RJ Cyler

Night Patrol

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RJ Cyler as Wazi

In the end I gave up and started liking Night Patrol, a hybrid beast that starts out as an update on Romeo and Juliet, with action shifted to the LA of Bloods and Crips, but winds up somewhere else entirely – in vampire territory. I think it was the audacity of the move that tickled me. There is an unwritten rule that rappers make good actors, going back to Tupac at least. Though there’s no shortage of them in this movie, the rule is clearly not universally applicable – flakiness and flat line readings abound. It does not matter too much because the action is largely with… well that’s a good question in itself. … Read more

Emergency

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Sean, Carlos and Kunle

Emergency is a funny name for a comedy but then it’s a funny sort of film, one that combines warm performances, likeable characters and high anxiety in a way that threatens at every turn to neutralise itself but never quite does. High wire stuff. It’s the “big night out goes wrong” sort of comedy that Harold and Kumar or the two young women from Booksmart once took for a drive around the block but this time out it’s RJ Cyler and Donald Elise Watkins as two familiar black stereotypes. Cyler plays Sean, the streetwise slacker student convinced that “black” and “ghetto” are more or less synonyms. Smart, possibly smarter than his unlikely friend, … Read more