Avaliações do Metacritic

Writer-director Tanya Hamilton's intellectually ambitious debut drama Night Catches Us is all the more notable for setting well-drawn fictional characters in a fraught, real moment in civil rights history.

This intelligent, emotional drama should resonate strongly with fans of character-driven stories and those interested in tales of American political struggle.

Ms. Hamilton tells a modest, complex story with admirable clarity and nuance. That her film is so quiet, so evidently invested in contemplation rather than confrontation, gives it power as well as insight.

Making a remarkable feature debut, Hamilton distinguishes herself more as a filmmaker than as a screenwriter. While she elicits smoldering performances from Mackie and Washington, the movie around them is rather diffuse.

Hamilton manifests her vision of what politics can do to individual thinking with subtlety and sophistication. Remember her name. She's a genuine find.

For Washington, the wounds of the past are just beneath the surface, as close as the bullet holes under her kitchen wallpaper.

Most successful are the scenes involving Marcus and Iris, a 10-year-old girl who grew up fatherless and watchful of her tumultuous surroundings.

The movie evokes its time and place so potently that it almost doesn't matter that Hamilton's script proves unequal to her vision.

"Night" never quite coalesces into the forceful drama it hopes to be.

It raises tangled questions about whether it is better to live humiliated or arm yourself, yet for the most part it's dramatically inert, talky and directionless, and it ends quietly without saying much of anything.