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On a Mission from God

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Is God Is

by Hope Madden

Writer/director Aleshea Harris may be pulling from folklore and road movies, revenge flicks and historical dramas, noir and arthouse, exploitation and even horror. But the result of those inspirations is one of the most boldly original films of 2025.

Is God Is follows twins Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) on a “mission from God.” It’s a funny line in a film about two misfits behind the wheel of a dubious vehicle, but the twins’ holy work has nothing to do with blues music. Their God is the one who created them, their mother (Vivica A. Fox), a woman they’d believed dead. She is not dead yet, but death is coming for her, and she has one request of her daughters. They need to kill their father (Sterling K. Brown).

Too often road trip films offer little more than a thinly connected series of hijinks and antics. Harris takes advantage of that sensibility, introducing us to various oddballs and dropping us into wild situations. The filmmaker shows great affection for so many types of movies, and the way she bends these tropes and styles to the will of this narrative is fresh, unpredictable, and fascinating.

Still, there is an inevitability to the story, and to the character arcs, that haunts the twins’ destiny. However wild, however bloody, however zany, there is a broken and beating heart at the center of the story.

Violence and destiny, family trauma, classism and misogyny, and rage—Is God Is finds poetry and honesty and blood in all of it.

Young and Johnson are a remarkable yin and yang, and the ensemble impresses at every turn. Brown is characteristically undeniable, an emotional shapeshifter, both seductive and terrifying. Janelle Monáe and Erika Alexander also impress in smaller roles.

But the star of Is God Is has to be the storyteller herself. Harris’s command of the audience and of cinema deliver the summer’s most daring and satisfying adventure.

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Game Off

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True to the Game 2

by Darren Tilby

Full disclosure: I never had the pleasure of seeing the first True to the Game movie, and so my thoughts here are based entirely on Jamal Hill’s sequel True to the Game 2 and what little I managed to garner from it about the first movie.

Picking up a year after the murder of her husband – Quadir – by rival gang leader Jerrell (Andra Fuller), Gena (Erica Peeples) is determined to leave her life in Philly behind her, moving to New York City and reinventing herself as a journalist. But the past has a way of catching up, and soon the drug gangs she thought she had escaped are closing in.

At its heart, this is a story of black lives being torn apart by gang violence, and as such, you might expect it to be a profound or maybe even empowering experience. Regretfully, the only thing remotely profound or empowering here is that not absolutely everyone in the film is an utterly detestable stereotype—although most are.

Much of the film relies on broad stereotypes and genre clichés, as it grinds from one scene to the next, and from one two-dimensional character to another. And there are a lot of characters here, in fact too many. Each with their own branching story going on, many of them not particularly well written, and most with arcs never satisfactorily resolved. While there are many perfectly capable performances, I just can’t accept them as believable people.

Quite apart from that, the pacing is off, the soundtrack feels like an afterthought and the plot is quite dull. It’s not bad, but nor is it exciting; there is nothing here that we haven’t seen before, and seen done better. The camera work, however, is really rather splendid. Framing is solid, and how the camera drifts and floats throughout and from scene to scene is skillfully done and pleasing.

True to the Game 2 didn’t work for me, on any level whatsoever. I disliked many of the characters, I was disinterested in the story, and I was bored by the predictability of its cliché-ridden writing. Fans of the first film (True to the Game), and perhaps fervid fans of the crime genre itself, may get something out of this, or at least more than I did. But suffice to say, I won’t be climbing the walls in anticipation for a sequel.