"A badge is scarier than a gun."

Essentially a Scorsese film, if Scorsese made films about black people (sorry, but it's true.)

Fantastic direction and superb acting by some of the greatest actors of our day! This is a complex story with a lot of characters, events, and ideologies that I imagine the average person isn't super familiar with, and I think the film sets up all of it and introduces the audience to everything flawlessly. Not to mention the countless events in the last year that one can't help but think of as parallels while watching this film.

If I had one note it would be that I didn't think the script really properly showed us LaKeith Stanfield's character's internal struggle of ratting on his friends until the end of the movie, one would have to assume this would be one of the hardest things for anyone to do. I think LaKeith did his best to try to put it into his performance, but the script should have underlined this part of his character a bit more. The coda of the film makes me think this was left vague intentionally, but I still would have liked to have felt more of that struggle throughout the film.