertion, tracing the history of systems of racial control from the years after the abolition of slavery all the way to George Zimmerman’s speaking to a police dispatcher about the 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. “He’s got his hand in his waistband,” we hear Mr. Zimmerman say shortly before fatally shooting Mr. Martin. “And he’s a black male.” When this documentary reaches its culmination, which features graphic videos of one after another black man being shot by police, Ms. DuVernay’s rigorously controlled deconstruction of crime, punishment and race in the United States has become a piercing, keening cry.

Ms. DuVernay isn’t the only American director to take on race and the prison industrial complex (Eugene Jarecki’s “ The House I Live In ” charts adjacent terrain), but hers is a powerful cinematic call to conscience, partly because of how she lays bare the soul of our country. Because, as she sifts through American history, you grasp the larger implications of her argument: The United States did not just criminalize a select group of black people. It criminalized black people as a whole, a process that, in addition to destroying untold lives, effectively transferred the guilt for slavery from the people who perpetuated it to the very people who suffered through it.

“13TH” is not rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

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13th review – Ava DuVernay's angry, persuasive film about the jailing of black men

The Selma director’s fiercely radical Netflix documentary argues that America’s 13th constitutional amendment perpetuated a link between prison and slavery

Ava DuVernay , director of the Martin Luther King drama Selma, has made a fiercely radical documentary for Netflix in sympathy with the Black Lives Matter movement. Her film argues that America’s incarceration of black men is a phenomenon with its roots in slavery, and that the resemblances are not minor or ironic echoes but symptoms of the same structural cause. Ironically, it is about the 13th constitutional amendment, which abolished slavery and the state’s right to deprive a person of liberty but with the specific exception of “criminals”, thus forging a link in the judicial mindset between imprisonment and slavery. It is an attitude that persists into the Jim Crow era , the Nixon/Reagan wars on crime and drugs, the Clinton three-strikes rule … and beyond. The state’s punitive energies were always targeted at the poorest, the least able to pay bail, the likeliest to be involved in crime and the most liable to have their protest criminalised. It’s like taking the Matrix red pill when you listen to statements from Nixon aide John Ehrlichman and Reagan consigliere Lee Atwater making it clear that attacks on “drugs” and “crime” are euphemisms for race. And with private firms running jails and lobbying Washington, black males have become raw material for a corporate legal industry. An intensely angry and persuasive piece of film-making, though maybe letting Bill and Hillary off the hook, a little bit.

• Documentary films
• Ava DuVernay
• Black Lives Matter movement

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13TH Reviews

DuVernay boldly explores how prisons and detention centers are making a profit off of free prison labor, most of it done by black men which begs the question, is slavery really dead?

Full Review | Dec 29, 2021

DuVernay brings to bear all of her cinematic and storytelling skills to wrap a thoroughly researched investigation into a most compelling documentary about the long lasting but little known effects of 13th Amendment.

Full Review | Nov 30, 2021

This fierce and fearless documentary is so brilliantly constructed that its message is inspiring as well as infuriating.

Ava DuVernay's 13TH is essential viewing on the history of racism in America - and how the warehousing of black men in contemporary corporate prisons is rooted in the slavery of the past.

DuVernay underscores the blatant yet rarely discussed clause within the 13th amendment of the Constitution.

Ferociously intelligent, rigorous and impassioned, DuVernay's film is a battle cry for democracy.

Silence is oppression, and by being silent we become tolerant. Impressive documentary, terrifying truth. Ava DuVernay channels understanding today through the knowledge of the past. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Mar 1, 2021

13th will fill your mouth with bitter anger but, if there's a way forward, it's one a filmmaker like DuVernay can get behind. There's hope in the power of imagery.

Full Review | Jan 5, 2021

Ava DuVernay's scathing documentary explores the injustices at the heart of America's painful racial history by examining the systemic failures of the penal system.

Full Review | Oct 27, 2020

[Ava DuVernay] has made a searing, detailed exploration of racial inequality as seen through the prison system.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Jul 11, 2020

..a thoroughly persuasive and artfully crafted argument.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 4, 2020

While enormously stimulating and often angering, the film is not without its flaws.

Full Review | Jun 25, 2020

Ava DuVernay probes the dark history of racial inequality the haunts the U.S., paying particular attention to the country's prison system and the way it targets and exploits African-Americans.

Full Review | Jun 22, 2020

Brutal, necessary watch for all who want to understand why America operates with impunity re its horrendous treatment of Black people. Incisive and shocking, moreso now than when it debuted in 2016.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jun 7, 2020

...13th explores legal measures enacted to ensure African Americans are not truly free and equal, from drugs laws that disproportionately affect them to voter suppression ...

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 31, 2019

From Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Bulworth, the cause of political injustice always comes back to corruption. Ava DuVernay's documentary, 13th, follows a bit too glibly in this tradition-though it also, and admirably, transcends it.

Full Review | Sep 18, 2019

Systems of oppression tend to reinvent themselves, according to 13TH. Is there a way to move past them?

Full Review | Sep 11, 2019

What we have here is an honest-to-god portfolio of horror and insanity, an exceedingly well-structured talking-head essay on the (black) body politic...

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 15, 2019

With clarity and focus, Ava DuVernay traces a history of inequality that has resulted in the United States having the highest incarceration rate in the world, in her documentary, 13TH.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 4, 2018

The film transcends its plainness with the sheer force of its intelligence and content.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 4, 2018

New York Film Festival Review: ‘13TH’

Ava DuVernay's documentary on the era of mass incarceration opens the New York Film Festival on a note of spectacular truth.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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Ava DuVernay ’s “ 13TH ” is the first documentary ever to be selected as the opening-night film of The New York Film Festival. (It premieres at Lincoln Center on Sept. 30.) That lends a momentous aura to what is already, each year, a momentous event. In this case, the precedent feels spiritually right. Movies, as both a business and an entertainment form, are struggling to define themselves in the 21st century, but there’s no doubt that we’re in the high renaissance era of documentary. Each week, every day, in theaters and on VOD, on cable channels and networks and streaming services, you can see movies that dive into topical issues with the investigative fury we once expected from newspapers. You can see movies that conjure (as maybe only movies can) the ghosts and artifacts and living semiotics of history, and that hold you in their grip with a force and excitement that match that of any dramatic feature. “13TH” is a movie that does all those things at once. More than just another documentary, it’s a crucial and stirring document — of racism and injustice, of politics and the big-picture design of America — that, I think, will be watched and referenced for years to come.

