We’ve been talking about “One Night in Miami” for what seems like months already, as the film debuted at last year’s Venice Film Festival. However, with awards season entering 2021 in full swing, and the film scheduled to arrive in a couple of weeks, Amazon is hoping that now more than ever, you’re reminded about its Oscar hopeful.
“One Night in Miami” is a period drama about four legends in Black culture during the mid-‘60s, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown, as they all discuss the world in a Miami hotel room. The film is the directorial debut of actress-turned-filmmaker Regina King. ‘Miami’ stars Kingsley Ben-Adir, Eli Goree, Aldis Hodge, Leslie Odom, Jr., Joaquina Kalukango, Nicolette Robinson, Beau Bridges, and Lance Reddick.
In our review of the film, we said, “As a work of deep, committed research into real history, that provides a very handy four-way primer on the most famous Black men of their day and the conflicting approaches to Black resistance and liberation that each personified, ‘One Night in Miami’ is an instructive and absorbing watch. But as a film with the potential to do more, push further and explore and maybe even in some ways explode those legacies in order to get at the men underneath them, it feels too timid, too talky, too conceptual in content for being so classical in form.”
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“One Night in Miami” is in select theaters now and will arrive on Amazon Prime Video on January 15. You can watch the new trailer below.
Here’s the synopsis:
On one incredible night in 1964, four icons of sports, music, and activism gathered to celebrate one of the biggest upsets in boxing history. When underdog Cassius Clay, soon to be called Muhammad Ali, (Eli Goree), defeats heavyweight champion Sonny Liston at the Miami Convention Hall, Clay memorialized the event with three of his friends: Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge).
Based on the award-winning play of the same name, and directed by Regina King, One Night In Miami… is a fictional account inspired by the historic night these four formidable figures spent together. It looks at the struggles these men faced and the vital role they each played in the civil rights movement and cultural upheaval of the 1960s. More than 40 years later, their conversations on racial injustice, religion, and personal responsibility still resonate.