Da 5 Bloods

During the Vietnam War, a squad of Black US Army soldiers of the 1st Infantry Division,^[3] Paul, Otis, Eddie, Melvin, and their squad leader Norman, who dub themselves the "Bloods," secure the site of a CIA airplane crash and recover its cargo, a locker of gold bars intended as payment for the Lahu people for their help in fighting the Viet Cong. The Bloods decide to take the gold for themselves and bury it so they can retrieve it later. However, in the ensuing Vietnamese counter-attack, Norman is killed, and the Bloods cannot locate the buried gold after a napalm strike obliterates the identifying landmarks.

In the present day, Paul, Otis, Eddie, and Melvin meet up in Ho Chi Minh City. A recent landslide had uncovered the tail of the crashed plane, and with this new information, they plan to find the gold and Norman's body. Otis reunites with his old Vietnamese girlfriend Tiên, who reveals that he is the father of her grown child. Tiên introduces the Bloods to Desroche, a French businessman who agrees to help the Bloods smuggle the gold out of Vietnam once they retrieve it. Soon thereafter, they are joined by Paul's son David, who has a tempestuous relationship with his father.

Vinh, a tour guide hired by the Bloods, leads the group out into the countryside, where a confrontation with a local merchant forces Paul to admit that he has post-traumatic stress disorder. At a hotel bar, David meets Hedy, the founder of LAMB, an organization dedicated to clearing landmines. The next day, Vinh drops off the group and tells them he will pick them up in a few days. During their first night, Paul confiscates a pistol Otis had been secretly given by Tiên and becomes suspicious of his motives. Eventually, the Bloods find the gold bars scattered across the side of a hill. They also find Norman's remains and pray over them. Eddie reveals that his excessive spending has rendered him broke but reminds the Bloods of Norman's original plan to give the gold to their black brethren in the United States.

On the hike out, Eddie steps on a landmine and is killed. David also steps on a mine but does not trigger it, just as Hedy and two other volunteers from LAMB, Simon and Seppo, show up. Paul and the others manage to pull David off the mine safely. Paul then holds the three outsiders hostage with Otis's gun, paranoid that they will report them to the authorities. During the night Seppo escapes while David and the others forcibly disarm Paul.

When the Bloods regroup with Vinh, a group of gunmen shows up demanding the gold in exchange for Seppo, whom they have captured. In the ensuing shootout, David is shot in the leg, and Seppo is killed by a landmine. All of the gunmen are killed except for one, who flees. Assuming that Desroche has crossed them, Vinh suggests retreating to a nearby abandoned temple to defend themselves from reinforcements. Unwilling to trust Vinh, Paul takes his share of the gold and heads out into the jungle alone. The remaining Bloods offer Vinh, Hedy, and Simon a share of the remaining gold for their trouble.

As he rages to himself, Paul has a vision of Norman who reminds Paul that he was the one who had accidentally killed Norman during a firefight and that he should let go of his guilt. He is subsequently located and killed by Desroche's men. Desroche, now wearing Paul's MAGA hat, arrives with the gunmen at the temple and is then ambushed by Otis, Melvin, and Vinh; all of his men are killed. Desroche wounds Otis and tries to finish him off with a hand grenade, but Melvin sacrifices himself by leaping on top of it. As Desroche prepares to execute Otis, David shoots and kills him with Otis's gun.

Vinh helps the surviving Bloods share out the gold. Melvin's widow receives his share, and Eddie's goes to a Black Lives Matter organization. Hedy and Simon donate their shares to LAMB in Seppo's name. Norman's remains are brought home to his family by the military. David reads a letter from Paul, who tells him that he will always love him. Otis visits Tiên and bonds with his daughter for the first time.

Discover more about Plot related topics

Black people

Black people

Black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid to dark brown complexion. Not all people considered "black" have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the Western world, the term "black" is used to describe persons who are perceived as dark-skinned compared to other populations. It is most commonly used for people of sub-Saharan African ancestry and the indigenous peoples of Oceania, though it has been applied in many contexts to other groups, and is no indicator of any close ancestral relationship whatsoever. Indigenous African societies do not use the term black as a racial identity outside of influences brought by Western cultures. The term "black" may or may not be capitalized. The AP Stylebook changed its guide to capitalize the "b" in black in 2020. The ASA Style Guide says that the "b" should not be capitalized. Some perceive the term "black" as a derogatory, outdated, reductive or otherwise unrepresentative label, and as a result neither use nor define it, especially in African countries with little to no history of colonial racial segregation.

