Roman Coleman, the career-defining role that journeyman Matthias Schoenaerts (Rust and Bone, The Drop) has been waiting for, does not disappoint. Finally, the 42-year-old actor you’ve seen in the background here and there and everywhere gets his opportunity to truly lead a movie. As the hardened felon-turned-horse trainer proves, anything can happen to anyone, given the right circumstances. The Mustang is a brilliantly directed movie by first-time director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre. Roman seems to desire to serve his time quickly and with as little human interaction as possible. He is nearly unrecognizable with his shaved head, as well as chiseled, tattooed body. But his problem with the latter leads to a longer than expected stay, and his explosive anger to go with that machine of a body suggests that he might not be going anywhere anytime soon.
Category Archives: Jason Mitchell
Mudbound (2017)
An early and serious contender for 2017’s Best Picture is a movie that may have yet to find its way to a theater had it not garnered so much critical acclaim. Dee Rees’s (Pariah) Mudbound is an original Netflix movie. Had it not been for The Academy of Motion Pictures’ rule of all Oscar-nominated films to be available to the public via movie theaters, who knows where it would have landed? This is not Netflix’s first movie to receive so much praise that the movie had to be released in the theaters. 2015’s Beasts of No Nation faced a similar fate. However, Beasts of No Nation‘s kudos faded as Oscar season approached, and the movie ultimately did not receive a single nomination. The same won’t be the case for Mudbound, which very well could earn a Best Picture nomination as well as nominations for Best Supporting Actor (Jason Mitchell Detroit, Straight Outta Compton), Best Supporting Actress (Mary J. Blige), and Best Adapted Screenplay to name a few. Of course, it’s an early prediction, and I have yet to see any of the other contenders, but this does feel like a poor year for movies. I would be shocked if Mudbound is not nominated for Best Picture, and I would be surprised if it doesn’t win at least one award in one of the other categories before cinema’s biggest night of the year is complete.
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Straight Outta Compton (2015)
Straight outta Compton and straight into the Oscar buzz. It’s early, and this movie will be forgotten by Halloween (just like most of the great films released in the first eight or nine months of each year). Still, for now, this movie is hot with audiences (over $100 million grossed in its first eight days) and critics (89% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes), like just about any other movie of the year. As I will explain in my review below, Straight Outta Compton didn’t do anything (besides the music itself) that was amazing on its own, but it did do just about everything well. I wouldn’t call it the surprise hit of the year, as many other movies flew further under the radar (Ex Machina and The Gift are the two that come to mind for me). Still, it was a movie that could be very good or very bad, depending on the acting, which parts of the story would be told, and, most importantly, the direction. I’ll talk more about F. Gary Gray (The Negotiator, The Italian Job) later in the review, but long story short, he nailed it. Straight Outta Compton was his most challenging and impressive work to date. While I think it’s an extremely long shot based on the history of the Academy and its voting, his name could still be swirling around as a dark horse for Best Director come December.