Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in Chicago, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
Monster's Ball (2001)
Director: Marc Forster
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Leticia Musgrove (Berry) is the wife of a Death Row inmate (Combs) and mother of a troubled obese teenager. Hank Grotowski (Thornton) works, like his retired father Buck (Boyle) and his own boy Sonny (Ledger), as a guard at the pen, proudly professional to the bitter end. Leticia is imprisoned by hardship and disappointment, Hank by the steely reserve required for his job and by a disciplinarian machismo inherited from a racist dad. What brings them together is chance; what they have in common is death, pain, rage, loneliness. You'd expect this cast to produce fine performances, and Berry and Billy Bob are merely the laurel-stealing protagonists. Praiseworthy too is Schaefer's 'Scope camerawork and Addica and Rokos' tough but sensitive script. Director Forster doesn't hurry things; a hell of a lot happens before the leads meet, and even then it's not cute. Violence (familial and institutional), deep-seated distrust and hatred (this is the South) cast long shadows, and an electric-chair scene ensures we remember love's seldom simple. At the same time, Berry and Thornton play so well that the pitfalls of miserabilist chic are mostly avoided: hope is always felt as a presence or possibility. If certain heavier-handed sequences don't quite gel, the (un-Hollywood) ending is nevertheless perfectly judged, persuasive and unusually graceful.Author: GA
Cast & crew
Director: Marc Forster
Producer: Lee Daniels
Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Halle Berry, Peter Boyle, Heath Ledger, Sean Combs, Mos Def, Coronji Calhoun, Taylor Simpson, Gabrielle Witcher, Amber Rules full cast
Duration: 111 mins
Most popular on this site
Features
Gray's anatomy
James Gray wants to push buttons—again.
The next big thing?
Gigantic Releasing tries to rethink indie distribution…without movie theaters.
Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova, First Lady of Soviet Cinema
So you think you can dance, comrade?
Puppet master
Coraline director Henry Selick takes stop-motion animation into 3-D.
Socratic method
Laurent Cantet's approach on the set matches the message of his film.
Wander woman
Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy puts a Bush-era spin on the road movie.
Oscars
Read our interviews with the nominees, our reviews of the nominated films and more.
What do you think?
Post your review now