It shouldn’t be possible for somebody’s debut feature to be this good. Granted, director Carlos López Estrada has been in the game making music videos for years. But in a year dominated by some of the heaviest hitters in black American filmmaking—Spike Lee! Ryan Coogler! Barry Jenkins!—it was Estrada who released perhaps the definitive statement on American race relations with his first film Blindspotting, a manic genre-hopping kaleidoscope of hope, hate, healing, and fury set in Oakland, California. Wildly veering between stoic social problem cinema, irreverent comedy, and urban fantasia, the film juggles every tone and emotion in the book without dropping any of them. A scene where a trio of hotboxing friends yank an endless supply of handguns from hammerspace to jokingly intimidate their parolee buddy can cut to one where a toddler is discovered by his parents playfully fiddling with a cocked and loaded pistol without missing a beat: this is indeed a universe where we can envision Looney Tune silliness co-existing with deathly serious fears of a young child accidentally blowing their head off. And Estrada makes it look so damn easy. Not since Tarantino has their been such an auspicious first film.
Rating: 9/10
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