Review of Five Star (2014) by Ted S — 05 Apr 2015

Five Star is a meditative gang film about the struggles of being a man. It's beautifully shot and even more beautifully acted. Real life gang.

Member Primo Grant gives a riveting performance as a version of.

Himself. It's full of raw emotionality that's a rare sight on film.

John Diaz plays a young student of Primo's whose father passed away.

Under mysterious circumstances. Both men bring a nuance to their.

Characters that ground them in the reality of the filmmaking and create.

Portraits of real people struggling with one of our most common and.

Modern dilemmas.

The film starts with maybe the most intense and emotional scene. Primo.

Recalls the birth of his handicapped son and his being in jail at the.

Time. His son has autism, but to Primo he's perfect. This immediately.

Sets the stage and the tone for the rest of the film. Dark, sometimes.

Humorous but always with a subtextual menace, the film traverses the.

Gang lifestyle in a completely new, and real way. This isn't scarface,.

It's much closer to The Wire. These are real people who have found.

Themselves in these situations because of varying factors. It does not.

Glamorize gang life nor does it hold moral judgement over it. What it.

Does do is offer a contemplative reaction to the way our world works,.

And the worlds we don't really understand.

The filmmaker's voice is never lost in this blending of fiction and.

Reality. Keith Miller's first film "Welcome to Pine Hill" has a similar.

Approach to a very different subject. Miller's ability to bring out the.

Reality of a person and their situation and arc it into a narrative.

That feels like a movie that the audience has been sucked into is.

Astounding. While some might characterize both his films as "raw" they.

Are not in the sense of a docu-drama, but in the sense that the cameras.

Are free flowing and the characters represent fully developed and often.

Troubled people. Make no mistake these "real life" stories are fiction.

And there is the clear hand of an auteur at work behind them.