Video review: "The Hate U Give"

“The Hate U Give” may be the best movie of 2018 most people haven’t heard of. This smart, heartfelt and riveting drama is perhaps the finest cinematic exploration of race relations in American in the past decade.

It takes as its jumping-off point the shooting of an unarmed African-American man, but this isn’t a heedless Black Lives Matter screed. Amandla Stenberg plays Starr, a smart kid from the bad part of town who attends an upscale, predominantly white high school on a scholarship. She narrates about traversing these two worlds, show us how she speaks and behaves around her white friends, including boyfriend Chris (K.J. Apa), and her black family and friends.

One day she meets up with an old childhood friend she’s sweet on, and he winds up getting shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop. For a while no one in either her white or black communities know she’s a witness, and Starr struggles to find a middle way that will protect those she cares about.

The terrific supporting cast includes Russell Hornsby as her dad, who has a powerful scene where he gives “The Speech” about how black teens should behave around law enforcement; Regina Hall as her mother; Common as her uncle, who’s also a member of the LAPD himself; and Sabrina Carter as a white friend who turns out to be not as woke as Starr thought.

Directed by George Tillman Jr. from a screenplay by Audrey Wells, based on the book by Angie Thomas, “The Hate U Give” offers no easier answers but many nagging -- and important -- questions.

Bonus features are quite good, cemented by a feature-length audio commentary track by Tillman, Stenberg, Hornsby and editor Craig Hayes. Such commentaries are always better when they include cast and crew.

There are also three extended scenes six making-of documentary shorts.

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Review: "The Longest Ride"

Movies based on Nicholas Sparks books tend to be short on brainpower but long on emotional tug. "The Longest Yard" is the best one since "The Notebook," making up most of the yardage in smarts without sacrificing too much in the way of passion.

Like all Sparks flicks, it centers around a volatile relationship between two young people from different worlds. It also borrows the familiar technique of giving us a parallel story of another love from another time, with connections between the two growing stronger as the film goes on.

It stars Britt Robertson and Scott Eastwood as one couple in the current time, while Oona Chaplin and Jack Huston are the antique pair.

If some of those names sound familiar, that's because they are. Chaplin is the granddaughter of the great Charlie Chaplin, and Eastwood is the son of Clint Eastwood. (I thought Huston might be one of the Hollywood Hustons, John/Danny/Angelica, but no, he's a Brit.)

Overall it's a nice cast, with each couple sharing warm chemistry between them. It also features Alan Alda in the old man role, and he's quite effective in an understated way.

The story is this: Sophia (Robertson), smart art student from Wake Forest meets Carolina bull rider Luke (Eastwood). They fall hard for each other, but she's soon headed to New York to work at a gallery, while he's chasing the elusive championship after some very hard knocks. On the way home from a magical first date, they rescue Ira (Alda), an old man whose car has run off the road, along with a box of old letters.

While visiting Ira in the hospital, Sophia reads the letters to him, which chronicle the tale of his lifelong love, Ruth (Chaplin). Part of the close-knit Jewish community in Greensboro in the 1940s, they fell in love themselves and started a life together, but not without certain challenges and tragedies along the way. Huston takes over the role of Ira as a youngster.

"Love requires sacrifice -- always," says elder Ira, in the sort of movie where characters just blurt out its main theme.

In the case of Luke and Sophia, that means he must give up the ranch and cracking his skulls falling off bulls, and she has to shelve her dreams of curating great art, or both.

Robertson is a charismatic and likeable star. Her face looks like a cross between Lena Headey ("Game of Thrones") and Linda Hamilton, and she has the spunk of a young Reese Witherspoon about her. Eastwood is like a prettier version of his dad, and much of the early going involves both cowgirls and college girls growing woozy at the sight of him. His acting's a bit stiff in the talkie scenes, but again, just like pop.

The Chaplin/Huston pairing is even better, enhanced by spectacular period costumes, cars and sets. Director George Tillman Jr. ("Men of Honor") shows off Sparks' North Carolina backyard in all its sun-dappled gorgeousness. He even manages to capture the frenetic, bestial grace of bull riding -- though, like the quarter mile races in "The Fast and the Furious," those 8-second rides somehow get stretched out to a minute of screen time.

"The Longest Ride" is a big cinematic piece of caramel-covered melted cheese, unapologetically sweet and sappy. But it will cause warm swells in the heart and a tear or two to be shed.

Review: "Faster"

There's actually a lot of things to like about "Faster," but the final mixture of dissimilar elements leaves us with a strange creature whose head doesn't quite know what its tail is doing.

This new revenge drama at the very least brings Dwayne Johnson out of his self-imposed exile in kiddie flicks ("Tooth Fairy," "The Game Plan") and back into rougher fare. Let's face it, when one resembles the former pro wrestling star dubbed The Rock, he just naturally fits better in vengeful badass mode.

At first, we think director George Tillman Jr. is going for a parody, so over-the-top is the opening sequence.

Johnson plays a prison inmate who's just been sprung after 10 years hard time. After enduring a sanctimonious speech from the warden (Tom Berenger, in a throwaway cameo) he marches impatiently out of the prison gate into the desert sun. No one is there to greet him, so he literally runs to town. Waiting for him there is a souped-up Chevrolet Chevelle SS, with a gun under the seat and a list of names and addresses of people he is supposed to kill.

But screenwriting brothers Tony and Joe Gayton are actually going for something a little more sophisticated here -- a morality tale about vengeance and forgiveness, and a future enslaved to the past. Maybe that's why the principal characters are never given names, just titles. Johnson's is "Driver," since he was the wheel man on a bank robbery that went bad, leaving his brother dead and his mind fixated on slaughtering those who did it.

(The film's title is a little unclear. There are two nifty chase sequences, but I would hardly call this a car picture. And, if anything, the pace of the killings slows down the longer the movie goes on.)

Driver marches into a local telemarketing office, and without a word blows away the guy who played the bad kid in "Children of the Corn." Personally, I'm in favor of wiping out everybody that had anything to do with that movie.

Billy Bob Thornton plays Cop, a high-strung detective who's something of a laughingstock in the department. The hotshot in the squad (Carla Gugino) isn't too happy about being partnered up with a loser, who's even got the proverbial two weeks until retirement to boot.

Then there's Killer (Oliver Jackson-Cohen), a British assassin with some personal issues. Rather than being a cold executioner, he's an angsty Gen Y kid who pops prescription meds and talks to his therapist over the phone while he's on the job -- in this case, taking out Driver.

Killer also has a beautiful girlfriend (Maggie Grace) who wants him to give up the assassination game -- though, for a while we think she might have a hand in it too: After a quickie wedding, they decamp to a barren patch for couples' target shooting.

All these loopy pieces spin around each other -- Driver's methodical killings, Killer's neurotic self-absorption, Cop's mumbling and dithering -- before intersecting in the finale, in ways the audience long ago guessed at.

Johnson's the steadying influence, with a face full of scars and haunted eyes, and we want the movie to be about him and his obsession with slaying those who done him wrong -- even when one or two of them express genuine remorse. But "Faster" keeps wandering off.

Thornton's Cop is such a drag, and the whole strange package of an assassin who kills out of a need for validation feels like it was plucked from another movie and sewed onto this one, Frankenstein-style.

2 stars out of four