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Akilla's Escape

2020

Saul Williams, Thamela Mpumlwana, Donisha Rita Claire Prendergast, Vic Mensa ...

Drama During what is supposed to be a simple, routine handoff, 40-year-old drug trader Akilla Brown is suddenly caught in the middle of a violent robbery. Narrowly making it out alive, he captures one of the thieves, a teenaged Jamaican boy named Sheppard. Under the pressure of the criminals who hired him, Akilla must set things right and retrieve the stolen goods over the course of one arduous night.

	Author	Review
United States	John DeFore The Hollywood Reporter	"A multi-generational crime film stripped of genre excesses (...) it lacks some of the flash expected in commercial genre pictures, but makes up for that in seriousness."	POS
Canada	Andrew Parker The Gate	"An admirable modern day morality play (...) It suffers, however, from feeling like two separate, awkwardly interlocking stories where one is vastly more resounding than the other (...) Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)"	NEU
Canada	Norman Wilner Now Toronto	"Officer does something else with 'Akilla’s Escape' that I’m hesitant to discuss, but when you see it you’ll hopefully be as stunned and impressed as I was (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Jonathan Christian The Playlist	"Despite its persistent determination to speak on important topics through imaginative subversion, 'Akilla’s Escape' falls flat more than it succeeds by falling into the tropes it struggles to sidestep"	NEU
United States	Odie Henderson rogerebert.com	"If you didn’t know any better, you’d think being Black was nothing but being a slave or having a dangerous side hustle. It’s as disheartening as it is dull and incorrect (…) Rating: ★★ (out of 4)"	NEG
United States	Christopher Schobert The Film Stage	"This tense and complex film from Canadian-British filmmaker Charles Officer is grim but electrifying, shot with style to spare and full of the sort of lived-in details that make a character-driven crime drama believable"	POS
United States	Guy Lodge Variety	"Toronto's Jamaican community lends a vibrant sociocultural backdrop to Charles Officer's timeline-hopping thriller, but a dour, convoluted script weighs it down."	NEU
United States	Michael Rechtshaffen Los Angeles Times	"The film remains firmly rooted in Williams’ quietly powerful, laser-focused performance (...) [It] boasts a unifying visual schematic captured by Maya Bankovic’s poetic cinematography."	POS
United Kingdom	Whelan Barzey Time Out	"It’s an uneven puzzle: eye-catching but not entirely convincing when put together (…) Rating: ★★★ (out of 5)"	NEU
United Kingdom	Phil Hoad The Guardian	"Officer's film [doesn't] live up to its pretensions, which are also present in the overlong opening credits discoursing on Jamaican history and corruption; themes hinted at later but which never entirely bloom (...) Rating: ★★ (out of 5)"	NEG
United States	Isaac Feldberg Paste Magazine	"A riveting, hypnotic neo-noir requiem for those trapped in vicious cycles"	POS

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