Writer: Ryan Coogler

Ryan Coogler writes his own films and the recurring structural choice is to give the opposing position a real argument. Killmonger in Black Panther is right about a great deal, and the film has to reckon with him instead of defeating him.

Fruitvale Station, written from the transcripts and reporting around Oscar Grant’s death, opens with the actual phone footage, which fixes the ending before the film begins and makes everything after it a study of an ordinary day.

Creed found a way into an exhausted franchise by shifting the point of view to a son who does not want his father’s name.