Judas and the Black Messiah Review

King's film about the killing of Fred Hampton makes an unusual structural choice: it centers the informant rather than the martyr, and lets you sit inside William O'Neal's cowardice for two hours. LaKeith Stanfield plays him as a small-time car thief who is in over his head from his first scene and never gets out, sweating through every meeting with a federal handler who calls him son. Daniel Kaluuya plays Hampton as a political mind first, and the film is smart enough to spend its energy on the coalition building, the free breakfast program and the speeches rather than on hagiography.

The oratory is staged for the room rather than for the camera, which is exactly why it works. Sean Bobbitt shoots Chicago in surveillance browns and hard interiors. Dominique Fishback is the quiet center of the thing and is given far too little to do. The thriller mechanics occasionally flatten the politics, and the last twenty minutes are as grim as anything in recent American film, deliberately so. A serious piece of work about how the state does this, and it does not flinch.