Luce

Luce Edgar is a high school senior in Arlington, Virginia, admired as a star athlete, a debate team leader, and the pride of the adoptive parents who brought him from war-torn Eritrea a decade earlier. His standing unravels when a teacher, Harriet Wilson, reads an essay he wrote in the voice of a historical figure and finds ideas about political violence that alarm her. What she suspects he is hiding turns her against a student she had held up as an example, dividing the school and straining his family.

Julius Onah directed and co-wrote the film with J.C. Lee, following his earlier The Cloverfield Paradox and preceding Captain America: Brave New World. Kelvin Harrison Jr. plays Luce, with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as his parents and Octavia Spencer as the teacher. It was released in August 2019 and took in about 2 million dollars worldwide, a small return for a drama of this kind.

Audience response was moderate: on IMDb it holds 6.6/10 from roughly 16,000 votes, and on TMDB 6.4/10 from far fewer. Critics were considerably warmer, giving it 7.8/10 across 171 reviews, so the film landed better with reviewers than with the broader public.