Adapted from August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, Tony Award-winning play of the same name, Fences is directed by Denzel Washington and sees him and Viola Davis reprising their lead roles from the 2010 Broadway revival. It’s a story of race, fragile masculinity, family struggles, high emotions, faded glory and lost dreams, and as you might imagine from a film with such themes, it is absolutely bursting with drama. If you go into this thing, you’d better be ready to walk out of the theater just absolutely devastated from all that drama you just witnessed. This is not some casual amount of drama. This is some real knock-you-on-your-ass-level, capital-D Drama. There’s shouting, crying, tears and snot are flowing—oh, man, and Denzel just shoved his son, but now it seems like the son might actually attack Denzel with a baseball bat, so, wow. That’s the kind of intense drama we’re talking about here.
If you feel you have the constitution, you can mainline this punch-in-the-gut of drama yourself Christmas Day.
