"Queen & Slim" is I think the perfect example of a movie that's greater than the sum of its parts.
There are many individual moments in the film that don't hold up under scrutiny. But when experienced as a whole, the film exerts a kind of poetic power. It's equal parts sorrow and rage at the treatment of African Americans in the United States, and having watched it after the George Floyd murder (even though the film came out before it), it's impossible not to understand the actions and motivations of the Bonnie and Clyde couple at the film's center.
It's certainly overheated and histrionic at times, but these are overheated and histrionic moments we're experiencing in our country right now, and I don't want movies, especially movies about race, to play it safe. I want them to be angry, to scream and shout and swear, to have muscle and teeth, and so the energy blazing off the screen from this movie felt right for the moment.
My favorite scene is the one where Slim comments on how beautiful the countryside of rural America is as they're driving through it, and Queen, who casually glances at a prison work gang in a field made up of all black men that could easily pass for a group of field slaves from the Civil War-era South, replies, "Is it?"
Grade: A-
