The best film of the year: Judas and the Black Messiah reviewed

Judas and the Black Messiah is a biopic about Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, but it’s not your regular biopic because it’s told as crime thriller, through the eyes of a snitch, who may be found out at any minute. This film says what it has to say — about race, injustice, police brutality — but excitingly, thrillingly and non-formulaically. It’s the best film of the year so far, which may not be saying much, given how few films have been released, but you get the sentiment. (The Bond film No Time to Die has been postponed so many times I fear none of us will see it in our lifetimes.)

Directed by Shaka King, and written by King, Will Berson, Kenny Lucas and Keith Lucas, the film is based quite accurately, as far as I can fathom, on true events. And it’s best you resist looking up Hampton until afterwards — when you will want to look him up — otherwise you’ll know the ending, which is such a shocker that I’m still reeling. This isn’t a cradle-to-grave journey, thankfully, but instead captures a moment in time in the late 1960s when Hampton, chairman of the Illinois section of the Black Panther party, was just 21 but had already set up breakfast clubs for black kids and was seeking to build a revolutionary ‘Rainbow Coalition’ to draw together all the under-represented groups in Chicago. He was also an electrifying orator, as played electrifyingly by Daniel Kaluuya, who has already won a Golden Globe for his performance. (He was so fiercely committed he took opera lessons for the oration scenes.)