Critics reviews

Certainly one of the most relevant American films of the last ten years, it’s also raw and emotional and features an incredibly sexy and sorrowful performance by soon-to-be-breakout-star Michael B. Jordan.

Shooting on 16mm and integrating documentary footage into the editing, Coogler gives Fruitvale Station a feeling of realism that's further consolidated by Jordan's amazing performance. . . . Jordan disappears into role. It's not so much that he's self-effacing as that he transfers his own charisma to Oscar, whose large, contradictory personality—by turns tender, volatile, stubborn, and magnetic—is the film's true subject.

[The movie's flaws] dissipate by the time of the superbly staged platform incident, which is tense and genuinely upsetting, even though we've been fully prepared for it. An elegiac tone is subsequently fostered by Spencer's moving performance in the ensuing hospital vigil scene.

Essentially a remake of Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, but reversed,Fruitvale Station is an exercise in sentimental histrionics and battering-ram manipulation, with the moral of the story being, you're never too lovable to get whacked. Try, if you might, to choke back the inevitable tears brought on by the climactic 20 minutes, but these are tears which have been earned via crooked means.

Oscar Grant is what's missing from movies about young black men. The movie strives to restore to Grant the individuality that the symbolism of tragedy took away. Coogler's portrait affixes a human face on ones that hoodies willfully obscure.

Fruitvale Station... tells the story of this tragic incident [involving the death of Oscar Grant], and you'd think that the primary question on its mind would be fairly simple: How did this happen? Unfortunately, writer-director Ryan Coogler poses a different, much less compelling, arguably irrelevant question: How could this possibly have happened to such a swell guy?

The film has been seen by some as winding audiences up with its shocking tale of a young father's senseless death. But the knockout punch comes not just from the pay-off but from a dramatically adroit build-up, a strong sense of social milieu, and the emotional range of lead actor Michael B. Jordan.

if [Fruitvale Station's] harrowing climax seems to bring together too many explicitly foreshadowed elements in a too-neatly contrived way, its depiction of police confusion and bad behavior, and its sobering hospital scenes, are sufficiently potent to give nitpickers pause as their tear ducts fill up.

Fruitvale Station reminded me of a social realist classic by Ken Loach ("Raining Stones," "The Wind that Shakes the Barley", "Land and Freedom"). Its volatile, deeply sensitive and charismatic protagonist is in the mold of Loach's working-class antiheroes.

Fruitvale Station" is a potent dramatic chronicle of contemporary American life, crackling with energy and possibility, made with the cooperation of Grant's mother and girlfriend. Built around a subtle and smoldering star performance by Michael B. Jordan... the film is more concerned with capturing the world Oscar Grant lived in than with delivering a journalistic or documentary analysis of how he died.

Fruitvale Station is intimate in the best way, thanks largely to Jordan's deft, responsive performance. Oscar's last day is filled, as most people's days are, not with big decisions but with small choices. If only he'd done y and not z, would he be alive today? Fruitvale Station doesn't trade in those kinds of equations. Instead, by detailing Oscar Grant's last hours, it suggests that his choices had very little to do with the way he died. But they had everything to do with the way he lived.

Coogler, who grew up in the same neighborhoods as Grant, evokes a tangible sense of place, and his staging of the climactic incident hits like a fist in the gut. It's not enough to wipe out his reduction of this real-life figure into a composite-character martyr or the lukewarm filmmaking that's come before, even if you're left shaken all the same.