1st Infantry Division (United States)

1st Infantry Division (United States)

The 1st Infantry Division is a combined arms division of the United States Army, and is the oldest continuously serving division in the Regular Army. It has seen continuous service since its organization in 1917 during World War I. It was officially nicknamed "The Big Red One" after its shoulder patch and is also nicknamed "The Fighting First." The division has also received troop monikers of "The Big Dead One" and "The Bloody First" as puns on the respective officially sanctioned nicknames. It is currently based at Fort Riley, Kansas.

Lahu people

Lahu people

The Lahu people are an ethnic group of China and Mainland Southeast Asia.

Viet Cong

Viet Cong

The Viet Cong, officially the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, was an armed communist organization in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. It fought under the direction of North Vietnam against the South Vietnamese and United States governments during the Vietnam War. It had both guerrilla and regular army units, as well as a network of cadres who organized and mobilized peasants in the territory the Viet Cong controlled. During the war, communist fighters and anti-war activists claimed that the Viet Cong was an insurgency indigenous to the South, while the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments portrayed the group as a tool of North Vietnam. According to Trần Văn Trà, the Viet Cong's top commander, and the post-war Vietnamese government's official history, the Viet Cong followed orders from Hanoi and were part of the People's Army of Vietnam, or North Vietnamese army.

Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, is the largest city in Vietnam, with a population of around 9 million in 2019. Situated in the Southeast region of Vietnam, the city surrounds the Saigon River and covers about 2,061 km2 (796 sq mi).

Post-traumatic stress disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental and behavioral disorder that can develop because of exposure to a traumatic event, such as sexual assault, warfare, traffic collisions, child abuse, domestic violence, or other threats on a person's life. Symptoms may include disturbing thoughts, feelings, or dreams related to the events, mental or physical distress to trauma-related cues, attempts to avoid trauma-related cues, alterations in the way a person thinks and feels, and an increase in the fight-or-flight response. These symptoms last for more than a month after the event. Young children are less likely to show distress but instead may express their memories through play. A person with PTSD is at a higher risk of suicide and intentional self-harm.

Make America Great Again

Make America Great Again

"Make America Great Again" or MAGA is an American political slogan which was popularized by Donald Trump during his successful 2016 presidential campaign. The slogan became a pop culture phenomenon, seeing widespread use and spawning numerous variants in the arts, entertainment and politics, being used by those who support and oppose the presidency of Donald Trump.

Falling on a grenade

Falling on a grenade

Falling on a grenade is the deliberate act of using one's body to cover a live time-fused hand grenade, absorbing the explosion and fragmentation in an effort to save the lives of others nearby. Since this is almost universally fatal, it is considered an especially conspicuous and selfless act of individual sacrifice in wartime; in United States military history, more citations for the Medal of Honor, the country's highest military decoration, have been awarded for falling on grenades to save comrades than any other single act.

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized political and social movement that seeks to highlight racism, discrimination, and racial inequality experienced by black people. Its primary concerns are incidents of police brutality and racially motivated violence against black people. It started following the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd, among others. The movement and its related organizations typically advocate for various policy changes considered to be related to black liberation. While there are specific organizations that label themselves simply as "Black Lives Matter," such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network, the overall movement is a decentralized network of people and organizations with no formal hierarchy. The slogan "Black Lives Matter" itself remains untrademarked by any group. Despite being characterized by some as a violent movement, the overwhelming majority of its public demonstrations have been peaceful.

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Delroy Lindo

Delroy Lindo

Delroy George Lindo is an English-American actor. He is the recipient of such accolades as a NAACP Image Award, a Satellite Award, and nominations for a Drama Desk Award, a Helen Hayes Award, a Tony Award, two Critics' Choice Television Awards, and three Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Jonathan Majors

Jonathan Majors

Jonathan Michael Majors is an American actor. He first rose to prominence after starring in the independent feature film The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), and in 2020 garnered wider notice for starring in the HBO television series Lovecraft Country, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. He has also portrayed Nat Love in the western The Harder They Fall (2021) and Jesse L. Brown in the war film Devotion (2022). Since 2021, he began starring in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as different versions of the character Kang the Conqueror.

Clarke Peters

Clarke Peters

Peter Clarke, known professionally as Clarke Peters, is an American-British actor, writer, and director. He is best known for his roles as Lester Freamon in the television series The Wire (2002–2008) and Albert Lambreaux in the television series Treme (2010–2013).

