Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

This year’s movie for everyone has arrived. King Richard has no particular niche audience, unless you want to include antiracists—and there are some strong elements of such struggles in the story of Serena and Venus Williams, their father Richard, and their family. The key difference with this movie, though, is that unlike movies like Radio or The Blnd Side, King Richard not only doesn’t centralize its white characters, it was also directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green, who is Black.

Full disclosure: the script was written by Zach Baylin, a white guy who is also, oddly, working on the script for Creed III. That one he is evidently co-writing with a Black man (Keenan Coogler), and even in the case of King Richard films are always a collaborative effort and Green would have been the boss, but still. In cases like this I always wonder, could they not have found a qualified Black writer to tell a story from their own community? This all feels like King Richard as an example of Hollywood moving in the right direction, but still in the middle of many steps needed to be taken.

All that said, when it comes to the finished product, and its potential to reach wide-ranging audiences, King Richard is wildly successful. It’s a story easy to lose yourself in, from the very start, about parents Richard and Brandy Williams raising five girls and cultivating master tennis players in two of them, Serena and Venus. I don’t even think of “sports movies” as a go-to genre for me, and even I was powerless to its infectious spirit. This will be the perfect movie for the whole family to sit down and watch over Thanksgiving—I saw it in the theater, but it’s also currently streaming on HBO Max.

There’s a lot of talk about an Oscar nomination for Will Smith as the title character, and rightfully so. It would be his third nomination, and it’s easy to imagine it becoming his first win, barring another performance coming out of left field int he Oscar race (always a possibility). If he won this award, I would be happy for him. If he doesn’t get nominated, it will be a genuine shock.

No other performance here is likely to get a nomination, unless perhaps if it sweeps a bunch of categories, in which case there’s a slight possibility for Aunjanue Ellis, as Richard’s wife, Brandy. Ellis is very understated in the role but no less skilled, and her performance has a lot more time to stew on the margins of the first half of the film, while the focus is so much more on Richard. Still, Ellis does get a speech that would be perfect for an Oscars clip.

Most importantly, Saniyya Sidney is excellent as tennis prodigy Venus Williams, as is Demi Singleton as her sister Serena. The historical record already shows that Serena ultimately became the greatest tennis player ever, but King Richard focuses a bit more on Venus, largely because she was a year older, broke through critical barriers first, and the story of this film in particular is about Richard as their father most of all (hence the title). One might wonder why the movie is more about their dad than about the tennis players themselves, but the movie itself answers that question: they got to where they are because of him.

And Richard Williams was clearly a complex man, something Will Smith plays with careful precision. He’s imperfect, sometimes overbearing, and even as a parent incredibly supportive of his daughters’ sport interests, insisted that their education and well-being come first. He ruffled feathers by saying other kids’ parents should be shot, but we all know what kind of parents of kids in sports he’s talking about, and it’s hard to disagree. The man took big swings and big risks which, in the context of this film anyway, we always part of his grand, master plan. And, it would seem, his calculated risks paid off.

That, really, is the arc of the story in King Richard: seeing his risks pay off. And these are not risks that put his daughters in danger, quite the opposite: while “experts” tell him he’s likely throwing his daughters’ future away by refusing to allow them to go pro until he feels they are ready, he holds them back from that until he’s confident they won’t break under pressure or burn out, while still keeping their grades up. And after a somewhat forced break from competition, we get a climactic tennis match that does not go quite the way most such climaxes of sports movies go, and yet it’s still as riveting as the best of them, and it still ends with the expected emotional triumph.

King Richard is at once a very conventionally made sports movie, and an example of a unique kind of cinematic uplift. The only thing that seemed to be missing, for me, was exactly how Richard got to be so obsessive about cultivating greatness in his daughters as tennis players. We hear a brief reference to him and Brandy having been athletes themselves, but by the start of this story—the opening sequence, in fact—Richard is already hustling for sponsorships, and working his kids so hard that he and his wife get grief about it from their neighbor across the street.

What still sticks in the memory, though, is the love Richard has for his daughters, and the care with which he prepares them for the challenges of being both truly great at something and young Black women in America. We already know that these women have borne the brunt of a lot of stupid shit in our culture, and what King Richard provides is a backdrop, a blueprint for how they weathered what came to them with humility and grace. (There’s even a lesson learned from Disney’s Cinderella, according to Richard anyway.) The end of this movie is just the beginning of Venus and Serena’s stories, and you’ll be helpless to the call for cheering them on, just as I cheer for this movie.

*A king and his princesses arrive declaring themselves to be reckoned with.*

Overall: B+