Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Jimmie Fails dreams of reclaiming the Victorian home his grandfather built in the heart of San Francisco. Joined on his quest by his best friend Mont, Jimmie searches for belonging in a rapidly changing city that seems to have left them behind.
The Last Black Man in San Francisco is a visually sumptuous and deeply personal film. Joe Talbot's direction, paired with Adam Newport-Berra's lush cinematography, gives the city an almost mythic, elegiac quality rarely seen in American indie drama. Jimmie Fails and Jonathan Majors deliver performances of quiet, soulful power — Majors in particular reveals extraordinary range. The film's conception is genuinely singular: a semi-autobiographical love letter to a city that is simultaneously home and site of displacement, filtered through the lens of Black identity and gentrification. This combination of tone, voice, and visual poetry makes it highly distinctive. The plot is more impressionistic than propulsive, which gives the narrative an occasional meandering quality, and the ending, while emotionally resonant, lands on an ambiguous note that feels slightly unresolved rather than purposefully open. Still, as a debut feature it announces a filmmaker of remarkable sensitivity and ambition.