11. The Black G*dfather
10. The Burial
The first of several movies based on true events, The Burial stars Foxx as real-life attorney Willie "the Giant Killer" Gary, who got his ominous nickname for winning legal cases against The Walt Disney Company and funeral home conglomerate, The Loewen Group.
9. Ray
Examining 30 years in the life of soul music legend Ray Charles, portrayed by Jamie Foxx in an Oscar-winning performance, from his childhood in Northern Florida to his conquest of American radio in the 1960s, Hollywood finally gives Ray Charles Robinson his due -- in a film that bears his first name.
8. Any Given Sunday
The second-best gridiron movie of 1999 revolves around Foxx's Black quarterback, Willie Beamen, as he confronts the football industrial complex and all the nastiness that the highest level of the sport has to offer, including: corrupt physicians; exploitative team owners; institutional racism; and more.
7. Ali
6. Just Mercy
Just Mercy is the film adaptation of attorney Bryan Stevenson's critically-acclaimed 2014 memoir Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Focusing primarily on Stevenson's attempts to free a wrongfully-convicted African-American man sentenced to the death penalty in Monroeville, Alabama, Just Mercy is a rarity among Hollywood movies about racism -- a savior film that features Black people being saved by a Black person. The movie highlights the astounding level of institutional racism within the Alabama (and American) justice system -- which persists to this day. Some moviegoers may initially have trouble comprehending the magnitude of the problem and believing the extraordinary lengths to which those in power went in order to uphold a system of oppression.
Interestingly enough, director Destin Daniel Cretton strongly indicts the caucasian male members of the communities involved. But though history tells a different story, the movie goes out of its way to absolve white women of any complicity in connection to the systemic racism that it depicts.
A courtroom drama that outshines genre favorites like A Few Good Men, A Time to Kill, Primal Instinct and Philadelphia, Just Mercy rivals To Kill a Mockingbird. Ironically, the author of the book on which that movie was based, Harper Lee, was a native of Monroeville.
The movie begins with the 1987 arrest of Monroeville entrepreneur Walter McMillian (Foxx), whose accused of murdering a local 18-year-old white woman, Ronda Morrison. After moving to Alabama and finding local commercial property owners reluctant to rent to an advocate for Death Row inmates, Harvard Law grad and Delaware native Stevenson moves in with the family of Eva Ansley, a local woman horrified by the Alabama justice system's mistreatment of poor defendants.
Initially refusing to work with the young attorney due to his previous lawyer's ineptitude, McMillian finally comes around following Stevenson's acceptance by his family and community.
McMillian eventually reveals that he was transported to Death Row immediately after his arrest, where he remained for more than a year before his trial. He was also at a fish fry attended by several witnesses, one of whom was a police officer, during the time of the murder. He was targeted by law enforcement and the judicial system not merely because he was African-American but because he was an African-American man who'd engaged in a public affair with a white woman.
In the absence of any physical evidence, the state's case depended entirely on witness testimony. And the primary witness, career criminal Ralph Myers, was indicted as a co-conspirator and offered a 30-year sentence in lieu of the death penalty in exchange for his testimony. Following the trial judge's decision to relocate the proceedings to a nearby overwhelmingly white county, McMillian was convicted by 11 white (with one African-American) jurors and sentenced to life in prison. Unsatisfied, the presiding judge set the jury's sentence aside and imposed the death penalty.
Stevenson's fight to secure McMillian's freedom even included a segment on 60 Minutes.
Onscreen, Stevenson endures police intimidation, legal stonewalling and reluctance to come forward on the part of witnesses to obtain justice for just one client. Would you believe he's gone on to save 125 men from death sentences?
Just Mercy should be required viewing, particularly for those concerned with the need for criminal justice reform.
5. Collateral
After picking up the seemingly unassuming Vincent, cab driver Max (Foxx) faces the devastating reality that his mysterious fare is actually a contract killer with no qualms about eliminating anyone -- including mild-mannered cabbies -- who know too much about his business.
4. Miami Vice
3. The Kingdom
After his colleague is killed in a bombing in Saudi Arabia, Foxx's Special Agent Ronald Fleury leads a team tasked with investigating a crime thousands of miles from home.
2. Project Power
Because of the global movie theater shutdown spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, two MCU movies, a Spiderverse movie and the final X-Men film have all been postponed -- and only two remain on the release schedule for 2020. Well Project Power has filled the superpower movie void left by those release date shuffles in spectacular fashion.
