Fruitvale Station

Fruitvale Station (2013) is Ryan Coogler's feature debut and you can watch it online on iFILM. The film reconstructs the final twenty-four hours in the life of Oscar Grant, a twenty-two-year-old from Oakland who was shot dead on a BART platform in the early hours of New Year's Day 2009. Michael B. Jordan plays him not as a martyr but as a specific person — someone trying to put his life back together after a stint in prison.

We follow Oscar through that last day: driving his mother (Octavia Spencer) to the grocery store, texting his girlfriend, playing with his daughter. He is not presented as flawless. The film earns its weight precisely because it refuses to editorialize. Then his friends talk him into ringing in the new year downtown, they take the train to Fruitvale Station, and bystanders record what happens next on their phones.

Coogler directed without melodrama — no swelling score at the wrong moment, no camera angle designed to tell you how to feel. The restraint is what makes the ending land as hard as it does. The film won the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at Sundance 2013, and earned a prize at Cannes in the Critics' Week sidebar. Watch Fruitvale Station (2013) online on iFILM.