Queen & Slim (2019)

Queen & Slim opens on a diner, a Tinder date going nowhere, and a traffic stop that ends with a dead white officer and two Black fugitives running for their lives. Melina Matsoukas directs from a Lena Waithe screenplay, and the credits read like a statement of intent: a Black woman at the helm, a Black woman writing, two Black leads, a Black composer selected with the care a sommelier applies to a difficult Burgundy. The craftsmanship is real. The camera lingers on faces and highways with genuine grace, and Daniel Kaluuya and Jodie Turner-Smith carry the weight without asking for our pity.

The film's engine is racial injustice, and it never pretends otherwise. Dashcam footage goes viral, strangers cheer the fugitives on, a teenager fires a shot that turns a protest into a funeral, and the final act converts two exhausted people into martyrs photographed for the history books. This is a story about police violence, about the machinery that decides which deaths become symbols. The politics arrive early and stay late, and the film makes no apology for the sermon. A woman co-lead with a law degree and a spine earns some credit on the gender front, though the movie's heart belongs to the state's violence and not to her interior life.

What Queen & Slim does not do is reach for the other instruments in the contemporary toolkit. There is no climate anxiety, no body-positive subplot, no neurodivergent arc, no indictment of capital, no historical revision, and no meaningful queer thread. It is a fugitive romance with a message, and the message is singular. The result is a film that knows exactly what it wants to say and says it at length. I respect the conviction. I merely note that conviction, repeated, becomes a sermon, and sermons have a way of outlasting their congregations.