Detroit

Starring: John Boyega, Anthony Mackie, Algee Smith
Directed by: Kathryn Bigelow (“Zero Dark Thirty”)
Written by: Mark Boal (“The Hurt Locker”)

As well directed and emotionally charged as Oscar-winning filmmaker Katheryn Bigelow’s true-life film “Detroit” is, it also plays as a one-note exercise in how to trigger outrage from an audience. “Detroit” is upsetting and disheartening and puts the ugliness of racism at the forefront, but it also needed to be a little more enlightening to capture the full essence of exactly what we’re witnessing in the harrowing drama. With “Detroit,” Bigelow and Oscar-winning screenwriter Mark Boal place us at the center of the civil unrest that took place in the Motor City in 1967, but do so in a way that sensationalizes the entire narrative. It would be like watching “Selma,” and the entire film was the Bloody Sunday scene on the Edmund Pettus Bridge stretched into a feature.