आलोचक समीक्षाएं

The film brims with authenticity and the electrifying emotional intensity of the best melodramas.

It’s a quiet drama despite its characters’ many volatile arguments. Most of all, it’s a moving character portrait of a complicated woman who makes good and bad decisions but is motivated solely by the desire to create a better life for herself and the people she loves.

Rockwell uses the full range of cinematic expressivity to turn a small, often tragic story of raw deals and rash decisions into an admiring portrait of survivorship, determination and resourcefulness.

It doesn’t nail everything it set out to accomplish, but A Thousand and One is a breathtaking character study of perseverance in Black motherhood.

Rockwell’s direction is sophisticated and visually imaginative even as the movie could benefit from a tighter edit around its New York cast of characters and the rapidly changing city in the hands of mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

Rockwell has plenty time to develop into a more distinguished storyteller, though her directorial instincts have a staggering specificity. This is a movie that gets gentrification right––she thrives in showing the way brief observations out a window paint a larger picture––and connects little dots from childhood to adulthood.

It is almost like a novel in how expansive it is, providing a sense of scope that can frequently leave this story feeling scattered. As the city is in a constant state of change, the lives of the characters are similarly in flux as their already pressing problems only become more and more dire.

Rockwell respects her audience enough to trust that we’ll be invested in Inez and Terry’s odyssey because of the nuanced performances.

While A Thousand and One is a breathtakingly beautiful portrait of Black womanhood and is thoughtfully political, the character beats heave with a noticeable unevenness. The fascinating parts rarely add up to a satisfying interpersonal whole.

There are many things working well in Rockwell’s debut, Taylor’s performance chief among them, but the end result doesn’t match her character’s formidable strength.