DuVernay, the brilliant director of “Selma,” has made a film that possesses a piercing relevance in the age of Black Lives Matter and the unspeakable horror and tragedy of escalated police shootings. “13TH” looks at the current American state of “mass incarceration,” a phrase that has quickly grown numbing with repetition; DuVernay puts the (disturbing) feeling back into it. She takes off from an era in which our nation — as President Obama observes in the film’s opening moments — contains just 5% of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. DuVernay’s chronicle of this crisis is heartrending and enraging; if that’s all the movie did, it would be invaluable. Yet “13TH” also travels deep into history, connecting every link in the chain to reveal how we got here. The metaphor is intentional: DuVernay’s message is that the psychodynamics of slavery, and the economic logistics of it, have never gone away. Instead, they went underground, mutating into different forms (Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the “war on drugs”) as the decades rolled on.

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That’s a bold thesis, one you might imagine will put certain audiences on the defensive. DuVernay, though, works with a slow, sure hand that never risks oversimplifying the past. On the contrary, she brings the psychological history of what has gone on in this country to life in a way that few mainstream investigations or (God help us) liberal message movies have done. When you watch “13TH,” you feel that you’re seeing an essential dimension of America with new vision. That’s what a cathartically clear-eyed work of documentary art can do.

DuVernay, of course, is far from the first social critic to observe that slavery, for all practical purposes, didn’t end in 1865. Yet she examines its legacy with freshly devastating insight. In recent years, “The Birth of a Nation,” the 1915 D.W. Griffith landmark that essentially invented feature filmmaking as we know it, has been treated as such a racist pariah of a movie that its very existence has, to a degree, been shunned. The film’s racism (more than racism; let’s call it what it was — an exhortation to terrorism and racist violence) is undeniable, a stain on our country and the DNA of its popular culture. Yet Griffith’s power as a filmmaker is relevant as well, and DuVernay explores the movie in all its contradictions. The African-American Studies scholar Jelani Cobb unpacks “The Birth of a Nation” with blistering eloquence, describing how Griffith, in his portrayal of the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan, invented the image of the burning cross, and how the film offered “a tremendously accurate prediction of how race would operate in the United States.” Yet where does the escalation of that oppression turn into the rise of prison culture?

“13TH” traces the connection back to the end of the Civil War, and — in a grand horrific irony — to the passage of the 13th Amendment itself, which abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” This meant that once the war was over, former slaves could be arrested on trivial charges like vagrancy and loitering and turned into prisoners, and just like that…they were slaves again. Hence the image of men singing spirituals on the chain gang: a kind of legalized slavery. The link to “The Birth of a Nation” is that Griffith, working with actors in blackface, took the image of the “black criminal” and turned it into a demonic mythology that undergirded the 20th century. The “black criminal” became a monster to be feared and repressed, resulting in a vicious cycle that continues to this day: the presumption of black guilt in crime, leading to conviction, leading to incarceration, leading to a de facto systemization of imprisonment that is really the ethos of slavery in disguise.

In “13TH,” this narrative of racial tyranny is told with a nimble cinematic power that awakens your senses even as it sickens your moral center. Yet the film doesn’t become revelatory until it reaches the Civil Rights era, a moment when a lot of people (i.e., white liberals) began to congratulate themselves for having finally confronted the great American race problem and taken the big steps to “solve” it. Even if you acknowledged that we still had miles to go, no one denied that the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act — and the slow prying apart of cultural barriers that had begun to take place in the ’60s — amounted to the stirrings of a revolution. What DuVernay homes in on is the calculated counterattack waged by the establishment.

We all know about the rise, within the Republican Party, of the Southern strategy, though DuVernay features an extraordinary audio recording of Lee Atwater articulating it that puts a chill in your bones. And we know about the cataclysm of the assassinations, from Malcolm to Martin to Fred Hampton — though Van Jones testifies, with furious insight, about how terrifyingly it damaged the black community to have an entire generation of leaders stripped away. But the leap of perception made by “13TH” is to demonstrate how the Civil Rights movement, in spelling the end of the Jim Crow era, caused the white power structure to ask: What can we put in its place? How can we continue to segregate? The answer was the “war on crime” and the “war on drugs.” They were born together in the Nixon era, and they were always code for “Let’s put them behind bars.” DuVernay plays astonishing recorded testimony from John Ehrlichman, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, in which he admits that the government created a crackdown that targeted left-wing dissidents…and black people. But always with the excuse of fighting the drug scourge. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs?” asks Ehrlichman. “Of course we did.”

The “war on drugs” is, of course, far more associated with President Reagan, who launched his version in 1982 (with Nancy shouting “Just say no!” like a cheerleader from the sidelines). Many people reflexively went along with it, precisely because defending serious drug use never seemed like a viable alternative position. What happened, though, was that a health issue got turned into a crime issue. And selectively, hypocritically so. Think about it: If you learned today that a family member, or friend, or work colleague was a heroin addict, would you react by calling the police and having that person arrested? That would seem insane — but that’s what we did as a culture to thousands of inner-city drug abusers. In recent years, there has been much liberal criticism of the war on drugs as an epic waste of money and resources, but “13TH” — rightly — recontextualizes the war on drugs as a race war.

DuVernay keeps flashing a time-clock of the rising prison population. In 1970, it was 357,292, and by 1980 it had risen it 513,900. In 1990, it was 1,179,200, and it is currently 2.3 million. (Forty percent of those prisoners are African-American.) It’s the biggest U.S. growth industry! The terrible thing is, I’m not joking. DuVernay anatomizes the racist and capitalist underpinnings of the era of mass incarceration in a way that makes “13TH” an indelible act of social-political inquiry. The movie fills in each level of how it works, starting with the rise of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the lobbying club on steroids that unites corporate leaders and politicians, so that the corporate leaders can write big checks and craft the legislation that is then “recommended” to Congress. As the film reveals, it was ALEC that came up with the cornerstones of President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill: the mandatory sentencing, the “three strikes” clause, and so on.