Norm Lewis

Norm Lewis

Norm Lewis is an American actor and singer. He has appeared in Europe, on Broadway, in film, television, recordings and regional theatre. Productions that he has been involved in include Dessa Rose, Miss Saigon, The Wild Party, Les Misérables, The Little Mermaid, and several others.

Isiah Whitlock Jr.

Isiah Whitlock Jr.

Isiah Whitlock Jr. is an American actor. He is best known for his role as corrupt state senator Clay Davis on the HBO television series The Wire as well as being a frequent collaborator of Spike Lee.

Johnny Trí Nguyễn

Johnny Trí Nguyễn

Johnny Trí Nguyễn is a Vietnamese–American actor, martial artist, action choreographer and stuntman who is mainly active in the Vietnamese film industry.

Mélanie Thierry

Mélanie Thierry

Mélanie Thierry is a French actress.

Jasper Pääkkönen

Jasper Pääkkönen

Joona Jasper Pääkkönen is a Finnish film actor and entrepreneur.

Chadwick Boseman

Chadwick Boseman

Chadwick Aaron Boseman was an American actor. During his two-decade career, Boseman received multiple accolades, including two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Critics' Choice Movie Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and an Academy Award nomination.

Jean Reno

Jean Reno

Juan Moreno y Herrera-Jiménez, better known as Jean Reno, is a Spanish-French actor. He has worked in U.S., French, English, Japanese, Spanish and Italian movie productions; Reno appeared in films such as Crimson Rivers, Godzilla, The Da Vinci Code, Mission: Impossible, The Pink Panther, Ronin, Les Visiteurs, Wasabi, The Big Blue, Hector and the Search for Happiness and Léon: The Professional.

Ngô Thanh Vân

Ngô Thanh Vân

Ngô Thanh Vân, also known as Veronica Ngô or by her initials NTV, is a Norwegian-Vietnamese actress, singer and model.

Hanoi Hannah

Hanoi Hannah

Trịnh Thị Ngọ, also known as Thu Hương and Hanoi Hannah, was a Vietnamese radio personality best known for her work during the Vietnam War, when she made English-language broadcasts for North Vietnam directed at United States troops.

Development and casting

The film was originally a 2013 spec script by Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo titled The Last Tour, with Mike Bundlie and Barry Levine Executive Producing and with Oliver Stone set to direct.^[4] Stone dropped out in 2016, and in 2017 producer Lloyd Levin pitched the script to Spike Lee, who performed a re-write with Kevin Willmott.^[1] The two changed the film to an African-American perspective, added the film's flashback sequences and expanded the role of the Stormin' Norman character.^[1] For his research, Lee credited Wallace Terry's 1984 book Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans as particularly helpful, and assigned it to the film's actors.^[1]

Samuel L. Jackson, Denzel Washington, Giancarlo Esposito, and John David Washington were initially cast in the lead roles but dropped out due to scheduling conflicts.^[5] In February 2019, it was announced that Netflix would distribute the film, with Chadwick Boseman, Delroy Lindo, and Jean Reno set to star.^[6] Jonathan Majors entered negotiations to join later that month.^[7] In March 2019, Paul Walter Hauser, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Norm Lewis, Mélanie Thierry, and Jasper Pääkkönen joined the cast of the film.^[8][9] Esposito was also confirmed for the cast, although he later dropped out.^[10] This was the final film release of Chadwick Boseman during his lifetime.

Filming

Filming began on March 23, 2019.^[11] Production lasted three months, mostly shooting in Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, and Chiang Mai. The ruins where an action sequence takes place, meant to represent the Mỹ Sơn temples, were a specifically constructed set built by the film crew using wood and Styrofoam in a period of two months.^[1] Unlike other films, including Netflix's The Irishman, Lee had the main cast (most of whom were in their 60s) play the 20-year-old versions of themselves in flashback sequences without the use of de-aging technology or make-up, bar for the final shot of their younger versions.^[1] Lee considered it an effective way to visually show that the aged characters remain trapped in the wartime memories, stating, "These guys are going back in time, but this is how they see themselves."^[1]

Da 5 Bloods uses four aspect ratios as framing devices which distinguish between the film's different time periods and locations.^[12] The 1960s flashback sequences were shot in 1.33:1 format on 16 mm film, mimicking newsreel footage of the time.^[12][1] Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel, who proposed the idea, stated, "Vietnam was the first war that was really televised, and it was predominantly shot with 16-mm. [...] It’s how the American public perceived the war."^[1][13] Netflix executives initially were resistant to the proposal given the challenges it presented, but Lee was adamant and was eventually allowed to proceed.^[13] With the exception of a brief scene filmed using a Super 8 camera in 2.39:1 ratio, the modern scenes were shot digitally. The present-day city scenes were framed in widescreen 2.39:1 ratio, evoking the aesthetics of David Lean's epics such as Lawrence of Arabia. The present-day jungle scenes were captured in 1.85:1 ratio, as Lee and Sigel sought to envelop the group with the vastness of the jungle.^[12]

