It’s a fun detail, but also emblematic of a movie that isn’t sure how to deploy its specifics. Halfway through the tough, bruising Netflix drama “All Day and a Night,” a young man named Jahkor (Memory looms heavily and sometimes heavy-handedly over “All Day and a Night,” which drifts backward and forward in time as it pieces together moments from Jahkor’s life.
“All Day and a Night” opens with a brutal sequence that immediately upends the most basic assumption that audiences have been conditioned to bring into a movie like this; one that denies us the privilege of “humanizing” its troubled hero in order to put the onus of doing that on him instead.Jahkor (another rivetingly implosive performance from “Moonlight” breakout Played by a coiled Jeffrey Wright, whose try-hard affectations harmonize beautifully with those of an abusive man trying to perform his own toughness, J.D. Justin Chang has been a film critic for the Los Angeles Times since 2016.
My father taught me how to take my fucked-up life out on everyone else.”It’s not for viewers — least of all white ones — to respond to that claim so much as it’s Jhakor’s prerogative to reckon with his place in the chain. She plays his aunt.
The movie then uses flashbacks and flashforwards to trace the pervasive violence in his past -- as a child, a teen, and a young adult -- that led to his incarceration. An aspiring hip-hop musician, Jahkor often retreats into his music; an early scene finds him rapping quietly to himself in his car, nurturing a moment of calm before the storm. Sanders’ quietly mesmerizing performance refuses to let anyone cast Jahkor as either victim or villain, instead locating a tricky middle ground. The beats of this story are easy enough to recognize, which is not to say that they’re formulaic. His mother (Kelly Jenrette) and his aunt (Regina Taylor) are a source of strength and occasional tough love. Cole sometimes embraces and sometimes deviates from the cliches of the genre, working in the mold of filmmakers like John Singleton (“Boyz n the Hood”) to pursue a gritty, grimly hopeless and explosively violent portrait of inner-city California life. Netflix's father-son crime drama 'All Day and a Night' is a nervy, deeply felt drama that gets a little lost on its winding path to redemption but still finds a way home. “I’m the only cast member who had their own unique experience of that franchise based on their race,” John Boyega told British GQ of his “Star Wars” role.Ashton Sanders, left, and Jeffrey Wright in the movie “All Day and a Night.” “All Day and a Night” struggles to cohere these episodes, and its aim often goes astray. Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Cole is overly careful not to rhyme the film’s parallel timelines with each other in a way that might feel didactic; Jhakor and J.D. Written and directed by Joe Robert Cole, it’s by turns a gangland thriller, a prison drama and a coming-of-age story, wrapped in a somber meditation on black male identity. The scenes between Sanders and Wright are too few and far between, but the inherited pain between them makes for a riveting sense of raw friction.The rest of the movie feels unsure of itself by comparison.
One thing that bothered me was that the slang and the Bay Area accent was off and you could tell. and Jhakor individually get muddled along the way.Running a long and often lugubrious two hours, “All Day and a Night” sometimes feels like several different movies smushed together. only knows how to prepare his son for the world as he’s lived it (Jalyn Hall is effective as tween Jhakor). As ALL DAY AND A NIGHT opens, Jahkor Abraham Lincoln (Ashton Sanders as an adult) commits a double murder and is sent to prison. “Slavery taught black people how to survive,” Jhakor insists, “but not how to live.