Fruitvale Station
Verdict: True story, about life and death
Rating: 
Fruitvale Station dramatises the true story of Oscar Grant, a young black man who was killed by a white police officer working for the public transit authority in Oakland, California, in the early hours of New Year's Day, 2009.
Grant's death provoked riots, but Ryan Coogler's film tells the story of what happened before rather than after his death; it is a tale of 24 hours in the life of an ordinary man, made hugely poignant by our awareness of what is to come.
Michael B. Jordan, so brilliant as the drug dealer, Wallace, in the acclaimed TV drama The Wire, gives an engaging performance as Grant, who is far from perfect and has had a spell in jail, but! is a loving father and a dutiful son.
Captivating: Michael B. Jordan and Ariana Neal in Fruitvale Station
If the picture has a fault, it is perhaps in ticking too many boxes to indicate Grant's essential goodness: he's nice to his grandma, helpful to strangers, he even befriends stray dogs. But this is a captivating film all the same.
Fruitvale Station is released in the UK on June 6th.
Little Accidents
Verdict: Sensitive, poignant drama
Rating:
Little Accidents is about death and culpability, too. Written and directed by Sara Colangelo, it is a well-acted, thoroughly involving drama set in a small West Virginia town in the wake of a mining disaster that has killed ten men.
The narrative cleverly weaves together the lives of the single survivor, the wife of the mining company executive deemed responsible for the accident (Elizabeth Banks), and a boy whose father was one of those killed.
At a deeper level, Little Accidents is also about truth. The survivor, Amos (Boyd Holbrook) has his reasons for concealing it, and so does the boy, Owen (Jacob Lalland).
In a quiet, melancholic way, it's a really fine film, sensitively and convincingly evoking the wounded life of a small, blue-collar, American town.
- Sundance London is on at The O2 until Sunday. Visit sundance-london.com for more information and tickets.
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Source : http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2612706/Fruitvale-Station-Captivating-24-hours-led-race-riot.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490
