Jayme Lawson – ALLIANCE OF WOMEN FILM JOURNALISTS

SINNERS – Review by Sherin Nicole

December 18, 2025December 21, 2025 Sherin Nicole Autumn Durald Arkapaw, hailee steinfeld, hannah beachler, Jayme Lawson, Li Jun Li, MICHAEL B JORDAN, Miles Caton, Ruth E. Carter, ryan coogler, Sinners, Wunmi Mosaku

Sinners is alive. Both in the moment and immortal. It’s a story about stories, a cinematic conjuring where folklore, music, and family become the marrow of survival. Ryan Coogler has crafted a bold reclamation but also an expansion of the American narrative on film, where vampires are less monsters than metaphors for the forces that have haunted and fractured our communities for generations. Here, the juke joint isn’t just a set piece. It’s a crossroads where Black-American, Chinese-American, Choctaw, and Old Irish traditions intersect in harmony and discord—each of our musical traditions entwined in the story’s DNA. Coogler trusts us to reconcile the mixing of genres, allowing the weight of history and centuries of rage to roil beneath the surface of Mississippi culture and lore. Never spelling out what anything means but trusting us to find the poetry in what we see and how it makes us feel.

Reviews

THE RUNNING MAN – Review by Valerie Kalfrin

November 18, 2025November 18, 2025 Valerie Kalfrin Colman Domingo, edgar wright, Glen Powell, Jayme Lawson, Josh Brolin, michael cera, The Running Man, William H. Macy

The Running Man feels like it’s several steps behind the times. Despite a few good performances, this updated remake of the 1987 original is essentially a 1980’s action movie with capable action but sorely in need of biting satire. Glen Powell steps into the running shoes Arnold Schwarzenegger laced on in the earlier version, an adaptation of a Stephen King short story about a bread-and-circuses world of brutal competitions that distracts the masses from their misery. Yet while Powell is up to the task—and believably more in peril than, let’s face it, Arnold would ever be—the film feels tired straigh out of the starting blocks. That’s largely because the cutthroat world it shows, while perhaps prescient in 1987, has been skewered better ever since.

Reviews

SINNERS – Review by Leslie Combemale

April 24, 2025April 26, 2025 Leslie Combemale Autumn Durand Arkapaw, delroy lindo, hailee steinfeld, hannah beachler, Jayme Lawson, Li Jun Li, Miles Caton, Ruth E. Carter, ryan coogler, Sinners, Wunmi Mosaku

While it’s true that Sinners is multi-layered, and filled with symbolism, the film can absolutely be enjoyed by those just wanting to experience a great period vampire thriller. The film takes place in 1932’s Mississippi Delta. Twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Coogler longtime collaborator Michael B Jordan) have returned home from Chicago with a bag full of money, and plan to build and run a new juke joint. They gather friends and family to help with opening night, and it gets off to a great start. Mid-evening, they find themselves forced to fight dark supernatural forces that want kill them all, or worse yet, integrate them into their vampiric colony. In addition to what’s seen on the entertaining surface, there are deeper layers in which vampirism becomes a metaphor for both colonization and conversion to Christianity and away from African spirituality.

Reviews

HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE – Review by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas

August 14, 2023August 15, 2023 Alexandra Heller-Nicholas Andreas Malm, Ariela Barer, daniel goldhaber, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Jayme Lawson, Kristine Forseth, Lukas Gage, Melbourne IFF 2023

There is a sense of urgency that permeates every frame of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, not just in terms to the necessary fast pacing that a film like this relies on as its generic backbone, but of course also in regards to its very subject matter. The feeling that we are running out of time is an explicit drumbeat throughout the film, a sense of desperation and speed driving the film’s cast of ensemble characters towards the act of domestic ‘terrorism’ from which the film takes its name. But even the label ‘terrorist’ is up for grabs here; in one of the film’s quieter moments before the crew get to work, a heated debate regarding what it means for their actions to be defined through the lens of domestic terrorism is one of the film’s many thoughtful moments where subtext and text collide.

