Director – Ryan Coogler – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 138m
*****
In 1932, a young blues guitarist finds himself out of his depth when two brothers open a juke joint which comes unexpectedly under siege from supernatural forces – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 18th
It’s a strange thing, but Warner Bros., which has a reputation for tough guy movies from its hard-edged gangster movies of the 1930s, has never made a movie about the blues. If that seems something of a stretch as an assumption, humour me here. The blues came out of the hardships of the Afro-American experience – white racism and the slave trade, poverty and hardship, and there was something raw about it, much as with those early gangster movies that shaped the Studio’s identity.
The idea of Warner Bros. making a movie about the black experience and the blues (or, indeed, building an entire genre around that idea) seems so obvious that it’s a wonder the Studio never did it before. Perhaps it’s significant that Warner Bros. were the Studio that made Elvis (Baz Luhrmann, 2023), which touches on such material.
Warner Bros. also has the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer (Alan Crosland, 1927), hardwired into its DNA.… Read the rest
