Fruitvale Station

Directed by Ryan Coogler

(R)

****

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Fruitvale Station is “one of the most extraordinary films you’ll see this year,” said Joe Neumaier in the New York Daily News. A fictionalized portrait of Oscar Grant, a young man who was fatally shot by transit police in Oakland on New Year’s Day 2009, it exhibits “an amazingly honest eye and ear for detail” and features a lead performance sure to win actor Michael B. Jordan an Academy Award nomination. Jordan’s Grant is no saint, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. After this “almost miraculous” film opens with actual cellphone footage of the shooting, the clock turns back 24 hours to show us a 22-year-old who is as unreliable as he is charming. First-time director Ryan Coogler isn’t unwrapping a mystery: By showing Grant apologizing to his girlfriend, doting on his young daughter, threatening an ex-boss, and shopping for his mom’s birthday, Coogler captures “the essence and texture of American life” as few of today’s filmmakers do. Fruitvale becomes a movie not about the police but about how cruel life can be, said Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle. That makes it “a work of art.”