"It's hard to imagine that Colman Domingo won't win an Oscar for his part in 'Sing Sing'," a "raw" and "affecting" fact-based drama about a theatre group in a high-security prison in the US, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times.
Domingo – who was Oscar-nominated last year for his turn in Rustin – plays John "Divine G" Whitfield, a real-life prisoner (since released) who was one of the founders of the Rehabilitation Through the Arts programme. With a cast mainly made up of former inmates who took part in the programme, the film follows a group of prison-yard tough guys as they put together a time-travel comedy. Whitfield's toughest recruit, Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin, finds the warm-up exercises "embarrassing" – "imagine if Mike Tyson took part in a ballet class, and you would be close" – but Whitfield sees real talent, and a capacity for redemption, behind his aggressive façade. Dodging "a viper-pit of potential cliché every step of the way", the film "puts all its truisms about the nobility of art to the test so that any redemption, at the end, feels hard won".
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