Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Till is a two-hour victim statement marketed as a drama. Centred on the real-life brutal lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall) in Money, Mississippi in August 1955, it focuses on the grief of his mother, Mamie (Danielle Deadwyler), putting her emotions front and centre. The primacy of Mamie’s sorrow and anger displaces every other aspect of the story – the killers, J W Milam (Eric Whitten) and Roy Bryant (Sean Michael Weber) being acquitted in the subsequent trial, though later admitting their guilt, the shopkeeper, Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), whose exaggerated sense of offence led to Emmett being ‘taught a lesson’ and her subsequent perjury, escaping prosecution. A caption tells us that in March 2022, lynching was finally classified as a crime in the United States, 67 years after Emmett’s death, but the film, directed by Chinonye Chukwu ( Clemency ), who also contributed to the screenplay by Keith Beauchamp & Michael Reilly, anchors the viewer to Mamie....

  Pictured : Exiled by the state, a group of school age girls incarcerated on a former leper colony in the 1950s as featured in director Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu 's film, ' We Were Dangerous ', written by Maddie Dai . Right: Matron ( Rima Te Wiata ). Still courtesy of Madman Entertainment (New Zealand) Cinema is filled with female authority figures of a certain age who are casually cruel but act with righteous purpose and a degree of enjoyment. Whether they are Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest , Miss Trunchbull in Matilda , Sister Bridget in The Magdalene Sisters or Mrs Danvers in Rebecca , these women live for their job, enforcing structure and discipline whilst suppressing empathy. Added to the list is the Matron (Rima Te Wiata), the dominant head of a reform school for girls featured in director Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu’s debut feature, the ironically titled, We Were Dangerous , set in 1954 on a tiny island that is part of Aotearoa (that’s New Zealand ...