Metacritic reviews

A quintessentially American tale; profane, profound, and beautiful.

These four actors provide their roles with a bold presence both in their ability to impersonate physically and embody spiritually.

One Night in Miami hits so hard because it remains joyfully, often painfully grounded in what makes a person extraordinary, even when the world isn’t ready for them. Here’s hoping this world is ready for what King has to show it.

What a debut film it is. She gets just the right amount of tension and angst out of these four actors in a way that still makes it believable they might all still be friends or want to hang out together in the first place. It’s a movie about agendas.

This is undeniably a very theatrical film, but it never hides that – indeed, it makes the most of a certain claustrophobia. It’s an immensely watchable evocation of a moment when black America was on the verge of an upheaval that continues to resonate, in 2020 as strongly as ever. It absolutely puts you – to coin a phrase of the time – in the room where it happened.

To some extent, One Night in Miami remains high-quality filmed theater. But the conviction and stirring feeling brought to it elevate the material, making this an auspicious feature debut. Here's hoping that King, one of our most consistently excellent screen actors, continues to spread her wings in this direction.

As one might expect from a movie based on a play and directed by a famous actor, dialogue and performances are the driving force.

King’s debut makes attempts to widen out the stage play, but there’s no denying the fact that this is an exchange of ideas as opposed to a narrative, or that dialogue is often pitched as monologue. What ideas, though, and what a night.

As a work of deep, committed research into real history, that provides a very handy four-way primer on the most famous Black men of their day and the conflicting approaches to Black resistence and liberation that each personified, One Night in Miami is an instructive and absorbing watch. But as a film with the potential to do more, push further and explore and maybe even in some ways explode those legacies in order to get at the men underneath them, it feels too timid, too talky, too conceptual in content for being so classical in form.

As unbalanced as it might be, One Night in Miami is a well-acted history lesson and a sincere tribute to the men, their friendship, and their inspiring cultural importance. It’s just that King and Powers’ treatment of that outstanding premise hasn’t quite made the leap from stage play to big-screen film; it has landed in TV-movie territory instead.