Sing Sing

Soaring and tender, this extraordinary drama has empathy enough to embrace its nuanced characters while rejecting the broken system that targets them. What particularly stands out about Sing Sing is the quality of its acting. Most of the cast—aside from Domingo, San José, and Raci—are formerly incarcerated men who participated in the real-life RTA program. And they excel in the film, with director Greg Kwedar encouraging some of the most naturalistic acting ever filmed. It's so subtle and organic that it sometimes feels less like a movie and more like life. This is juxtaposed, of course, with the play-within-the-movie (especially Hamlet's soliloquy, which is performed gorgeously—and differently—by Domingo and Maclin).

Ultimately, this is a movie about acting, as viewers can see in the scenes between Divine G and Divine Eye; the two actors, one an Oscar nominee and one a beginner, adjust their energies to match each other. The more the characters open up, the more they trust, the more they connect, the more honest they seem. (By contrast, Divine G's struggle during the story's second half reveals the dangers of closing up.) As Raci's character says in one scene, being "real and vulnerable" is "something men don't get to do very often." So acting, in its artificiality, leads, for these men, to something true. Domingo and Maclin are the keys to Sing Sing; they're opposites, but alike. Their final moment on-screen together is like letting out a long-held breath and taking in a fresh, new one.