In a new review, The Washington Post’s Film Critic Ann Hornaday writes that hip-hop musician Boots Riley makes an anarchic debut with “Sorry to Bother You” that remains on-point and observant, despite its polarizing climax.
Rating the film 2.5 stars, Hornaday goes on to write, “This is a movie of myriad worthy, even urgently necessary, ideas; when it reaches its climax, it goes completely haywire in a preposterous, increasingly scattershot sci-fi pastiche.”
FULL REVIEW: wapo.st/2KRrowd
FULL REVIEW: wapo.st/2KRrowd
- It’s a jarring but amusing conceit, and much of “Sorry to Bother You” possesses similarly on-point jokes; the film is a fluid, peripatetic montage of set pieces, visual gags and ingeniously conceived stunts that are utterly of a piece with Cassius’s own tortured relationship to mobility within white-dominated social spaces.
- But even skeptics will agree that if “Sorry to Bother You” doesn’t entirely succeed as a coherent movie, it bursts with zany, unfiltered passion and go-for-broke brio. What’s more, it offers a deserved showcase for Stanfield, who is that rare actor who can almost immediately earn the audience’s sympathy, his hooded, hunched reticence conveying both hard-won mistrust and vulnerability.
- The film’s final-final ending might strike some as too pessimistic, but “Sorry to Bother You” might be more accurately understood as an impassioned, chaotically accurate response to dark and troubling times. After all, few can credibly argue that cash is green, even when it’s covered in blood.
