‘Small Axe: Mangrove’ Film Review: Steve McQueen Exposes the Police Brutality of the Past, and the Present

“Never count out an oppressed population” and “never count out a played-out genre” are just two of the notions that stayed with me after watching “Mangrove,” one of a five-part series of period films by Steve McQueen about London’s West Indian community. It’s a movie about a real-life injustice followed by a courtroom drama, and if a long history of hacky biopics and feel-good activist cinema made you think this kind of story was beyond telling on film with power or efficacy, McQueen proves that there’s still a way to do it right. The tale of the Mangrove Nine was relevant in the late 1960s and early 1970s when it actually happened, it was relevant when McQueen and Alastair Siddons (“Tomb Raider” 2018) sat down to write about it, and it’s relevant today, tomorrow, and in the future, as unchecked police brutality continues to rain down on communities of color. Like “Lovers Rock,” the “Small Axe” chapter that preceded “Mangrove” at the New York Film Festival, the film allows McQueen to unleash a previously-untapped gift for celebration and exuberance. The West Indian residents living in Notting Hill in 1968 might be facing regular discrimination and violence from the racist […]

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