Review of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) by Theredsky — 09 Feb 2021
It’s poetic that Chadwick Boseman’s final performance is easily his best. Boseman’s performance is absolutely incredible and powerful. His character is so wonderfully developed and interesting and that’s due to the good screenplay.
It isn’t a great screenplay but it isn’t bad either. Boseman though, makes the script sound much much better. Viola Davis also does an incredible job too. Her performance and Boseman’s are easily some of my favorites of the entire year.
All of the other performances are pretty good too but my issue is that some of these characters who are kinda interesting don’t get that much development. It doesn’t kill the movie in any way but I wish they had a little more development.
I didn’t expect the movie to take place in one setting but it did and I thought it worked very well for the film. Keeping the story very self contained helps with the pacing and emotional weight to the film as you know something is going to happen but you don’t know when or where.
The reason the film is so self contained is that it’s based on a play of the same name. If you know that it’s based on a play, then the self contained story makes sense. The film looks visually very nice and it has a good score and good sound editing.
Viola Davis has an absolutely incredible voice and I really hope that that was actually Boseman on the trumpet. I would highly recommend checking this out as it’s up there on my favorites of the year.
This review of Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) was written by Theredsky on 09 February 2021.
Ma Rainey's Black Bottom has generally received positive reviews.
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