The conflict of interest is stunning. For a long time, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison company, was a member of ALEC, and so was Wal-Mart, which had a vested interested in playing up “stand your ground” laws because the result of those laws is that gun sales shot up (and Wal-Mart is a major merchandiser of firearms). The very notion that the American prison system is now being run by private corporations, with a profiteering interest in maintaining a large prison population, represents a fundamental — and indefensible — transfer of power in our society. The entire prison system has become a racket. The word for that situation is…well, I’m a film critic, not an editorial writer, so I won’t say the word. What I will say is: Watch “13TH” and draw your own conclusion.

There are some who may carp at the powerful case Ava DuVernay makes in “13TH.” Because her take on these issues is complex, she can’t point every time to a smoking gun (though her film has several holsters’ worth of them). Yet one of the staggering things this movie captures is how racism could be the driving force behind something as seismic as the rise of mass incarceration in America, yet that racism could remain in many ways “invisible.” So some people will be driven to say the racism isn’t there. But what they’re really saying is: It’s not a white people problem. A film as starkly humane as “13TH” makes you realize that it’s everyone’s problem.

Reviewed online, Sept. 29, 2016. Running time: 100 MIN.

• Production: A Netflix release. Producers: Ava DuVernay, Howard Barish. Executive producers: Lisa Nishimura, Ben Cotner, Adam Del Deo, Angus Wall, Jason Sterman.
• Crew: Director: Ava DuVernay. Screenplay: DuVernay, Spencer Averick. Camera (color, widescreen): Hans Charles, Kira Kelly. Editor: Spencer Averick.
• With: Melina Abdullah, Michelle Alexander, Cory Booker, Dolores Canales, Gina Clayton, Jelani Cobb, Malkia Cyril, Angela Davis, Craig DeRoche, David Dinkins, Baz Dreisinger, Kevin Gannon, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Newt Gingrich, Lisa Graves, Van Jones.

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’13th’ Review: Damning Doc on Racist Prison System Deserves an Oscar

By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Note to the Academy: The Oscar for this year’s Best Documentary belongs to 13th, Ava DuVernay’s incendiary, indelible and indispensable document about the myth of racial equality in America. As we all learned in school, the 13th amendment – enacted on Jan. 31, 1865 – abolished involuntary servitude in these United States. Like hell it did. There was a loophole, which basically said no servitude “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Translation: If you’re white and rich enough to afford a lawyer, no problem, If you’re a minority with nothing, you’re fucked. Welcome to the era of mass criminalization and the prison industrial complex, where African-American inmates are forced into unpaid manual labor by a systemic corporate culture that profits from human bondage. Slavery is alive and well. And hot damn, do profiteers want it to continue.

DuVernay, with academic precision and fervent heart, marshals the evidence. Her talking heads, from Angela Davis to (yikes!) Newt Gingrich, illuminate the journey with blistering clarity. Yes, we’re heard some of this before, but only half listening, only half considering the appalling implications. DuVernay, as she has with her feature films Selma and Middle of Nowhere, makes it impossible to turn away. Her film goes by in a riveting rush, but astonishes in every frame with its ferocity and feeling. The archival footage is horrific, from a clip from D.W. Griffith’s 1915 race-demonizing, rape-baiting The Birth of a Nation to Donald Trump getting all nostalgic about “the good old days” when black protestors at rallies would get a solid police bashing and be “carried out on a stretcher.” One clip, showing a black marcher during the civil-rights era getting his hat repeatedly knocked off his head by a white mob, will leave you beyond tears. And the hatred is only growing. These days, there’s a new code name for police shootings of unarmed blacks: law and order.

DuVernay has molded her doc into a living history of slavery as an institution that won’t quit. Her voice, heard through a chorus of other committed voices, is a wake-up call none of us can afford to ignore. Don’t think it can’t happen here – look around, it is happening. 13th, available in theaters and on Netflix, is one for the cinema time capsule, a record of shame so powerful that it just might change things. Godspeed.

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Ava DuVernay’s 13th Is an Essential, If Imperfect, Look at Race Relations and Incarceration

The New York Film Festival has opened for the first time in its 54-year history with a documentary, 13th , directed by Ava DuVernay, of Selma . What’s surprising is that it’s not a formally innovative work but a conventional talking-heads doc, made for Netflix. Why did the good people at the Film Society of Lincoln Center give it this prestigious platform? I imagine because this is an election year — the most potentially cataclysmic in our lifetime — and the programmers want the film to reach a moneyed, influential audience and the media attuned to its responses. But they’re also paying tribute to film’s scope. DuVernay has attempted to give mass incarceration (2.3 million people in the U.S., 40 percent of them black), Black Lives Matter, and white racism an economic context. “Law and order,” the film argues, is a code phrase for a form of slavery that exists right now, unrecognized.

The title refers to the constitutional amendment that freed the slaves — but left them to their own devices in a crushed economy and a predatory culture. The irony, DuVernay says, is that the culture promptly recast blacks as the predators, the threats to social order as well as the virtue of white women. She invokes D.W. Griffith’s 1919 The Birth of a Nation to far greater effect than Nate Parker in his shockingly crude new film of the same name. (I was surprised that Parker’s film wasn’t chosen for the NYFF — until I saw it.) The point we’re meant to take away is that one form of slavery was replaced by another. Prison labor isn’t covered by the 13th Amendment.

From the outset, black leaders were criminalized and have remained so, even after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. (I still have a bone to pick with DuVernay about her vilification of LBJ in Selma , which was specious, opportunistic, and, more important, unworthy of her.) J. Edgar Hoover brought the full force of his “bureau” on some of the most visionary civil-rights activists of our time. Fred Hampton was shot to death in his bed, though Angela Davis somehow escaped being killed or imprisoned and is interviewed (to great effect) in the film. Top Nixon aide and Watergate felon John Ehrlichman is quoted on the purposeful demonization of anti-war activists and the drug culture.

