Queen & Slim's reviews
Media reviews
Indiewire
Kaluuya, whose wide-eyed exasperation and wry smile always make him worth watching, embodies the clash of ambivalence and involuntary celebrity at the center of the movie ? but it?s Turner-Smith who stands out as a true revelation, exhibiting ferocious survival instincts in tandem with convictions about their right to keep moving ahead.
Empire
Debut feature director Melina Matsoukas delivers on the promise of a Black Lives Matter spin on Thelma & Louise ? replete with stomach-knotting moments of tension, neon-bathed visual razzmatazz and exhilarating musical cues. But Queen & Slim always affords time and space to intimate, quiet moments that orient themselves around these issues of race, perception, legacy and the fledgling love between its two central characters.
The Wrap
Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith are mesmerizing and urgently sexy as the eponymous pair, while a script by Lena Waithe (from a story by Waithe and ?A Million Little Pieces? author James Frey) elegantly juxtaposes romantic fantasy, inescapable reality and the legacies ? inherited and aspirational ? that bond them together.
Variety
The director sees an opportunity to turn these two fictional characters into vigilante heroes, or martyrs for a cause, or both, and rather than play it frisky and in-your-face, she goes for iconic. The soundtrack, the style, the overarching sense of tragedy and defiance ? all of these elements contribute to her vision of ?Queen & Slim? as an overdue ?Easy Rider? for African American audiences, the sort of movie meant to embody and elevate a segment of society accustomed to being depicted as criminals and miscreants.
The Hollywood Reporter
The screenplay by Waithe (based on a story she wrote with James Frey, of A Million Little Pieces infamy) moves through dark comedy and horror-infused suspense to romance and melodrama, and Matsoukas struggles to navigate the tonal shifts. When a skeevy convenience store clerk threatens Slim with violence and then says, "I'm just messin' with you," a viewer might feel messed with too.
Screen Daily
As with Thelma & Louise, Queen & Slim is, in part, an existential thriller meant to use the crime-drama genre as a vehicle to explore cultural ills. Where Thelma and Louise rebelled against the sexism around them, Queen and Slim discover that the bigotry that?s part of the background of their daily lives moves to the forefront after Slim kills the officer.