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Critics Consensus: Crown Heights' heartbreaking fact-based narrative -- and LaKeith Stanfield's remarkable starring performance -- push this powerful drama past its structural flaws.
Critic Consensus: Crown Heights' heartbreaking fact-based narrative -- and LaKeith Stanfield's remarkable starring performance -- push this powerful drama past its structural flaws.
All Critics (76) | Top Critics (22) | Fresh (57) | Rotten (19) | DVD (1)
The sole fresh twist, one that should have been more than enough to drive the show - one friend dedicating his life to exonerating the other - is repeatedly undermined by their unequal presentation.
Stanfield deftly balances rage and resignation, and Asomugha is impressive as a crusader who refuses to give up.
"Crown Heights" is soul-shaking only in the abstract. In execution, it's deathly dull.
Stanfield, in a performance of quiet power, fully inhabits Warner's agony at the injustice that is being done to him.
"Crown Heights" plows forward, steely in its resolve, and forgoes the emotional fireworks in favor of subdued, straightforward storytelling.
The two men's relationship, and others in the film, might have been explored in greater depth, but Ruskin rightly keeps his focus on the judicial system as it fails Warner again and again.
Crown Heights dismayingly plods to its conclusion, where the weight and intrinsic importance of its material is rendered into a saccharine goop of inconsequence.
The story of Colin Warner is just one of many, one of many heartbreaking stories where justice isn't served.
Even though [the actors] excel, the constant ping-ponging back and forth to make sure everything is included does subvert their success.
It's an impressive, quietly powerful film that will stay with you long after the final credits roll.
[Lakeith Stanfield] infuses Haitian-born Colin Warner's true story with a simmering immediacy that feels at odds with director Matt Ruskin's banal approach to history and social justice.
Writer/Director Matt Ruskin never lets the audience get a sense of the characters outside the mechanics of the injustice they are currently suffering through, which he often skims over like he's trying to race to get to the end credits.
It loses steam by the time it gets around to the investigation and exoneration portion of the movie. The reason is that this shift in the narrative forces the filmmakers to abandon their far more moving examination of the slow, agonizing way the criminal justice system and prison dehumanizes those trapped within them.
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