Even if you do not believe in the soul, the film makes it impossible to deny the soul of a country, that which births us, grooms us, and to which we add as we live and die inside it.

| Dec 6, 2023

Episode 35: Triple Frontier / Climax / Black Mother / Transit

| Original Score: 40/100 | Sep 14, 2021

This is highly sensuous filmmaking, not only in its vivid close-ups of flesh, food, and the natural world, but in the varied textures of[ Khalik] Allah's cinematography.

| Mar 24, 2020

It's as if Allah's subjects are soaking up the power of being seen.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 3, 2019

The effect of watching this movie is very emotional and sensual. It's overwhelming on both those levels.

| Sep 28, 2019

The impression is of a dreamlike blend, some shots repeated, inspected at leisure with an implicit critique of colonial exploitation, contemporary sociopolitical circumstances, and gender inequality.

| Jun 11, 2019

A transcendental meditation on life, love, and black identity that takes the mundane and makes it feel miraculous.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 3, 2019

It's [Allah's] love for his country drawn on the tapestry of moving images and poetic soundscapes. It has the power to hush both Jamaicans and non-Jamaicans like myself into silence.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 26, 2019

A viscerally poetic portrait of a country that's full of contradictions.

| May 21, 2019

Allah, who directed, shot, edited, and co-scored the film, avoids the literal and the linear to create a beguilingly immersive, multifaceted, vividly sensorial portrait of his mother's homeland, Jamaica.

| May 21, 2019

An eternal nurturer, the black mother whom Allah dissects and praises in this transfixing hymn of a movie about the place where the woman that gave him life was born is far more than just a homeland but a direct link to the answers about existence.

| May 10, 2019

Like the culturally complex and often overwhelming island nation itself, Black Mother is a haunting and singular experience unlike any other.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 11, 2019

With its almost palpable earnestness and its reverence for the community it's depicting, Black Mother can't help but generate goodwill.

| Mar 21, 2019

One of the most memorable, intense experiences in recent memory.

| Original Score: A | Mar 12, 2019

Black Mother is made in a language rarely spoken in cinema, be it multiplex or arthouse. [Khalik] Allah throws his audience into the ocean and forces them to tread water, soaking in the country's textures and contradictions and trauma.

| Original Score: 9.5/10 | Mar 12, 2019

Many filmmakers are journeymen, able to work their craft. A few are artists, who, if they had a different calling, would be painters, sculptors or poets. This New York-born director fits into the latter category.

| Mar 8, 2019

Like his earlier work, Black Mother embraces intimacy and empathy in equal measure, providing visual and sonic space to people rarely represented in cinema.

| Mar 8, 2019

Allah-who shot, directed, edited and sound designed his film-manages to paint a complex portrait of the island, making his visually unconventional depiction of the land come into sharp focus one provocative shot at a time.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 8, 2019

This first section is largely unflinching, combining close-up profile shots and snippets of real conversations between the subjects and those who engage with them for a sense of intimacy that is at times unsettling.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 8, 2019

In its poetic, elliptical, concise way, this film makes a grand statement: The black mother is the mother of life itself.

| Mar 6, 2019