I have my issues with some of DuVernay’s subjects, who argue that crack, an “inner city” drug, was treated more harshly than cocaine, a suburban white drug. Maybe, but crack was and has been proven to be more addictive and more dangerous, and the crime in its wake wasn’t, uh, trumped-up. You’d think from 13th that crime didn’t exist. There’s no attempt to find a middle ground between the hyperbolic “super-predators” — a term we see then-First Lady Hillary Clinton throwing around — and genuine predators. (Yes, I am the stereotypical liberal who has been mugged — twice, once with a degree of force. It did not turn me into a reactionary, but I bridle when I hear that urban crime in the ‘80s was largely the creation of the media.) Nor does DuVernay mention that even as five innocent black men were arrested and convicted for the brutal sexual assault on a Central Park jogger, one black newspaper took to calling the victim, “the Central Park hussy.” It was insane time and we were all confused and scared — white and black.

But in the main 13th makes connections that haven’t been made in a mainstream documentary before. Republican strategists like Lee Atwater used Willie Horton not just to get George H.W. Bush elected over Mike Dukakis but to set in motion the unprecedented construction of prisons, some for-profit, all of which needed to be filled. Bill Clinton’s omnibus crime bill and three-strikes law made the situation even worse for blacks, and DuVernay throws a spotlight on the big-business-funded ALEC — the American Legislative Exchange Council — which turns out to be the author of many of the laws that have helped pack for-profit private prisons (which use virtual slave labor). The movie argues that this mindset — and a militarized police force — has made beatings and murders of prisoners epidemic. Lincoln Center moviegoers who wish to pay tribute to one of ALEC’s biggest allies — Koch Industries — can stroll across the plaza and wave at the David H. Koch Theater.

13th has its mannerisms. No one interviewed looks at the camera, which is almost always arcing around him or her. The movie is frankly exhausting, with too much information (and too many brilliant interviewees) to do justice to here. You simply need to see it. Even in its overreaching, it’s vital. And your jaw will drop as Donald Trump waxes about the good old days when protesters were carried out of rallies in a stretcher — and we see images of those good old days that prove they weren’t so good for blacks.

As for the rest of the festival, well: I’m still working through it. Among its treasures is Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight , a quasi-romance (emphasis on quasi, but with lingering romanticism) that hype would bruise: It’s so sensitive in its touch that the usual superlatives sound unusually crass. Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea is among the bleakest films I’ve seen in years, although every drop of its despair is earned. There will be much to say about the refugee documentary Fire at Sea , Paul Verhoeven’s provocative (to say the least) S&M drama, Elle , and so much more. This could well be the most provocative NYFF in years.

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Review: Ava DuVernay’s documentary ‘13th’ simmers with anger and burns with eloquence

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It’s President Obama’s voice we hear first. “So let’s look at the statistics,” he says. “The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners. Think about that.”

Which is what “13th,” Ava DuVernay’s smart, powerful and disturbing documentary, proceeds to make us do.

As persuasively argued as it is angry, and it is very angry, “13th” follows that statistic with another, equally unsettling one. African Americans make up 6.5% of the American population but 40.2% of the prison populace. While a white male has a 1 in 17 chance of ending up behind bars, for black males it is 1 in 3.

How did this situation happen, where did it come from? How did America end up with the highest rate of incarceration in the world? How did our prison population go from 196,441 in 1970 to nearly 2.3 million today?

Named after the constitutional amendment that ended slavery, DuVernay’s follow up to best picture Oscar nominee “Selma” reminds us that this state of affairs did not take place overnight.

Offering a brisk, cogently argued alternative to the conventionally taught American story, allied in that sense to Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” DuVernay gives us a documentary that systematically covers a lot of territory, a century and a half of race relations in this country in fact.

If it is packed with facts, statistics and on-camera thoughts — from top-drawer academics like Henry Louis Gates, Michelle Alexander (author of the groundbreaking “The New Jim Crow”) and Angela Davis as well as assorted notables including Sen. Cory Booker, Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist — it is because there is so much to deal with.

In addition to these incisive talking heads, “13th” provides a great deal of newsreel and documentary material (footage of a white Little Rock mob beating up black journalist L. Alex Wilson, later the editor of the Chicago Defender, is especially chilling).

And music plays a key role as well, not only with songs like Nina Simone’s version of “Work Song” heard on the sound track, but with key words from rap lyrics like Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe the Hype” appearing as arresting large type on the screen.

As put together by DuVernay’s longtime editor, Spencer Averick (who also shares co-writing credit with the director), everything in “13th” illuminates what is convincingly presented as a sad and tragic story that we are still living today.

The film’s premise is that while the 13th Amendment to the Constitution eliminated slavery and involuntary servitude, it in effect had an unintentional loophole that asserted “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

For the South after the end of the Civil War, says University of Connecticut professor Jelani Cobb, the question became how to replace the 4 million slaves who were the critical component of the region’s economic system.

The answer turned out to be mass arrests for minor crimes such as loitering and vagrancy and the creation of a system of convict leasing that allowed prisoners to work for private parties.

At the same time, what one academic calls “the mythology of black criminality” was created, with D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “The Birth of a Nation,” with its racist images of rapacious, animalistic behavior, being a key element, leading to a major revival of the Ku Klux Klan and an increase in lynchings.

Jim Crow segregation, with African Americans relegated to second-class citizenship, came next, leading eventually to Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement that, Gates notes, sought to turn the prison system on its head by portraying going to jail for a cause as a noble action.

While the 1965 Civil Rights Act was passed to remedy that situation, “13th” underscores that an increase in crime and the Republican Southern Strategy, formulated under President Nixon, of having crime stand in for race in order to help turn the South from Democratic to Republican, pushed the other way.

The war on drugs promulgated by Republicans and Democrats alike extended this dynamic, with Gingrich commenting on the unfairness of criminalizing crack cocaine, prevalent in black neighborhoods, over the powder variety and President Clinton shown apologizing for his role in the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill that led to massive prison expansion.

