Michael Shannon Movies Blog

  This film opens with a red car and a blue car having a race – for a minute I thought I was watching a dramatization of that old Milky Way advert! The film is in fact about a landmark legal case that allowed interracial marriage in the state of Virginia. That may not sound too exciting, and it isn’t, but it’s a likeable film about a pivotal case. The ‘Loving’ of the title is two fold – we have a loving couple but the main character is called ‘Richard Loving’ lucky his name wasn’t ‘Bastard’ or something similar. It’s the late 1950’s in the Deep South and Richard is dating Mildred who falls pregnant. The two decide to marry and do so in Washington seeing as interracial marriage isn’t allowed in their home state of Virginia. They set up home together but are soon slung in jail. The agree a plea deal which sees their one year sentences suspended for 25 years if they leave the state. They do so but are back five minutes later as Richard’s mother is a midwife and they have need...

  This is Shannon’s 4 th of 6 collaborations with the writer and director Jeff Nichols. We have previously looked at the pair’s work on ‘Shotgun Stories’ and ‘Take Shelter’, both of which offered some appeal. This effort came after those previous two, but before ‘The Bikeriders’ which we also enjoyed. In this one we open in a cheap motel with a news alert about an abducted 8 year old child. The suspect is named as Roy Tomlin and a picture of Shannon pops up. We then see that Roy is watching the TV in the company of the abducted boy and with another man. The hotel room has cardboard taped over the windows and it is clear that something odd is going on, but it’s not clear what. Elsewhere two cult members are on the hunt for the boy, just as their service gets raided by the FBI. The Feds have been tracking the cult as they’ve been buying a lot of guns and some of their sermons contain embedded government secrets. It turns out that Shannon is the boy’s father and he and a...