PP is a neo-noir featuring a mysterious loner and a police officer independently investigating the destructive proliferation of a new street-drug in New Orleans. Instead of providing a momentary high, these $500-a-pop capsules imbue the consumer with a unique superpower -- but only for five minutes. Because the pills react differently based on users' genetics, one dose can be lethal. Some of the users who actually survive the ingestion use their newfound abilities for nefarious purposes and the dealers themselves attract the violence that comes with the sale of most hard drugs.
The story cleverly references real-life medical atrocities and conspiracies that I won't specify here because doing so would amount to giving spoilers. But the superpowers angle is enough to put pressure on some of your favorite comic book adaptations. There's even a teen sidekick named Robin and an appearance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who portrayed Robin to Christian Bale's Batman in The Dark Knight Rises.
Project Power is the first movie involving people with superpowers with a Black lead (Jamie Foxx's Art Reilly) since the phenomenally successful Black Panther. And though Panther has been assured a sequel, it's scheduled release date is two years away and more than two years have passed since the first film's debut. 2016's Suicide Squad has been given a quasi-sequel -- set to hit theaters next year -- but Will Smith's Deadshot won't be in it. Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson's Black Adam will debut at the end of 2021. And by the time the next Blade movie arrives, it will have been two decades since the Wesley Snipes-led Blade trilogy ended. So if a Project Power sequel is greenlit -- and PP is certainly good enough to warrant one -- it'll be a welcome and much-needed addition of color to the ever-growing field of superhero movie series.
Project Power is unquestionably the best movie of the summer and if it becomes an actual franchise, the MCU, the DCEU and the Spiderverse may have some competition on their hands.
Streaming on Netflix now.
1. Due Date
Peter Highman is gonna be a first-time father any day now. His wife Sarah is super-pregnant and waiting for him in LA. All he has to do is make his flight home from Atlanta so that he'll be there for the arrival of his first-born. Unfortunately for him, the weirdo he meets on the plane, Ethan Tremblay, gets them both kicked off the flight and placed on the national "no-fly" list. Undeterred but missing his wallet, Peter agrees to share a rental car with Ethan, in spite of his growing hatred for him, on a coast-to-coast road trip.
Along the way, Peter ends up in a high-speed chase from the Mexican police and discovers that his friend Darryl (Foxx) probably fathered the baby that Sarah's carrying. All that to witness the birth of his (probably Darryl's) child.
Originally Posted 8/20/20
7. Ali
Ali explores a decade in the life of legendary heavyweight boxing champion and political activist Muhammad Ali. The movie begins in 1964, the year that Ali, then known as Cassius Clay Jr., defeated Sonny Liston to become only the second-youngest (at 22 years old) fighter to win the heavyweight title. With assistant trainer and cornerman Drew Bundini Brown (Foxx) by his side for most of the following 10 years, Ali's life and career suffer devastating lows and phenomenal highs.
6. Just Mercy
Just Mercy is the film adaptation of attorney Bryan Stevenson's critically-acclaimed 2014 memoir Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. Focusing primarily on Stevenson's attempts to free a wrongfully-convicted African-American man sentenced to the death penalty in Monroeville, Alabama, Just Mercy is a rarity among Hollywood movies about racism -- a savior film that features Black people being saved by a Black person. The movie highlights the astounding level of institutional racism within the Alabama (and American) justice system -- which persists to this day. Some moviegoers may initially have trouble comprehending the magnitude of the problem and believing the extraordinary lengths to which those in power went in order to uphold a system of oppression.
Interestingly enough, director Destin Daniel Cretton strongly indicts the caucasian male members of the communities involved. But though history tells a different story, the movie goes out of its way to absolve white women of any complicity in connection to the systemic racism that it depicts.
A courtroom drama that outshines genre favorites like A Few Good Men, A Time to Kill, Primal Instinct and Philadelphia, Just Mercy rivals To Kill a Mockingbird. Ironically, the author of the book on which that movie was based, Harper Lee, was a native of Monroeville.
The movie begins with the 1987 arrest of Monroeville entrepreneur Walter McMillian (Foxx), whose accused of murdering a local 18-year-old white woman, Ronda Morrison. After moving to Alabama and finding local commercial property owners reluctant to rent to an advocate for Death Row inmates, Harvard Law grad and Delaware native Stevenson moves in with the family of Eva Ansley, a local woman horrified by the Alabama justice system's mistreatment of poor defendants.
Initially refusing to work with the young attorney due to his previous lawyer's ineptitude, McMillian finally comes around following Stevenson's acceptance by his family and community.
McMillian eventually reveals that he was transported to Death Row immediately after his arrest, where he remained for more than a year before his trial. He was also at a fish fry attended by several witnesses, one of whom was a police officer, during the time of the murder. He was targeted by law enforcement and the judicial system not merely because he was African-American but because he was an African-American man who'd engaged in a public affair with a white woman.