“13th” covers so much territory that many of the events it incorporates, like the suicide of former Rykers Island inmate Khalief Browder and the police shooting of Black Panther Fred Hampton, can only be mentioned briefly.

Shown in considerable detail, however, is the work of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), an organization that writes laws that benefit the major corporations that are its members. “There are people out there desperately trying to make sure the prison population does not drop by one person,” says Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, “because their economic model needs that.”

Though DuVernay has been working on this film for years, its footage of violence at Donald Trump rallies, linked to the candidate’s publicly expressed yearning for “the good old days,” brings its story chillingly up to date.

What “black lives matter” means in essence, one of this film’s voices says, “is that all lives matter,” a point “13th” makes with undeniable eloquence as well as persuasive force.

No MPAA rating.

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Playing Laemmle’s Monica, Santa Monica. Streaming on Netflix.

Critic’s Choice. “13th.” Offering a brisk, cogently argued alternative to conventionally taught American history, Ava DuVernay’s powerful, persuasive documentary systematically covers a century and a half of race relations in this country. — Kenneth Turan

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History of the oppression of black people from the end of slavery to mass incarceration in for profit prisions

Importnat film, but...., essential knowledge., great, provocative film, vital history we all need to understand, 13th is frightfully real, an important history lesson.

Movie Analysis: 13th

The film 13th takes a look at how minorities historically been treated in the American prison systems. Photo courtesy of culturehoney.com.

Now that we are finally opening up our eyes to the racial injustices that plague America, it’s time to learn how these systems came to be and what can be done to change them. It is important to look at America's history of how we have treated black people and people of color in order to better educate ourselves on how to make a more perfect nation.

Released on Oct. 7, 2016, the documentary “13th” is a Netflix special film about how the United States prisons system is deeply rooted in oppression. “13th” was directed and written by Ava DuVernay who has also directed “Selma”, and “A Wrinkle in Time”. In the documentary, there are many interviews with scholars and representatives, but also everyday citizens whose lives have been affected by the police and prison system.

“13th” has won 32 awards and has been nominated for 44. It was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. “13th” also won a couple of Emmys including Outstanding Documentary or Non-Fiction Special, Outstanding Motion Design and Outstanding writing for nonfiction programming.

In “13th” the filming locations and production design all have deeper meanings.  The interviews are filmed in front of brick walls and industrial equipment which represents the labor that, according to the director DuVerney statement on IMDB , “has been stolen from black people in this country for centuries.”. Although this movie is TV-MA, it is still an important documentary for all American citizens to watch.

I want to talk about the production value and editing of the documentary first. I’ve watched quite a few documentaries, and I have to say that this one was one of the most digestible of them, editing wise. I really liked how they separated what they were going to talk about with either original music, or well-known songs about how the system is broken. I also liked the fact that a majority of the interviews were done against brick walls to make that correlation with what they were talking about to what people are seeing on the screen.

Going into this documentary, I knew that it was going to be difficult to sit through and to see all of the atrocities that we as a nation have committed, but I didn’t know how much I was going to learn. I was introduced to slavery by just watching the film Roots, then the teacher telling us that Martian Luther King came along and fixed everything. This documentary did so much more than that. It teaches you how the effects of before and after slavery still present in American society.  I also thought that this documentary was going to be full of jargon and incomprehensible information that I would have to look up later, but it was surprisingly easy to understand. Although it is difficult to get through, I believe that everyone should watch this documentary.

Do you have any recommendations on what films I should look into next? Send your suggestions to [email protected]

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Instantly acclaimed as one of the most important documentaries of the year, Ava DuVernay’s film about the mass incarceration of black men, “13th,” wowed audiences at the New York Film Festival and looks like a leading Oscar contender as it premieres in theaters and on Netflix on Friday.

Disappointingly, given the importance of the underlying issues, the film is a morass of distortions, half-truths, calculated omissions, absurd hyperbole and outright falsehoods. Equating Donald Trump supporters with Deep South lynch mobs isn’t even its most outlandish tactic.

DuVernay, the director of “Selma,” begins the film with a much-discussed but irrelevant statistic: The US, home to 5 percent of the world’s population, is also home to (nearly) 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

Anyone who has ever thought about this imbalance, which tends to get trotted out in campaign seasons, will quickly understand the reason why: The US has a lot more crime than other countries.

If you think judges should sentence criminals based not on what they’ve been convicted of, but based on international incarceration disparities, fine. Let’s start with your neighborhood. Go ahead, lean on your local judges to let murderers and rapists off with a warning. It’s all for the noble cause of leveling out our incarceration rate, right?

DuVernay constructs her film around the fatuous notion that the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery, was deliberately constructed with a loophole that was meant to continue the mass enslavement of black people using indirect means.

The “loophole”? Convicted criminals can still be deprived of liberty. But this isn’t a loophole, it’s just a restatement of common sense. The US, like every other country on Earth, can lock you up if you are convicted of a crime. If this were so controversial, why has no one thought to be outraged about it before?

Viewers (such as film critics) who don’t pay especially close attention to the news pages are likely to be suckered by the misinformation in the movie. No, Woodrow Wilson didn’t say “The Birth of a Nation” was “history written with lightning.” No, Trayvon Martin didn’t die because of Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, which wasn’t even cited by George Zimmerman’s defenders. Martin died because Zimmerman exercised self-defense after Martin jumped on Zimmerman, punched him in the nose and pounded his head into the pavement. Zimmerman had injuries that backed up his story.

No, Walmart didn’t back the American Legislative Executive Council because it was fantasizing about people buying more Walmart guns to defend themselves under Stand Your Ground. (Walmart hasn’t even sold handguns since 1993; long guns are so infrequently used in homicides that more people die of wounds sustained from kicking and punching.)

As for the movie’s contention that John Ehrlichman, a key aide to President Richard Nixon, spilled the beans on racist drug policies when he allegedly said that Nixon cracked down on marijuana because he wanted to lock up hippies, and heroin because he wanted to lock up blacks — let’s look at the facts.

