Recensioni de* critic*

The film recalls the ambitiously broad, gritty city thrillers of the 1970s, 80s, and even 90s; I kept thinking of Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City and Q & A, sweeping, low-key crime entertainments in which ground-level political smarts get blown out with all-encompassing, novelistic breadth.

Veronica’s grief hangs in the air like a geometric shape; Davis, her eyes revealing all by trying to hide everything, makes us see its contours and shadows, and feel its coldness.

A well-rounded entertainment with some points to make along the way, Widows constitutes a frustratingly rare multiplex prospect: a good-time movie from a feel-bad director.

It’s a film that gestures at brilliance—but ultimately falls short of it, because the overall picture never quite gels into something you can totally believe in. It’s a dazzling film, but an immensely frustrating one.

The result is a fascinating and sometimes frustrating hybrid, a film that tries both to transcend and to exploit its genre. It works best when Davis commands the screen with her inimitable blend of psychological subtlety and operatic intensity.

Despite the deftness of the graft (thanks to a script that he co-wrote with Gillian Flynn), it remains, throughout, a graft—a conspicuous effort to rely on the simple emotional engagement of a crime drama to deliver didactic observations about political power relations.

McQueen largely succeeds at something few directors even try: to set a satisfyingly twisty crime plot in the broader social context of political corruption and systemic racial and gender bias.

By even careless measure, the already questionable heist-movie genre (previously used for sympathetic female sob stories such as Set It Off and Banditas) is not justified by the simple-minded, self-justifying immorality of Widows.

McQueen and his co-writer, Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, have crafted an enjoyably giddy maze of a script. Even in a genre known for the intricacy and twists of its plotting, Widows offers some razzle-dazzle.

Widows chronicles the ways people mourn family, relationships, and aspirations, and Davis grounds the film with a tenacious, heartrending performance as the woman at the center of this mess.

It occasionally suffers from a plot too eager to hurtle to its logical conclusion to do its characters justice. It’s also difficult to place tonally, tottering the line between a gritty self-serious to parodic satire. But what it does offer is a clear-eyed gaze on the inevitable corruption of power, the blunt statement that your elites will not save you.

This story isn’t so much sprawling as it is meaty, each component packed rich with themes of gender empowerment, cross-class and cross-cultural grief, economic uncertainty, nepotism and hypocritical progressive politics, and much more. But these register in broad strokes only, for McQueen isn’t interested in the storytelling required to deftly cut between these lines of plot.