Portrait of the jurist as a young man

Marshall

Crit

For a film about racism and false rape accusation in the tony corner of 1941 Connecticut, this veers awfully close to comedy at times, and it's certainly a buddy picture from the get-go. The buddies are a young NAACP attorney named Thurgood Marshall (Chadwick Boseman, completing a hat trick after previous cinematic portrayals of Jackie Robinson and James Brown) and Sam Friedman (Josh Gad), a Jewish Bridgeport lawyer whose specialty is finding technicalities to absolve insurance companies of their fiduciary responsibilities, who is enlisted to get Marshall, a member of the New York bar, certified to sit at (but not speak from) the defense table. They meet cute, they resist each other, and their mutual surrender is as inevitable as a black man someday sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Not a great film, but both an entertaining and a moving one, which makes it more rewarding than some stodgily great ones.

Trailers

• Wonder Wheel--The latest from Woody.
• Roman J. Israel, Esq.--Denzel as a pain-in-the-ass (uppity, say?) lawyer; if nothing else, a good trailer to precede the feature.

You oughta be in pictures

Visages Villages (Faces places)

Crit

A buddy movie and a road picture, filmmaker Agnès Varda aiding, abetting, and documenting the artist JR's ongoing project of taking photographic portraits, printing them huge, and affixing them to walls. There are subtexts political, architectural, and geographical, and even a sort of cameo by that prick Jean-Luc Godard, but mostly this is about two charming and brilliant people charming us and illuminating the world.