Ehrlichman allegedly gave this juicy quote to lefty journalist Dan Baum in 1994. Baum, who was writing a book on the drug wars that he published two years later, didn’t use the quote then. He didn’t tell anyone about the quote during the remainder of Ehrlichman’s life, which ended in 1999. Not until 2012 did Baum suddenly remember he was sitting on the quote of the century when it came to drug policy, and finally published it.

Do you really believe a journalist would sit on a bombshell quote like that for 18 years?

“13th,” which, especially in its final minutes, is unabashedly designed to motivate left-wing voters to get them to the polls, is purposefully vague during a strange tangent about Black Panthers and other Woodstock-era radicals. It avoids going into detail about, for instance, Assata Shakur, a convicted cop-killer who broke out of prison and fled to Cuba, who is portrayed as a hero here.

Van Jones, the ex-communist and 9/11 truther who appears repeatedly in the film as an expert witness, tells us that an entire generation of leaders was put in prison or forced to leave the country. “Leaders”? Tell that to all of the shooting and bombing victims of 1960s radicals. If your goal is to decrease the black prison population, extolling violent 1960s revolutionaries is a strange way to go about it.

Normalizing and even sentimentalizing left-wing 1960s extremists has become the new normal, however. Weren’t the Black Panther uniforms cool? As recently as a decade ago, you’d have had to visit a college campus to encounter such gullibility.

Yet the film saves the worst for last, closing with the shocking contention that blacks have made so little progress in the last 50 years that we’re still living in the Jim Crow era under a different name. This is an insult to the Civil Rights-era heroes who moved mountains in the cause of liberty and justice. It’s an insult to Martin Luther King Jr., the hero of DuVernay’s last film, “Selma.”

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Entertainment | Movie review: ‘Don’t Tell Mom the…

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Entertainment, subscriber only, entertainment | movie review: ‘don’t tell mom the babysitter’s dead’ a surprisingly fun remake.

The hazards of remaking a beloved film are well known. While the 1991 comedy “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead,” starring Christina Applegate, didn’t exactly thrill critics 30 years ago, it’s become a cult classic, especially for elder millennials who grew up on the movie. It’s the ideal text for a remake — the source material isn’t regarded as untouchable, the name recognition is high, and it can be easily adaptable to a modern milieu while still stoking those childhood memories for those who love the original.

Nostalgia can be a trap, one that writer Chuck Hayward and director Wade Allain-Marcus fortunately sidestep in their remake. There are enough nods to the first film to please fans looking for those Easter eggs, but they don’t get in the way of the story itself, a teen comedy that keeps it real, despite the heightened circumstances. They also update the family from white to Black, which brings a new layer of stakes to the situation.

After their mother (Patricia “Ms. Pat” Williams) suffers a nervous breakdown at work, the Crandell siblings are left in the care of a Mrs. Sturak (June Squibb), a sweet old lady who reveals herself to be a nagging, racist, slut-shaming tyrant. In her advanced age, the wild rager that the kids throw in the house is too much for her to bear, and she (as the title suggests) drops dead from shock, or perhaps secondhand smoke. Hoping to evade authorities, the Crandell siblings get rid of her body — along with her purse filled with cash from mom.

Without wanting to disturb their mentally fragile mother, shipped off to a meditation retreat in Thailand, it’s up to big sis Tanya (Simone Joy Jones) to get a big-girl job and provide for her siblings. So much for a fun summer, she’s now learning the joys of a Los Angeles morning commute and cutthroat office politics at a fashion company called Libra. Meanwhile, her skater brother Kenny (Donielle T. Hansley Jr.) has to get his slacker act together to hold down the fort at home.

Much of the appeal of the first film came from star Applegate in her first major film role (she was already well-known thanks to the sitcom “Married… With Children”), playing eldest sister Sue Ellen. Jones is similarly charming, in a different way. She sells a performance of a likable teen who is in over her head but gamely manages to thrive in a professional working environment.

The script by Hayward is not exactly breaking new ground (it is a remake after all) but it establishes the siblings as unique and distinctive characters, including smart and weird little bro Zack (Carter Young) and morbid gamer tween sis Melissa (Ayaamii Sledge). Their interactions are funny and natural, and their healthy skepticism of the police has real consequences and informs their questionable decision-making.

The only weak link in the family is Williams, a stand-up comedian whose small, underwritten role as mom to the Crandell kids doesn’t play to her strengths. She’s in a handful of scenes, and Tanya’s role model is filled by Nicole Richie playing her boss at Libra, Rose. Richie is so dynamic and energizing on screen you wonder why she doesn’t act more, and she has genuine chemistry with Jones.

This is the first major feature film directed by Allain-Marcus, an actor who co-starred on “Insecure,” and he does a lot to demonstrate his abilities and influences as a director here. The cinematography by Matt Clegg is crisp and saturated, utilizing a lot of complex tracking shots, and there are nods to ‘70s-style filmmaking and retro touches like the yellow title font that drops about 18 minutes into the film. Some of these flourishes are slightly inconsistent with the material, but demonstrate a new filmmaker excited to experiment with the form of the teen comedy.

“Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead” is surprisingly authentic and fun for this kind of nostalgia-baiting remake material, which is naturally formulaic. It’s the focus on character and allowing the actors to shine that makes this one sing, and it should make a star out of Jones, who, like her character, manages to hold it all together.

‘Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for teen drug use, language and some sexual references)

Running time: 1:38

How to watch: In theaters Friday

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‘Monkey Man’ review: Patel impresses in…

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‘monkey man’ review: patel impresses in front of, behind camera with revenge-fueled film, set in india, violent tale rises above ‘john wick’ comparisons.

Dev Patel clearly knew the comparisons to “John Wick” would be inescapable.

Thus, “Monkey Man,” his violent tale of a young man hell-bent on vengeance — inspired as much as anything, Patel says, by Korean action cinema — wisely namedrops the hit action flick starring Keanu Reeves that, to date, has spawned three sequels and a spin-off series.

Heck, there’s even a cute dog. (Don’t worry. It lives.)

Patel makes a highly impressive debut as a director with “Monkey Man,” a film in which he also stars, serves as a producer and co-wrote. He also gets the lone story-by credit.

