Sing Sing review: prison drama bursts with 'charm, energy and optimism'

"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". 

It seems "churlish" to find fault with a film that's so bursting with "charm, energy and optimism", said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But "Sing Sing" suffers for the fact that Domingo's magnetic performance is "oddly out of joint with the rest of the cast".

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Yes, there are moments when you feel as though the real-life ex-cons are acting in a different film, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. But it's testament to Domingo's generosity as a performer that this happens only rarely; and to the skill of his co-stars that we are as invested in their stories as we are in Divine G's. A tale of male friendship and vulnerability, this is not your standard prison drama; and it is "profoundly moving".