Magnolia Pictures | Release Date: August 11, 2017 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
24
Mixed:
2
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Filmmakers Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis were among those on the front lines of the protests against police violence and their on-the-ground, from-the-heart documentary Whose Streets? communicates that urgency from the inside out — not as news story or social theory, but as communal experience and awakening.
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Movie NationAug 7, 2017
The scruffiness is intentional and the film has that conventional search for heroes and heroines — who to follow, single-out and build the movie around. But Whose Streets? also lets us see how citizens journey from outrage to action, from passivity to protest to influencing public policy, just by standing up and saying “Enough!”
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The movie’s most potent closeup is of a black policewoman, in a line confronting protesters; if you can film her, why not learn what she has to say? Folayan and Davis, however, hold no brief for even-handedness, and, for those who dominate the screen, any sign of temperance, even in a President, is treated with contempt.
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The PlaylistAug 10, 2017
This isn’t a movie about despair in the face of seemingly implacable problems; it’s about the heavy lifting that constant hope requires. Disappointingly, that surging energy which animates the activists profiled here, in ways both intimate and caught-on-the-fly, never coalesces into the desired blueprint for reform.
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Whose Streets? is not a movie intended for those seeking an explanatory recap, let alone “balanced” analysis, of the original case itself. What it does offer, however, is a pulse-taking of one community’s response — variably constructive, occasionally chaotic — to perceived institutionalized abuse by law enforcement.
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Although news reports presented police use of rubber bullets and tear gas as justifiable responses to increasingly volatile crowds, Whose Streets? offers a useful alternative view, with citizen journalists capturing what look like unprovoked attacks on demonstrators by law enforcement officers woefully unprepared or unwilling to de-escalate sensitive situations and engage.
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