Music

The musical score for Da 5 Bloods was written by composer Terence Blanchard.^[14] In addition to Blanchard's score, the film features several songs from the early 1970s.^[15] Most predominantly, the film contains six songs from Marvin Gaye's 1971 album What's Going On. "That record was released when I was young, but I could feel what was going on in the country," said Blanchard. "When Spike has that music put in a film it becomes extremely powerful for so many reasons."^[16] The six main characters share the same first names as the members of The Temptations and their producer Norman Whitfield.^[17]

A soundtrack album was released by Milan Records on May 29, 2020.^[18]

Discover more about Production related topics

Mike Bundlie

Mike Bundlie

Michael Bundlie is an American artist, film and music producer, entrepreneur, author and publisher.

Denzel Washington

Denzel Washington

Denzel Hayes Washington Jr. is an American actor and filmmaker. He has been described as an actor who reconfigured "the concept of classic movie stardom". Throughout his career spanning over four decades, Washington has received numerous accolades, including a Tony Award, two Academy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards and two Silver Bears. In 2016, he received the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2020, The New York Times named him the greatest actor of the 21st century. In 2022, Washington received the Presidential Medal of Freedom bestowed upon him by President Joe Biden.

Giancarlo Esposito

Giancarlo Esposito

Giancarlo Giuseppe Alessandro Esposito is an American actor. He is best known for portraying Gus Fring in the AMC crime drama series Breaking Bad, from 2009 to 2011, as well as in its prequel series Better Call Saul, from 2017 to 2022. For this role, he won the Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series and earned three nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series.

John David Washington

John David Washington

John David Washington is an American actor and former professional football player. He played college football at Morehouse College and signed with the St. Louis Rams as an undrafted free agent in 2006. Professionally, Washington spent four years as a running back for the United Football League's Sacramento Mountain Lions.

Chadwick Boseman

Chadwick Boseman

Chadwick Aaron Boseman was an American actor. During his two-decade career, Boseman received multiple accolades, including two Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Critics' Choice Movie Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, and an Academy Award nomination.

Delroy Lindo

Delroy Lindo

Delroy George Lindo is an English-American actor. He is the recipient of such accolades as a NAACP Image Award, a Satellite Award, and nominations for a Drama Desk Award, a Helen Hayes Award, a Tony Award, two Critics' Choice Television Awards, and three Screen Actors Guild Awards.

Jean Reno

Jean Reno

Juan Moreno y Herrera-Jiménez, better known as Jean Reno, is a Spanish-French actor. He has worked in U.S., French, English, Japanese, Spanish and Italian movie productions; Reno appeared in films such as Crimson Rivers, Godzilla, The Da Vinci Code, Mission: Impossible, The Pink Panther, Ronin, Les Visiteurs, Wasabi, The Big Blue, Hector and the Search for Happiness and Léon: The Professional.

Jonathan Majors

Jonathan Majors

Jonathan Michael Majors is an American actor. He first rose to prominence after starring in the independent feature film The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019), and in 2020 garnered wider notice for starring in the HBO television series Lovecraft Country, for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award nomination. He has also portrayed Nat Love in the western The Harder They Fall (2021) and Jesse L. Brown in the war film Devotion (2022). Since 2021, he began starring in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as different versions of the character Kang the Conqueror.

Clarke Peters

Clarke Peters

Peter Clarke, known professionally as Clarke Peters, is an American-British actor, writer, and director. He is best known for his roles as Lester Freamon in the television series The Wire (2002–2008) and Albert Lambreaux in the television series Treme (2010–2013).

Isiah Whitlock Jr.

Isiah Whitlock Jr.

Isiah Whitlock Jr. is an American actor. He is best known for his role as corrupt state senator Clay Davis on the HBO television series The Wire as well as being a frequent collaborator of Spike Lee.

Jasper Pääkkönen

Jasper Pääkkönen

Joona Jasper Pääkkönen is a Finnish film actor and entrepreneur.

Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City

Ho Chi Minh City, formerly known as Saigon, is the largest city in Vietnam, with a population of around 9 million in 2019. Situated in the Southeast region of Vietnam, the city surrounds the Saigon River and covers about 2,061 km2 (796 sq mi).