“Monkey Man” feels only so much like “Wick,” at least until its bloody, turn-your-head-at-times final act. If not quite grounded in reality, this film is based in something closer to it than what the “Wick”-verse has come to offer.

Plus, being set in modernized India — Batam, Indonesia, stood in for an Indian city during the film’s principal photography — and the incorporation of the Hindu deity Hanuman helps make “Monkey Man” more interesting from a cultural perspective.

We are introduced to Patel’s character, Kid, when he is a boy, being told stories of Hanuman by his loving mother, Neela (Adithi Kalkunte). We then cut to present day, as Kid — wearing a monkey mask as an homage to Hanuman — competes at an underground fight club run by the sleazy Tiger (a fun-as-always Sharlto Copley) to make ends meet. At this point in the story, Kid is a good enough fighter to put on a good show before taking a fall for some extra cash. (There’s even a “bleed bonus.”)

Kid has his eyes on a different gig, any job within King’s Club, a high-end brothel. He gets his wish after a carefully orchestrated encounter with the ruthless, chain-smoking woman who runs it, Queenie (Ashwini Kalsekar). To execute his secret plan, he must get promoted and gain access to the VIP areas, so he befriends glorified gofer Alphonso (a consistently entertaining Pitobash) and soon is serving drinks to powerful men.

And, oh boy, Kid does not like when those men lay their hands on the women the club employs to entertain them — especially the beautiful Sita (Sobhita Dhulipala).

However, he works to keep his eyes on the prize: corrupt police officer Rana (Sikandar Kher). (The reason Kid wants revenge on this man will become clear, as will the origin of the scars that cover our hero’s hands.)

When Kid moves against Rana — in a bathroom complete with a large aquarium — he meets more resistance than he’d bargained for and must run for his life.

To this point, Patel exhibits confident and skilled direction, “Monkey Man” boasting the kind of unusual camera angles and quick cuts — courtesy of director of photography Sharone Meir and editor David Jancso, respectively — that quickly could become exhausting if not handled so deftly.

All in all, this first act is downright stunning.

With the second, Patel over-course-corrects, giving the viewer a much-needed break from the action — especially considering what’s to come — as Kid heals among a group of people led by the wise Alpha (Vipin Sharma). It’s all a tad too snoozy, though — at least until the recovered Kid begins the obligatory training for the fight to come and is given tempo backing by an enthusiastic percussionist. (Hey, we think what we’re calling “bongo boxing” could catch on.)

The final chapter of “Monkey Man” delivers the high body count for which we’d been waiting. As nifty (and disturbing) as many of the mini sequences are, “Monkey Man” becomes a bit numbing in the way similar action movies can.

In front of the camera, Patel is a compelling lead, which is no surprise given past films such as “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008), “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (2011) or “Lion” (2016). However, Kid is a far cry from the gentle souls he played in those films. He is out to conflict pain and suffering on those he believes deserve it, and Patel sells it convincingly, down to the muscle he added at some point.

Originally, “Monkey Man” was bound for a streaming platform, before gaining the attention of Monkeypaw Productions , the company founded by filmmaker Jordan Peele (“Get Out,” “Nope”), and shifting to a theatrical release. This is a film worthy of a big screen.

And given its strengths, it’s more than worthy of a follow-up. That said, there’s something at least a little special about this one, and we wouldn’t mind if it doesn’t lead to, say, three more movies and a TV series.

‘Monkey Man’

Where: Theaters.

When: April 5.

Rated: R for strong bloody violence throughout, language throughout, sexual content/nudity and drug use.

Runtime: 2 hours, 2 minutes.

Stars (of four): 3.

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'Abigail' Review: Radio Silence's Vampire Flick Is All Guts, No Glory

Alisha Weir and Dan Stevens shine in a shallow if bloody new monster movie.

The Big Picture

• Abigail offers a mix of horror subgenres, keeping audiences on their toes with twists and turns.
• The film shines with a zany cast of characters and intense action sequences directed by Radio Silence.
• Melissa Barrera's portrayal falls flat, lacking depth compared to the rest of the cast.

If there’s one vampire movie that’s poised to take the world by storm, it’s Radio Silence ’s Abigail , the story of a sweet little ballerina hiding a monstrous facade underneath. The film is highly anticipated not just for fans of the Ready or Not directors, but for horror fans in general, as the duo behind the last two Scream films helm their very own Universal Monster movie. The new film, starring Melissa Barrera , Dan Stevens , Kathryn Newton , and more joins a long legacy of monster movies, adding yet another vampire to a long and storied canon.

Anyone familiar with horror films knows that it’s beyond stupid to kidnap a monster — including the audience at Overlook Film Festival, where I attended the film’s world premiere — but that’s not the case for the crew of Abigail , who spirit the young ballerina ( Alisha Weir ) away to a country estate, in hopes of trading her for fifty million dollars. Naturally, things take a turn as fast as you can say Nosferatu , and there’s no shortage of twists and turns as the lights go out and bodies start to drop .

Abigail (2024)

After a group of criminals kidnap the ballerina daughter of a powerful underworld figure, they retreat to an isolated mansion, unaware that they're locked inside with no normal little girl.

The film plays with a lot of subgenres — locked door mystery, slasher film, haunted house, alongside the obvious vampire story — that it almost seems like Radio Silence couldn’t decide what their favorite was and opted for a taster menu of everything. That works in its favor occasionally, especially since its monstrous little ballerina, surprisingly, takes up so little of its screen time. Turning such a zany cast of characters against each other House on Haunted Hill style is an inspired if oft-overused idea, especially considering the level of talent Universal managed to wrangle.

'Abigail's Crew Is Delightfully Quirky for a Horror Film

Kathryn Newton follows up her overlooked performance in Lisa Frankenstein as Sammy , the crew’s bimbo (I say that with affection) techie, tied with the late Angus Cloud for best comedic relief. (It’s devastating to know that we’ll never get more from the latter, and that we didn’t even get more from him in this specific film, hilarious as he is.) The two pair with Kevin Durand to make up the standard brainless half of the crew, while Barrera and Stevens make up the qualified serious side. Stevens is, naturally, as unhinged as ever as the ruthless and intelligent Frank, echoing bits of his performances in Legion and The Guest to spectacularly entertaining effect.

