RECOMMENDED
There is a brooding beauty and quotidian peculiarity to Robinson Devor’s widescreen “Police Beat,” co-written by The Stranger critic and crime-blotter reporter Charles Mudede. “Police Beat” is a genuinely wondrous movie, a very beautiful, dreamy series of vignettes (based on Mudede’s reporting) set over the course of a week about Z (Senegalese Pape Sidy Niang) a West African-born, Muslim bicycle cop in Rain City, with lyrical interior monologue in his native tongue. “Police Beat” makes a concrete case for the failure of American film distribution and for the sustenance of a moviegoing culture: only Seattle’s nonprofit production and exhibition concern, the Northwest Film Forum, involved in its production, stepped up to get it into theaters. The city’s strangeness is epic, and set to the distracted patter of one man’s mind. The dialogue goes from gnomic to surreal, with, for instance, “Your tree is dead, and if it’s not chopped down it will continue to harm and disturb the living.” America deserves dozens more movies like this. Will we get them? Who will make them? Who will show them? Who will see them? Hello? Sean Kirby’s cinematography is lovely and inspired. In English and Wolof. 81m. (Ray Pride)
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