Da 5 Bloods was released on June 12, 2020, by Netflix.^[19][20] Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the film was originally scheduled to premiere out-of-competition at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, then play in theaters in May or June before streaming on Netflix.^[1]

Commercial response

Upon release, it was the top-streamed film in its first weekend,^[21] before falling to sixth place in its second.^[22] At their Q2 report meeting in July 2020, Netflix reported the film had been viewed by 27 million households since its release.^[23] In November, Variety reported the film was the 16th-most watched straight-to-streaming title of 2020 up to that point.^[24] In March 2021, Variety reported the film was among Netflix's most-watched Oscar-nominated titles, and assigned it an "audience appeal score" of 81 out 100.^[25]

Critical response

The performances of Lindo and Boseman garnered widespread acclaim.

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 92% based on 303 reviews, with an average rating of 8/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Fierce energy and ambition course through Da 5 Bloods, coming together to fuel one of Spike Lee's most urgent and impactful films."^[26] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 82 out of 100, based on 49 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".^[27]

Writing for the Chicago Sun-Times, Richard Roeper gave the film four out of four, saying: "The picture, the script and director Lee all deserve nomination consideration, as does the lush and booming score by Lee's longtime collaborator Terence Blanchard... Whitlock, Lewis, Peters and Boseman deserve supporting actor conversation, while Delroy Lindo should be an instant contender for best actor".^[28] Richard Brody of The New Yorker wrote that the film "runs two hours and thirty-four minutes, but it's not a second too long. On the contrary, it feels compressed, bustling, and frenzied with its intellectual and dramatic energy."^[29] David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter called the film "as timely as today's news", writing: "Lee deftly steers it all full circle in a series of brief wrap-up scenes that are both fancifully tidy and deadly serious, acknowledging the Black Lives Matter movement in a way that allows this sprawling, unwieldy, frequently brilliant film to close on a profoundly affecting note of hope and catharsis. Structural flaws notwithstanding, this movie is a gift right now, and there's no other director that could have made it."^[30]

Eric Kohn of IndieWire gave the film a grade of "B" and wrote: "A loose, caustic look at the Vietnam war through the prism of black experiences, Da 5 Bloods wrestles with the specter of the past through the lens of a very confusing present, and settles into a fascinated jumble as messy and complicated as the world surrounding its release."^[31] Writing for Variety, Peter Debruge called the film "ambitious but uneven" and said that "Lee interweaves potent social critique with escapist B-movie thrills as four veterans return to 'Nam to claim the loot they were ordered to retrieve decades earlier, but stashed for themselves instead. The result is overlong and erratic, but also frequently surprising...propelled by an unforgettable turn from Delroy Lindo".^[32] Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post gave the film three out of four, writing that "its moments of stinging insight and soaring cinematic rhetoric once again prove why Spike Lee might be America's most indispensable filmmaker".^[33]

Critic Mark Kermode called the film "a mixed bag".^[34] Writing for The Guardian, he gave the film three out of five, praising its political and comedic aspects as well as Lindo's performance, but wrote negatively of its "tonal shifts", noting that "warring elements of Da 5 Bloods appear bolted together".^[35] Chuck Bowen of Slant Magazine gave the film two-and-a-half out of four, concluding: "At its best, Da 5 Bloods offers a damning, impassioned, hallucinatory collage of images and ideas concerning the relationship between racism and warfare with superb performances. At its worst, it's a vibrant mess."^[36]

Da 5 Bloods appeared on 77 critics' year-end top-ten lists, including ten first-place rankings and six second-place ones.^[37]

From U.S.-based Vietnamese writers

In an article for The New York Times, Pulitzer-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen expressed his mixed feelings. He notes, that even with a new central perspective of Black soldiers and justified messaging, the film still reanimates tropes such as victimizing Vietnamese and being America-centric. He said, "If one can't disentangle Black subjectivity from dominant American (white) subjectivity, it’s impossible to apply a genuine anti-imperialist critique. Hence the marginalized Vietnamese continuing to serve their role as excuses for a Black drama staged against America's Black-white divide."^[38]

Hoai-Tran Bui echoes similar perspectives in her analysis for the blog /Film, saying Lee's work "is haunted by, even enamored with, the legacy of Apocalypse Now". Still, she notes "Lee does take steps to undercut past Hollywood depictions of the Vietnamese people as faceless victims", referencing the major presence of the tour guide character Vinh and the rare focus on Amerasian children.^[39]

