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O.G.
February 23, 2019  | By David Bianculli

HBO, 8:00 p.m. ET

 

MOVIE PREMIERE: This film, starring Jeffrey Wright of HBO’s Westworld, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, after which the network happily snapped it up for TV distribution, giving one of its prominent stars another firmament in which to shine. In this drama, Wright plays Louis, a maximum-security inmate about to be released after 24 years in prison, who spends his last days in prison befriending a new inmate named Beecher (Theothus Carter). The last time HBO presented a prison drama featuring a new maximum-security inmate named Beecher was in Oz, the Tom Fontana drama series that led the way for The Sopranos and the entire Platinum Age of Television. But this is a different Beecher, a different story, and – as approached by director Madeleine Sackler, a different approach to filmmaking entirely. At the same time she was filming O.G. on location at Indiana’s Pendelton Correctional Facility, she also filmed a companion documentary, It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It, in which she co-directed 13 prisoners in participating in filming and telling their own stories. That documentary premieres on HBO Monday; tonight, we have the original O.G.

 
 
 
 
 
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