Whether you’re standing in the theater lobby or curled up in bed, deciding what to watch next is often the most difficult part of any pop-culture junkie’s day. And with dozens of films in theaters on any given weekend, plus virtually endless layers of streaming purgatory to sort through in search of your next binge-watch, there’s more out there—and tougher decisions to make—than ever.
Fortune‘s here to help you navigate the week’s latest offerings, boiling all the entertainment out there down into three distinct recommendations: should you see it, stream it, or skip it? Find out below.
SEE IT: ‘Clemency’ and ‘Just Mercy’ (In theaters)
Capital punishment has long been scrutinized by the American public, the practice a burning question of both conscience and conviction.
How much trust should we place in a legal system poisoned by racial and ethnic animus to put forth only demonstrably guilty parties for execution? How comfortable are we with the prevalence of mentally ill prisoners on death row, with the reliability and fairness of capital proceedings susceptible to the human error of those overseeing them? How can one defend the practice on modern, ethical grounds when “an eye for an eye,” a literally Biblical summation of vengeance, is a widely held stance its supporters offer as justification?
Two exceptional American dramas that interrogate the death penalty in spiritual as much as schematic terms, Clemency and Just Mercy—each finely acted, thoughtful pieces of filmmaking that weigh several metric tons—are opening within days of one another. Grouped together with the Apple TV+ series Truth Be Told, their arrival reflects an escalating conversation around prison reform in this country, aimed at reconsidering mass incarceration in light of public reckoning with its racial and economic fault lines.
Clemency, a profoundly bleak chamber piece built around a death-row warden (Alfre Woodard), is of the two a more challenging and subversive work. The sophomore effort of writer-director Chinonye Chukwu, it meditates upon on the psychological apocalypse that can ensue from serving, as this character must, as a state-appointed angel of death, witnessing and carrying out executions while mere inches away from prisoners taking their last breaths—and feet from their heartbroken families. The focus on this warden, Bernandine Williams, at first seems an odd and unconventional choice by Chukwu (though Woodard internalizes everything to give one of the great pressurized performances of the year). But it’s through the character’s eyes that the film is able to offer an atypically up-close view of the slow, soul-grinding machinery of state-sanctioned violence. From within the walls of Williams’ prison, as she anticipates the execution of another inmate (Aldis Hodge)—one who may in fact be innocent and has led crowds of protesters to gather in the parking lot—Clemency is unrelenting in how coldly it lays out the penal system’s warped power structures.
Just Mercy, comparatively, is a much lighter and more commercially viable film, though its view of how arduous it can be to find justice within a broken system of law is no less valuable. Based on true events, it centers around crusading attorney Bryan Stevenson (Michael B. Jordan), who’s spent his life fighting to upend wrongful convictions, to exonerate those whose lives have been stripped brutally from them. His efforts include trying to free an Alabama man, Walter McMillan (Jamie Foxx), who’s been railroaded by a system stacked against him. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, whose Short Term 12 looked empathically at the big-hearted workers toiling within the foster-care system (that film’s star, Brie Larson, is back here in a supporting role), it’s a feel-good crowdpleaser about an occasion on which justice, against the system’s very design, was actually done. And it’s constructed with such consummate competence and care that the inevitable courtroom theatrics just about avoid veering into gooey, melodramatic pulp.
Clemency is cold and punishing in its depiction of how these processes can empty out a soul. Just Mercy is warm, perhaps aggressively so, in its lionization of those outside the prison walls, battling to scale them. These two films, taken together, shade a vital portrait of the institutional cruelty rampant within our current criminal justice system—and the compassion that will be necessary to combat and reform it.
STREAM IT: ‘Sweetheart’ (Netflix)
Monster movies are almost always heavy on symbolism—look at the irradiated, city-destroying potential of Godzilla, crawling out of the Pacific nine years after the bombing of Hiroshima, or the way Sadako escapes screens to terrorize anyone who thought modern technology might offer distance from real-world terrors throughout the Ringu franchise. King Kong’s racial politics are about as hairy to explore as the rest of him, while creations like Alien‘s Xenomorph suggest correspondingly kinkier roots in sexual panic.
Sweetheart, a sly grafting of Coralie Fargeat’s Revenge onto Predator and Castaway, is a desert-island movie about a young, marooned woman (Kiersey Clemons, of Dope) battling a monster that leaps out of the sea each night to find and brutalize her, heading back out before daybreak. At its heart, it is about abuse and fighting back, about rebelling despite the apparent futility of such attempts when what’s threatening you has height, strength, and speed on its side, not to mention unparalleled access. You still have to try. In one scene, the woman—whose name, we discover, is Jennifer—has only a palm frond with which to hide herself as she attempts to spy on the monster from a distance; it barely even obscures her face, and you feel the unavoidable, petrifying nature of her exposure. As in Creature from the Black Lagoon 65 years ago, coexistence is out of the question. If Jenn’s to survive, this denizen of the depths—which emerges, in one of the film’s most striking images, from a hellmouth on the ocean floor—must be banished.