In the absence of any physical evidence, the state's case depended entirely on witness testimony. And the primary witness, career criminal Ralph Myers, was indicted as a co-conspirator and offered a 30-year sentence in lieu of the death penalty in exchange for his testimony. Following the trial judge's decision to relocate the proceedings to a nearby overwhelmingly white county, McMillian was convicted by 11 white (with one African-American) jurors and sentenced to life in prison. Unsatisfied, the presiding judge set the jury's sentence aside and imposed the death penalty.
Stevenson's fight to secure McMillian's freedom even included a segment on 60 Minutes.
Onscreen, Stevenson endures police intimidation, legal stonewalling and reluctance to come forward on the part of witnesses to obtain justice for just one client. Would you believe he's gone on to save 125 men from death sentences?
Just Mercy should be required viewing, particularly for those concerned with the need for criminal justice reform.
5. Collateral
After picking up the seemingly unassuming Vincent, cab driver Max (Foxx) faces the devastating reality that his mysterious fare is actually a contract killer with no qualms about eliminating anyone -- including mild-mannered cabbies -- who know too much about his business.
4. Miami Vice
The film adaptation of popular 80s television show "Miami Vice" turns the substance up a notch and dials the style of the series way down for a much grittier take on the dealings of the Miami-Dade Police Department's vice squad.
After detectives Ricardo "Rico" Tubbs (Foxx) and James "Sonny" Crockett learn that the wife of one of their former confidential informants, Alonzo Stevens, has been murdered, the duo go deep undercover in order to investigate the Colombian cartel responsible.
3. The Kingdom
After his colleague is killed in a bombing in Saudi Arabia, Foxx's Special Agent Ronald Fleury leads a team tasked with investigating a crime thousands of miles from home.
2. Project Power
Because of the global movie theater shutdown spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic, two MCU movies, a Spiderverse movie and the final X-Men film have all been postponed -- and only two remain on the release schedule for 2020. Well Project Power has filled the superpower movie void left by those release date shuffles in spectacular fashion.
PP is a neo-noir featuring a mysterious loner and a police officer independently investigating the destructive proliferation of a new street-drug in New Orleans. Instead of providing a momentary high, these $500-a-pop capsules imbue the consumer with a unique superpower -- but only for five minutes. Because the pills react differently based on users' genetics, one dose can be lethal. Some of the users who actually survive the ingestion use their newfound abilities for nefarious purposes and the dealers themselves attract the violence that comes with the sale of most hard drugs.
The story cleverly references real-life medical atrocities and conspiracies that I won't specify here because doing so would amount to giving spoilers. But the superpowers angle is enough to put pressure on some of your favorite comic book adaptations. There's even a teen sidekick named Robin and an appearance by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who portrayed Robin to Christian Bale's Batman in The Dark Knight Rises.
Project Power is the first movie involving people with superpowers with a Black lead (Jamie Foxx's Art Reilly) since the phenomenally successful Black Panther. And though Panther has been assured a sequel, it's scheduled release date is two years away and more than two years have passed since the first film's debut. 2016's Suicide Squad has been given a quasi-sequel -- set to hit theaters next year -- but Will Smith's Deadshot won't be in it. Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson's Black Adam will debut at the end of 2021. And by the time the next Blade movie arrives, it will have been two decades since the Wesley Snipes-led Blade trilogy ended. So if a Project Power sequel is greenlit -- and PP is certainly good enough to warrant one -- it'll be a welcome and much-needed addition of color to the ever-growing field of superhero movie series.
Project Power is unquestionably the best movie of the summer and if it becomes an actual franchise, the MCU, the DCEU and the Spiderverse may have some competition on their hands.
Streaming on Netflix now.
1. Due Date
Peter Highman is gonna be a first-time father any day now. His wife Sarah is super-pregnant and waiting for him in LA. All he has to do is make his flight home from Atlanta so that he'll be there for the arrival of his first-born. Unfortunately for him, the weirdo he meets on the plane, Ethan Tremblay, gets them both kicked off the flight and placed on the national "no-fly" list. Undeterred but missing his wallet, Peter agrees to share a rental car with Ethan, in spite of his growing hatred for him, on a coast-to-coast road trip.
Along the way, Peter ends up in a high-speed chase from the Mexican police and discovers that his friend Darryl (Foxx) probably fathered the baby that Sarah's carrying. All that to witness the birth of his (probably Darryl's) child.
Originally Posted 8/20/20
Updated 10/28/23
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