Where's Wallace at? Yes, it's just a shade too hagiographic. But damn, that cellphone footage... In fact, it would make for a very interest re-edit if you moved that footage to the end, perhaps even intercutting the film's own 'staged' material with that of one from the phone.
It has forceful quotidian grit, enhanced by Rachel Morrison’s Super 16 lensing, but overt approaches to racial themes run toward the familiar and ham-fisted. A utopian, improvised New Years countdown on a Bay Area train before its passengers can reach a midnight fireworks display, shared by Oscar and his homies, Sophina, and a pan-racial throng including white hipsters and a black lesbian couple, is too “warmly” generic to feel like anything but a careful dose of corn to cushion the climactic horror.[…]
Spencer brings tones of impatience and watchful anxiety to her familiar figure of tough, even-keeled love, but the focus on her devotion, and the aw-shucks sentimentality of Jordan’s soft-spoken parenting scenes, evade a larger purpose that Fruitvale Station needed to address more boldly.
— Bill Weber (Slant Magazine)
Even if every word of Coogler’s account of the last day in Grant’s life held up under close scrutiny, the film would still ring false in its relentlessly positive portrayal of its subject. Best viewed as an ode to victim’s rights, Fruitvale forgoes nuanced drama for heart-tugging, head-shaking and rabble-rousing.
— Geoff Berkshire (Variety)
You walk out of it, not shaking your head over an abstract social problem, but grieving the senseless death of one flawed, complex, tragically young man.
— Dana Stevens (Slate)
Synopsis: Oakland, California. Young Afro-American Oscar Grant crosses paths with family members, friends, enemies and strangers before facing his fate on the platform at Fruitvale Station, in the early morning hours of New Year's Day 2009.