| Amazon Studios | Release Date: December 25, 2020 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
48
Mixed:
3
Negative:
0
|
Watch Now
| Stream On |
|
| Buy on |
|
| Stream On |
|
| Stream On |
|
Critic Reviews
Jan 14, 2021
To be successful and Black in America, this movie says, is to tell your own story even as you live it, in the pages of a book or the grooves of a record, in the end zone of a football field or the battleground of a boxing ring. To understand the weight and importance of having to be an example. And to understand when being an example just isn’t enough.
Read full review
Sep 13, 2020
Kemp Powers' thoughtful script gives us an insight into what might have been going on behind the sports and entertainment performances that awed us, and in doing so urges us to look at what's still going on now. Director Regina King's cast delivers some of the best performances of the year, unveiling the hidden pain of public figures. Through a keen focus and confident flow, she unfurls their struggles in a poignant display to show how they live on today.
Read full review
Jan 7, 2021
The suspension of disbelief that any celebrity impersonation requires may be multiplied fourfold here, but One Night in Miami ... turns that excess into a kind of economy. It moves, with light-fingered assurance, through sequences that transform from soulful arias into sustained duets, built around performances that are collaborative rather than imitative in nature.
Read full review
Jan 7, 2021
Jan 19, 2021
The movie’s gathering momentum, even as it grows more claustrophobic, is owed to a few things. It comes from Ben-Adir’s artfully calibrated performance as Malcolm — here more consumed with doubt, worry and self-awareness than the usual firebrand portrayal. It comes from Odom’s deft sense of Cooke. And it comes from King’s remarkable elegance as a director.
Read full review
Jan 15, 2021
Debuting director Regina King ignites sparks by casting four dynamite actors as 1964 civil-rights icons—Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm X, Eli Goree as Cassius Clay, Aldis Hodge as Jim Brown, and an Oscar worthy Leslie Odom Jr. as Sam Cooke—and letting them rip about being Black in America.
Read full review
Jan 12, 2021
The stakes are important, but the film is carried by a stream of small, acutely observed moments, and the way these actors move, converse, relate and enliven Powers’s best dialogue. It’s a case of getting the best of both worlds: a strong, mellow film of urgent, historically prescient ideas expanded from a juicy theatrical premise.
Read full review
RogerEbert.comDec 23, 2020
This is a very good film, full of memorable performances and thought-provoking speeches and arguments. The accomplishments of King and her actors are even more impressive when you stop to think about the shadows these men cast, both in their real-life incarnations and their cinematic representations.
Read full review
Jan 14, 2021
One Night in Miami is a powerful imagining of one of the most intriguing private gatherings in contemporary history. And though we are merely a fly-on-the-wall, eavesdropping on a conversation that is likely far more electrifying than the actual discussion, it's still a remarkable experience.
Read full review
The GuardianSep 12, 2020
This is undeniably a very theatrical film, but it never hides that – indeed, it makes the most of a certain claustrophobia. It’s an immensely watchable evocation of a moment when black America was on the verge of an upheaval that continues to resonate, in 2020 as strongly as ever. It absolutely puts you – to coin a phrase of the time – in the room where it happened.
Read full review
Sep 12, 2020
To some extent, One Night in Miami remains high-quality filmed theater. But the conviction and stirring feeling brought to it elevate the material, making this an auspicious feature debut. Here's hoping that King, one of our most consistently excellent screen actors, continues to spread her wings in this direction.
Read full review
Jan 7, 2021
The PlaylistSep 12, 2020
As a work of deep, committed research into real history, that provides a very handy four-way primer on the most famous Black men of their day and the conflicting approaches to Black resistence and liberation that each personified, One Night in Miami is an instructive and absorbing watch. But as a film with the potential to do more, push further and explore and maybe even in some ways explode those legacies in order to get at the men underneath them, it feels too timid, too talky, too conceptual in content for being so classical in form.
Read full review
Jan 21, 2021
King clearly has the chops, and hopefully, with future films, she’ll be more adventurous. Still, as it stands, One Night in Miami is fitting fare for our present conditions. By placing some of the 20th century’s boldest Black male figures in one shining frame, simply talking, we are asked to consider Black lives as both public and private creations. It’s a great theme, which the film falls just short of embodying.
Read full review
Sep 12, 2020
As unbalanced as it might be, One Night in Miami is a well-acted history lesson and a sincere tribute to the men, their friendship, and their inspiring cultural importance. It’s just that King and Powers’ treatment of that outstanding premise hasn’t quite made the leap from stage play to big-screen film; it has landed in TV-movie territory instead.
Read full review
Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score