Reviews

HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE – Review by Rachel West

April 12, 2023April 12, 2023 Rachel West Andreas Malm, Ariela Barer, daniel goldhaber, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Jayme Lawson, Kristine Forseth, Lukas Gage

Director Daniel Goldhaber’s How To Blow Up A Pipeline is a timely eco-thriller with all the suspense of a true heist film. Based on ideas in the non-fiction book of the same name by Andreas Malm, How To Blow Up A Pipeline structures its plot around Malm’s argument that environmental sabotage is a perfectly reasonable and encouraged form of climate activism. In 2023, we are living in a reality where climate scientists and activists have time and again said we are past the point of passivism when it comes to global climate change. Extreme weather like floods, droughts, heatwaves, and fires are now a common occurrence while governments, major corporations, and the wealthiest nations in the world still debate climate action plans at a glacial pace. And even then, those glaciers are melting faster than climate action.

Reviews

HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

April 3, 2023April 12, 2023 MaryAnn Johanson Andreas Malm, Ariela Barer, daniel goldhaber, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, Jayme Lawson, Kristine Forseth, Lukas Gage

Even before I saw this movie, I thought it had a good chance of being the film of the year. Of the decade, even. And I don’t mean that I think it’s gonna win tons of Oscars. I mean in a more fundamental, profoundly philosophical way. I wondered if this might even feel like the first movie of the 21st century, zeitgeist-wise.

Reviews

FAREWELL AMOR – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

December 11, 2020December 13, 2020 MaryAnn Johanson Ewa Msangi, farewell amor, Jayme Lawson, motw, Movie of the Week, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah

Farewell Amor is the beautiful feature debut of writer-director Ekwa Msangi, in which she finds a delicate balance between drama in the wild sense, as secrets threaten to upend a cautious newfound domestic equilibrium, and drama in the more intimate sense, as husband and wife tentatively rediscover each other; as father and child unexpectedly stumble upon common ground; and as mother and daughter find that their different approaches to life are suddenly more pronounced in this potentially dangerous new place.

Movie of the Week Reviews

MOVIE OF THE WEEK December 11, 2020: FAREWELL AMOR

December 6, 2020December 12, 2020 Jennifer Merin betsy bozdech, Cate Marquis, Ewa Msangi, farewell amor, Jayme Lawson, jennifer merin, kathia woods, leslie combemale, liz whittemore, loren king, maryann johanson, motw, Movie of the Week, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Pam Grady, sandie angulo chen, susan wloszczyna, Zainab Jah

Love — and the best of intentions — may not be enough to overcome a 17-year separation for the reunited family of three who are at the heart of writer/director Ekwa Msangi’s touching first feature, Farewell Amor. This affecting drama raises thoughtful, heartfelt questions about what it means to be a family, And, it takes an honest and insightful look at the difficulties of immigration.

Reviews

FAREWELL AMOR – Review by Susan Wloszczyna

December 2, 2020December 6, 2020 Susan Wloszczyna Ewa Msangi, farewell amor, Jayme Lawson, motw, Movie of the Week, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah

Farewell Amor is an intimate soap opera blessed with an engaging small cast and an intriguing premise: What happens when Esther (Zainab Jah), an Angolan woman, and Sylvia (Jayme Lawson), her teen-age daughter, finally reunite with their husband and father after spending 17 years apart? Writer-director Ekwa Msangi could have chosen to look back at the woes that these immigrants have suffered in the past. But, instead, the trio is more concerned about whether they will be able to get over the awkwardness of their situation and be able to share a future together as a family.

Reviews

FAREWELL AMOR – Review by Leslie Combemale

December 2, 2020December 6, 2020 Leslie Combemale Ewa Msangi, farewell amor, Jayme Lawson, motw, Movie of the Week, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, Zainab Jah

It’s quite the achievement to create a movie that feels as fluid as a dance. Writer/director Ewa Msangi achieves just that with Farewell Amor, a film that tackles the challenge of articulating reintroduction, second chances, and the risks and rewards of chosen intimacy for a family reuniting after 17 years. In her feature directorial debut, Msangi reveals herself to be a filmmaker with a deft and nuanced hand, and one to watch.