In fact, Abigail is at its best when it pits the Downton Abbey alum against Weir’s vampire , with both operating on a level of batshit the rest of the cast can only dream of. Neither has any qualms about biting into the material they’re given (pun intended) with relish, and it makes me grateful that Stevens has seemingly bypassed the traditional action hero/male lead career path in favor of playing what I can only describe as fucked up little guys with severe God complexes. Similarly, Radio Silence are at their best as directors when they lean hard into the gore of it all, imploding vampires like pop bottles someone stuck a pack of Mentos into.

Melissa Barrera Doesn’t Quite Reach Final Girl Status in 'Abigail'

Barrera, unfortunately, is the only snag in the film’s otherwise pleasantly schlocky fabric . Her performance, compared to the rest of her castmates, is uninspired and flat, reminiscent more of a first read-through than a final film. From moment one, it’s obvious to the audience that she’s the Important Character, but not in any way that allows her to earn any amount of sympathy. She is simply there to be conventionally attractive and fill the final girl role, and doesn’t seem like she’s even interested in doing that, a hard one-eighty from her performance in Scream .

It’s entirely unsurprising where the story goes for her, which becomes all the more predictable given her rote "straight-man" routine. At least Stevens gets to go a little apeshit — she just passively snarks and acts above it all . She’s the robot in a crew of Roger Rabbit characters, reading out exposition and monologues with a stiffness that would make even C-3PO jealous. She has very little life to her, and I never fear for her even once over the course of the film in the way I mourn the other characters who find themselves being picked off one by one. If nothing else, her being thrown around like a ragdoll by the film’s vampires is a welcome respite from learning anything more about what’s already a cardboard cutout of a character.

I’m not sure if it’s the Riverdale -adjacent Gen-Z style of acting or if I just keep watching movies with building block scripts that make for stories that don’t push the limits nearly as much as they could. There are points of Abigail that feel very much like paint-by-numbers horror , filled with exposition dumps that effectively took me out of the gooey, bloody narrative in their need to cut tension. It’s symptomatic of big-budget studio horror, which feels the need to hold the audience’s hand so they aren’t too scared at the end of everything.

To their credit, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett do their best with that limited narrative palette , and it does make me wonder if Stevens will become a frequent collaborator of theirs, given how much fun he seemed to be having soaked in fake blood. Their action sequences are perhaps the best and most entertaining of all the films I saw at Overlook, and I can’t disparage anyone too much when they’ve admitted to using a blood cannon to achieve their desired level of gore.

While their trademark meta-ness might not land in Abigail , for a Friday night popcorn movie, there’s a lot to enjoy, especially Weir, who makes such a sharp turn away from her role in Matilda that she nearly seems like an entirely different person — or vampire. She’s a solid addition to the canon of vampires, and if nothing else, she gives little old Claudia a run for her money.

Abigail is a vampire movie at its best when it leans into the gore and a delightful performance by Dan Stevens.

• The film's comic relief, brought to life by Kathryn Newton and Angus Cloud, is effectively hilarious.
• Dan Stevens and Alisha Weir are each spectacular, proving to be the chaotic duo the film benefits most from.
• Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett craft some great action sequences that never skimp on the gore.
• Melissa Barrera doesn't bring the same depth to her performance with the character ultimately falling flat.
• With a building block script, the film doesn't push the limits nearly as much as it could.

Abigail had its World Premiere at the 2024 Overlook Film Festival. It comes to theaters in the U.S. starting April 19. Click below for showtimes.

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The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan. The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan. The untold story behind Helm's Deep, hundreds of years before the fateful war, telling the life and bloodsoaked times of its founder, Helm Hammerhand, the King of Rohan.

• Kenji Kamiyama
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• Trivia Set 183 years before the events of "The Lord of the Rings".
• Connections Referenced in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: Geeked Week for Freaks (2021)

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• Runtime 2 hours 10 minutes
• Dolby Atmos
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Uta’s medialink sets senior exec team amid ongoing legal battle with michael kassan, caitlin clark crashes ‘snl’s weekend update & makes michael che read self-deprecating jokes.

By Armando Tinoco

Armando Tinoco

Night & Weekend Editor

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Michael Che was humbled by basketball star Caitlin Clark when she crashed Saturday Night Live ‘s “Weekend Update” segment after the comedian made a sexist joke at her expense.

“The University of Iowa announced that basketball star Caitlin Clark will have her jersey retired and replaced with an apron,” Che said.

Che then introduced the real Clark ahead of the WNBA draft, where she is expected to be the No. 1 pick overall.

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“I am a fan, Caitlin, by the way,” Che told the future WNBA star.

Clark called out Che for making a lot of jokes about women’s sports, which the comedian tried to deny. Colin Jost chimed in to say, “It’s definitely a lot,” and exposed Che with a super-cut of his past jokes.

“Unlike Che, I support women,” Jost said, throwing his co-host under the bus.

Che said Clark was a great basketball player and noted that he couldn’t play like her, and the basketball champion said he couldn’t tell jokes like him. Clark said she wrote some jokes and asked Che to read some of them to her.

“The Indiana Fever have the first pick in this Monday’s draft, a reminder that Indiana Fever is a WNBA team and not what Michael Che gave to dozens of women at Purdue University,” Che read the joke.

Clark asked him to read a second one with Che reading, “Netflix’s top new show is Ripley , featuring an eerily, unsettling performance by actor Andrew Scott. Critics say it’s the hardest thing to watch on Netflix since Michael Che’s special Shame the Devil .”

Che read a third joke at his expense, “Caitlin Clark broke the record for three-pointers in a single season, and I have three-pointers for Michael Che: 1. Be 2. Funnier 3. Dumbass.”

After the self-roast, Che wished Clark luck in the WNBA. The basketball star also paid tribute to the women who came before her, name-dropping Sheryl Swoopes, Lisa Leslie, Cynthia Cooper, Dawn Staley, and her own basketball hero, Maya Moore.

“These are the women that kicked down the door so I could walk inside. So I want to thank them tonight for laying the foundation,” Clark added.

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