Jeffrey Wright is outstanding here

You can say that “All Day and a Night” is another movie in a long line of gang-banger cliches. At times it feels just like that. But the directorial debut from Joe Robert Cole (a co-writer on Black Panther) is too ambitious for that. This is a movie that honestly and deeply wants you to understand it; how a father (a phenomenal Jeffrey Wright) can get so weary and beaten down by his lack of options that he fails in his duties as a parent, how a son (“Moonlight’s Ashton Sanders) can want to improve on the lessons of the father but still feel that simmering anger as though it’s genetic, how there really isn't much of a difference between prison and the culture of violence and detriment that a young kid like Jahkor (Sanders) comes from. He is first seen gunning down two people and going to prison for it. Much of the rest of the film is a flashback that will tell us why it happened but which rightfully becomes secondary to what the film makes out to be just an endless loop of poor options and even worse choices. The film is gritty, unsentimental, and never looks for easy answers but it provides moments of needed perspective (“Slavery taught black people how to survive, but not how to live”) that feel both vital and eye-opening. And Wright is Oscar-worthy here as JD, an intimidating father-figure who dishes out hard lessons to his son before leaving the scene for all too predictable reasons. Sanders is also compelling, toeing a line between staying on the straight-and-narrow and fighting for his small piece of the pie cause no one else is fighting for him. “All Day” is telling a familiar story, but it’s beating heart is the tragedy of just having to keep telling it.

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