Mudbound (Dee Rees, 2017)

Garrett Hedlund and Jason Mitchell in Mudbound

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Jason Clarke, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Mitchell, Mary J. Blige, Rob Morgan, Jonathan Banks, Kelvin Harrison Jr., Dylan Arnold, Kerry Cahill, Lucy Faust, Jason Kirkpatrick. Screenplay: Virgil Williams, Dee Rees, based on a novel by Hillary Jordan. Cinematography: Rachel Morrison. Production design: David J. Bomba. Film editing: Mako Kamitsuna. Music: Tamar-kali.

Mudbound is a solid, hard-edged, sometimes raw look at Mississippi in the post-World War II period, one I know well, having been born into that time and place. It only occasionally slips into the "Magical Negro" and "White Savior" tropes that afflict so many films about race relations. For example, it has Jamie McAllan (Garrett Hedlund) in his crippled bomber saluted by one of the Tuskegee Airmen, who have just rescued him from an attack by German fighter planes. This serves as a predicate for Jamie's friendship with Ronsel Jackson (Jason Mitchell) and his attempt to save him from a lynch mob headed by Jamie's own father, known as "Pappy" (Jonathan Banks). The screenplay also subverts some of the film's earlier harshness by tacking on a somewhat happy ending for Ronsel, who reunites with his German girlfriend and their son. It feels gratuitously sentimental in comparison with what has gone before. Nevertheless, Mudbound is a well-acted film, sometimes beautifully acted, as in the case of the Oscar-nominated Mary J. Blige as Florence Jackson, the tower of strength for both the Jackson and the McAllan families. Rachel Morrison also deserved her Oscar nomination -- the first ever for a woman -- for cinematography. She provides images of both the stark beauty of the Mississippi Delta landscape and the oppressiveness of the mud that clings to and clots the lives of its inhabitants.

The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Joe Talbot, 2019)

Cast: Jimmie Fails, Jonathan Majors, Rob Morgan, Tichina Arnold, Mike Epps, Finn Wittrock, Danny Glover, Willie Hen, Jamal Truelove. Screenplay: Joe Talbot, Jimmie Fails, Rob Richert. Cinematography: Adam Newport-Berra. Production design: Jona Tochet. Film editing: David Marks. Music: Emile Mosseri.

With Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada, 2018) and Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018), The Last Black Man in San Francisco forms a kind of trilogy of films about gentrification in the San Francisco Bay Area. The first two films are based in Oakland, but the center of gravity in the area is what people continue to call The City. Jimmie Fails (the character and the actor-writer have the same name) is obsessed with a Victorian house in which his family used to live, back when old houses were cheap and many of them were located in predominantly black neighborhoods. He has convinced himself somehow that the house was built in 1946 by his grandfather, who settled in San Francisco after the war, and that the decline of the family fortunes, brought about by his father's fecklessness, robbed him of his heritage. Jimmie now lives in the rundown Bayview-Hunters Point area of San Francisco, bunking with his friend Mont (Jonathan Majors) and Mont's blind grandfather (Danny Glover), but whenever he can he takes the bus or rides his skateboard to the old house and surreptitiously does what he can to keep it up whenever the elderly couple who live there are away. The more realistic Mont does what he can to dispel his friend's illusions, but when the residents move out and the house is held up because of conflicts over its ownership, Jimmie moves in and tries to claim ownership himself. Eventually, Jimmie is forced to confront reality. Meanwhile, Fails and writer-director Joe Talbot craft a loving but pained portrait of what San Francisco has become in an era of severe income disparity. The film is neither as pointed as Blindspotting nor as raucously satiric as Sorry to Bother You, but it accumulates its own special poignancy in its exploration of the racial and economic disjunctions of the 21st century.