Freedomland

This mixed-up, self-important thriller is adapted by Richard Price  from his own novel and wastes a talented cast. Brenda Martin (Julianne Moore) is a distraught mother who runs screaming to the authorities after her car is stolen from a largely African-American New Jersey housing estate with her young son still sleeping in the back. Intense questioning from an intense local detective (Samuel L Jackson) and an equally intense meeting with the head of a victims’ support group (Edie Falco) show that the intense Martin is actually lying – but it’s too late to prevent a quite startlingly unintense race-riot kicking off all the same. Studio exec Joe Roth (whose motley directorial credits run from ‘Revenge of the Nerds II’ to ‘Christmas with the Kranks’) offers no credible sense of time and place whatsoever. Despite its pretensions to social commentary, this film could have been made on the moon in the 1930s and is fatally plagued by shouty speechifying from Moore and Jackson.