The Book of Clarence: Movie Review

“The Book of Clarence,” the religious epic by multi-hyphenate talent Jeymes Samuel, is a handsomely crafted picture that simply loses the plot. Built around Clarence (LaKeith Stanfield), a street hustler living in A.D. 33 Jerusalem, Samuel’s script is a farcical exploitation flick forcibly reaching for political relevance under the misbegotten expectation that every Black film must be important. As evidenced in Samuel’s directorial debut, “The Harder They Fall,” the filmmaker has an exacting vision, but there’s a fine line between subverting the genre and rendering it incomprehensible.