For the publication AwardsWatch, Nguyen Le sees many areas of the film, "in an imperfect-but-commendable way", a departure from Hollywood's constant portrayal of Vietnam as nothing more than a war. He also wonders the possibility of Vietnamese communities no longer hyper-entrenching themselves in wartime memories and instead focusing on combating anti-Black racism from within and without. "As the end of Da 5 Bloods shows, there are more important issues to tend with than the past, sometimes it's because we have finished confronting it", he wrote.^[40]

Accolades

Discover more about Reception related topics

Review aggregator

Review aggregator

A review aggregator is a system that collects reviews and ratings of products and services. This system stores the reviews and uses them for purposes such as supporting a website where users can view the reviews, selling information to third parties about consumer tendencies, and creating databases for companies to learn about their actual and potential customers. The system enables users to easily compare many different reviews of the same work. Many of these systems calculate an approximate average assessment, usually based on assigning a numeric value to each review related to its degree of positive rating of the work.

Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is an American review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee, and Stephen Wang. Although the name "Rotten Tomatoes" connects to the practice of audiences throwing rotten tomatoes in disapproval of a poor stage performance, the original inspiration comes from a scene featuring tomatoes in the Canadian film Léolo (1992).

Metacritic

Metacritic

Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, television shows, music albums, video games, and formerly books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged. Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc Doyle, and Julie Doyle Roberts in 1999, and is owned by Fandom, Inc. as of 2023.

Chicago Sun-Times

Chicago Sun-Times

The Chicago Sun-Times is a daily newspaper published in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Since 2022, it is the flagship paper of Chicago Public Media, and has the second largest circulation among Chicago newspapers, after the Chicago Tribune. The modern paper grew out of the 1948 merger of the Chicago Sun and the Chicago Daily Times. Journalists at the paper have received eight Pulitzer prizes, mostly in the 1970s; one recipient was film critic Roger Ebert (1975), who worked at the paper from 1967 until his death in 2013. Long owned by the Marshall Field family, since the 1980s ownership of the paper has changed hands numerous times, including twice in the late 2010s.

Richard Roeper

Richard Roeper

Richard E. Roeper is an American columnist and film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times. He co-hosted the television series At the Movies with Roger Ebert from 2000 to 2008, serving as the late Gene Siskel's successor. From 2010 to 2014, he co-hosted The Roe and Roeper Show with Roe Conn on WLS-AM. From October 2015 to October 2017, Roeper served as the host of the FOX 32 morning show Good Day Chicago.

Richard Brody

Richard Brody

Richard Brody is an American film critic who has written for The New Yorker since 1999.

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter

Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a decentralized political and social movement that seeks to highlight racism, discrimination, and racial inequality experienced by black people. Its primary concerns are incidents of police brutality and racially motivated violence against black people. It started following the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Rekia Boyd, among others. The movement and its related organizations typically advocate for various policy changes considered to be related to black liberation. While there are specific organizations that label themselves simply as "Black Lives Matter," such as the Black Lives Matter Global Network, the overall movement is a decentralized network of people and organizations with no formal hierarchy. The slogan "Black Lives Matter" itself remains untrademarked by any group. Despite being characterized by some as a violent movement, the overwhelming majority of its public demonstrations have been peaceful.

IndieWire

IndieWire

IndieWire is a film industry and review website that was established in 1996. The site's focus was predominantly independent film, although its coverage has grown to "to include all aspects of Hollywood and the expanding universes of TV and streaming". IndieWire is part of Penske Media.

Mark Kermode

Mark Kermode

Mark James Kermode is an English film critic, musician, radio presenter, television presenter and podcaster. He is the chief film critic for The Observer, contributes to the magazine Sight & Sound, presents a weekly Scala Radio film music show and the BBC Four documentary series Mark Kermode's Secrets of Cinema, and is a co-presenter of the film-review podcast Kermode & Mayo's Take alongside long-time collaborator Simon Mayo.

The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as The Manchester Guardian, and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers, The Observer and The Guardian Weekly, The Guardian is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of The Guardian free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for The Guardian the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in its journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK.

Slant Magazine

Slant Magazine

Slant Magazine is an American online publication that features reviews of movies, music, TV, DVDs, theater, and video games, as well as interviews with actors, directors, and musicians. The site covers various film festivals like the New York Film Festival.

/Film

/Film

/Film, also spelled Slashfilm, is a blog that covers movie news, reviews, interviews, and trailers. It was founded by Peter Sciretta in August 2005.