Green makes films from true stories, and he is at his best when the story lets the subject be unpleasant. Give him a crooked Baltimore sergeant and he is exact and angry; give him Bob Marley and Marley's family and he goes quiet.
Fi1m perspective
A car is stopped on a Baltimore street, a man is searched, and cash goes from his pocket into a police pocket while the paperwork calls it a seizure. Nobody raises a voice, and Reinaldo Marcus Green does nothing to underline it. That scene, from We Own This City (2022), is the clearest picture of what he does well: he trusts a wrong thing to look wrong on its own. It made us angry, and we stayed angry for some time, which is what the scene was for.
He came to directing late, after teaching in a primary school and working in finance, and went to film school at 27. His first feature, Monsters and Men (2018), which he also wrote, followed several people around a police killing and asked what each of them owed the others. Since then he has made Joe Bell (2020) and episodes of Top Boy (2019), but the work he is known for is taken from the record: King Richard (2021), made with Zach Baylin; We Own This City, from Justin Fenton's book about a police unit that took guns off the street and money off the people it stopped; and Bob Marley: One Love (2024), on which he shares a screenplay credit with Baylin, Frank E. Flowers and Terence Winter.
Green is good when the story has room for its subject to be unpleasant. We Own This City runs on Jon Bernthal's Wayne Jenkins, who walks into a roll call and gives a talk about how to police a corner that is not stupid, and Green keeps the charm and the theft in the same body without ever winking at us. King Richard, which we have not reviewed, let its hero be exhausting, vain and occasionally right. Bob Marley: One Love is more frightened of its subject. Rita Marley and Cedella Marley are among the producers, four writers are credited, and what they have built lists the things Marley did, set to the songs he wrote, while the man stays out of reach for 104 minutes. The gunmen arrive at Marley's house without music, and the peace concert that follows, shot by Robert Elswit at night with hot light on the stage and the crowd a dark mass beyond, is the best thing in the film; we sat forward for it. Then the family portrait closes back over the top.
He works other people's material, and the result depends on what he is handed. The tangled timelines and the fondness for a speech in We Own This City belong to David Simon and George Pelecanos as much as to him; the caution in One Love belongs to a family. Next is The Punisher: One Last Kill (2026), which he directs and co-writes. The Punisher never existed, and it will be worth seeing what Green does with a subject nobody is asking him to honour.
Biography
Reinaldo Marcus Green is an American film director, producer and writer. Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1981, he studied at Fairleigh Dickinson University and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He began with short films before making his feature debut with Monsters and Men (2018), which won the Special Jury Award for Outstanding First Feature at the Sundance Film Festival.
His subsequent films include Joe Bell (2020) and King Richard (2021), the latter nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Green has also directed television, including episodes of Top Boy (2019) and the miniseries We Own This City (2022). He co-wrote the screenplay for and directed the biographical film Bob Marley: One Love (2024).
