Film

What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases

Search cinema listings

Browse cinemas A-Z

Search 20,000 reviews

 

Monster's Ball (2001)

Director: Marc Forster

Average user rating
No reviews

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

Time Out Film Guide


  • Print this page
  • Send to a friend

What do you think?
Post your review now

clear rating
Min 1 star. Zero stars will be treated as unrated.

*mandatory fields





Top Stories

A Farewell To Tartan Films

A Farewell To Tartan Films

To mourn the loss of the great Tartan Films, Time Out remembers a few of the best films to emerge from their impressive canon

Jason Bateman: interview

Jason Bateman: interview

Jason Bateman – star of ‘Hancock’, alongside Will Smith – talks to Time Out about his comic influences and how to pretend to throw a car

Ten Great Head Shots In The Movies

Ten Great Head Shots In The Movies

Lots of people get shot in the head in the new film 'Wanted'. Read our guide to some other great head shots on film

Set visit: 'The Damned United'

Set visit: 'The Damned United'

Dave Calhoun gets his training kit on as he visits the set of a new film about football legend Brian Clough’s torrid spell at Leeds United in the mid-1970s