In more ways than just this central tension, Sweetheart (directed by Sleight‘s J.D. Dillard, who also cowrote with Alex Hyner and Alex Theurer) choreographs its protagonist’s vulnerability, making her transformation into a strong-willed action heroine all the more invigorating. There’s a dark, despairing read of this film, but there’s a more triumphant one too, in which victimhood is gradually replaced by a hard-scrabble heroism. We meet Jennifer as she washes ashore on a mysterious island, briefly tending to a mortally wounded fellow survivor of their presumed ship crash (“Did you see it?” gasps the man, ominously, coral protruding from his side.) She strives to retrieve a coconut for him to drink from; he’s dead by the time she returns. Jenn’s first days as a castaway are distinguished by struggle; Clemons shines in little, wonderfully utilitarian moments when she’s first figuring out how to skewer fish with a spear or locate a water source.
But the aforementioned monster—some more savage kin to The Shape of Water‘s Adonis Fishman—soon arrives to shatter any illusions of security. Its introduction is a thing of wonder, and terror. As a plane flies overhead at night, Jenn races to the shoreline and fires a flare into the dark sky. The flare arcs across the night and descends into the ocean—backlighting as it does an imposing figure watching her from the water. Dillard pulls off some impressive tricks in Sweetheart, that moment chief among them, but he’s more broadly commendable for his ability to get a lot out of a little: to push minimal actors, one setting, and a surely shoestring budget toward something thoughtful, frightening, and fiercely entertaining.
SKIP IT: ‘1917’ (In theaters)
War is hell, and it’s rarely felt as stagily like it as in 1917, a World War I epic from Sam Mendes (Skyfall). The latest in a spate of such films about conflict told from the dirt-caked, wide-eyed perspective of the young men caught up in it, 1917 emulates Dunkirk‘s sensory might and the emotional horror of All Quiet on the Western Front, mirroring the race-against-time dimension of Saving Private Ryan and cribbing more than it would readily admit from the Brothers in Arms video games.
Where 1917 aims to elevate itself is through the central gimmick of a single-shot technique, holding what appears to be (but is not) one unbroken take as it follows two soldiers tasked with crossing enemy lines to deliver intel that will prevent an entire regiment, the Second Devonshire, from getting wiped out in a German ambush. The first scene, perhaps the most thoughtful in the entire film, opens in an idyllic green meadow, Lance Corporals Schofield (George MacKay) and Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) savoring one last moment of stillness. Heading back toward the trenches, they begin to walk, the camera tracking steadily back with them as the landscape shifts, fertile soil and Malickian sunlight fading into a gradual muck of dirt, grease, and trenches that rise up around the pair, the stench of death starting to linger around their shoulders.
But even this opening, striking in its visual poetry, is undermined by the stilted dialogue between Schofield and Blake, whose banter could have been pulled from the cut-scene of a first-person shooter. Mendes, who cowrote the script with Krysty Wilson-Cairns, is aesthetically after an immersive big-screen experience, but the human touch required to make such a gambit feel like more than just technical braggadocio is only felt intermittently.
That turns out to be the biggest issue with 1917, and it’s a foundational one Mendes so fully commits to that he must consider it the film’s strength. With Roger Deakins, one of our greatest living cinematographers, along for the ride, 1917 often does look stunningly gorgeous, even from the claustrophobic vantage point of its characters’ perspective. The fog of war is literalized as massive plumes of dirt explode up around the characters’ ears, enveloping them in darkness. The ghosts of a decimated town center can be felt in the rich shadows that line its few still-standing walls, beneath which little fires still blaze. The film’s tunnel-vision approach—move, dodge, fight, stay alive—should be engrossing.
After a short while, Mendes’s deliberately showy approach crumbles into unreality, in scenes such as one when a dogfight off in the distance between two rag-tag fighter pilots suddenly crashes into the remote farmhouse that Blake and Schofield are passing through. The horror of conflict is in its chaotic, sprawling nature, the sense that you could look into the distance and see another life-or-death narrative playing out, involving men you’ll never meet. But Mendes’s script ensures every obstacle these two soldiers face is lobbed a bit too directly at their heads.
At the root of 1917‘s problems is a disconnect between filmmaking theory and practice when it comes to long takes. Occasionally, as in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, they can work to stick one’s audience into a truly all-encompassing symphony of sound and fury. But more often, they’re the most blatantly affected gimmick one can employ (see: Birdman), a boast on the director’s part rather than a natural process of the story they’re telling.
Even with such talented technicians behind the scenes, 1917 is the sum of its artifice and somehow less. What 1917 feels like is a Haunted Mansion theme-park ride built over the Battle of the Somme. As Blake and especially Schofield go through hell, getting roughed up and shot at, nearly drowned or crushed inside a collapsing cave, their misery is tracked faithfully by Deakins’s camera, which moves so cleanly and gracefully that it appears a holy presence, observing from someplace beyond. An aesthetic choice though that may be, it keeps the audience at arm’s length, a problem given that everything else about Mendes’s vision tells me he wants the audience to be right there. But it’s hard to be immersive when you’re constantly calling attention to yourself, and it’s impossible when your camera is more the protagonist of your film than your characters.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Aldis Hodge on “going to that dark place” for death row drama Clemency
—From Charlie’s Angels to Hellboy: the biggest box office disappointments of 2019
—Little Women director Greta Gerwig and cast reveal how they reinvented a Feminist Classic
—How Netflix transformed the peak TV terrain in the 2010s
—Whistleblower cinema is back in a big way
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