Detroit (2017)

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Detroit is a dramatisation of a tragic chapter from America's past, a provocative period piece. More than 40 people died during the so-called "Detroit rebellion", most of them African Americans, many shot by the police or national guardsmen. The writers aimed to convey underlying truth. Any viewer aware that the film takes poetic licence will have some doubt what is true and what isn't. It's an immersive experience which places the viewer at the heart of the unfolding chaos. The cinematography is brilliant. Vintage lenses are used to capture multi-angle digital footage interweaving seamlessly with archive material. However, there isn't an authenticity of dialogue, a charge that the screenwriter accepted. John Boyega gives a careful performance as the security guard who is caught between his race and his uniform. Will Poulter succeeds in characterising a corrupt, racist cop, 'Officer Krauss', a fictional character said to be a combination of a number of different officers from the Detroit Police Department who were present at the Algiers Motel that night. Detroit isn't immune from its critics. It is told in a mode disengaged from the cultural and systemic forces in America that led to that kind of police brutality in 1967. Leaving the viewer feeling angry was the director's intention, and it succeeded.

Greetings from Lithuania."Detroit" (2017) is a very good movie from start till finish. It is superbly acted, directed and written true story. The great duet Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal teamed up again after two masterful and one of the most two memorable movies of the past decade "The Hurt Locker" and "Zero Dark Thirty". While "Detroit" is not in the same league as two above mentioned titles, yet their collaboration is clearly visible in every scene.Overall, "Detroit" a gritty, intense and very involving thriller based on a very true story. A very solid movie all around.

The story is compelling, scary, historical. It depicts very well the state of mind of the US. Violence is their way. They did not change much. Better than Alien, because true.

When I started seeing promotional material for "Detroit", I thought that it really had the chance to be something special. It is very timely in today's social/political climate, and director Kathryn Bigelow always takes such care in her films to portray the truth. While this seems to indeed be the case in "Detroit" as well, the film comes off as lacking a clear focus in terms of what it wanted to accomplish short of "showing the facts of what happened".For a basic plot summary, "Detroit" tells the story of the 1967 race riots that tore through the city of Detroit, MI. While the first half of the film looks at the riots as a whole, the second half focuses in on one specific incident where the Detroit PD roughs up a group of African American men (and two white women) in trying to find a weapon that was fired from that location. The shocking brutality and subsequent trial are all chronicled in the back half of the film.There are two things that I really wish "Detroit" would have done different:1. It almost seems to be two different movies, and I wish Bigelow would have stuck to the first one, so to speak. As I've mentioned, the first half is really gripping, showing the beginning of the riots and what they might mean for everyone. I was really "into" this movie, as it truly does parallel many similar themes and problems even today. When the film switches to the one Algiers Motel incident, however, I felt like it bogged down and never really recovered. Perhaps had the film focused on that single scene from the beginning it would not have been so jarring of a switch, but as it stands I didn't like the focus going from wide-angle to pretty strict zoom.2. I know that Bigelow likely wants to remain a-political in her filmmaking (from what I remember, a similar thing happened in "The Hurt Locker"), but I also feel like this isn't a story that can be told without taking a bit of a stand. That doesn't happen here, though, and the movie has less of an impact because of it. Instead, this is very much a "just the facts, ma'm" approach that, at nearly two and a half hours, becomes hard to get through.There is enough in "Detroit" to make it a watchable movie, as the acting performances are great and the general atmosphere of the whole piece is pretty chilling. Plus, Bigelow does a great job of subtly showing how similar race issues continue to plague black/police relationships. Basically, it does a great job of showing how the problems often remain even after the actors change.So, while not a bad movie by any stretch, "Detroit" is one that I was quite underwhelmed by. I wanted a more consistent storytelling approach and a bit more of an impactful, articulated message within it. It's worth a watch if you are interested in the type of topics it delves into, but it likely won't vault to the top of your best-of lists.