Synopsis
Based on the true story of First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, a soldier deployed to Iraq begins to keep a journal of love and advice for his infant son. Back at home, senior New York Times editor Dana Canedy revisits the story of her unlikely, life-altering relationship with King and his enduring devotion to her and their child.
Your Movie Library
Cast
- Michael B. JordanCharles King
- Chanté AdamsDana Canedy
- Jalon ChristianJordan
- Robert WisdomSgt. T.J. Canedy
- Tamara TuniePenny Canedy
- Jasmine BatchelorGwen Canedy
- Marchánt DavisMike Canedy
- Susan PourfarMiriam
- Vanessa AspillagaRobin
- Grey HensonCiro
Recommendations
- 63
Washington Post
Despite a story line that covers such fraught historical events as 9/11 and the Iraq War, the movie is too tidy to ever really feel like a living, breathing thing. - 63
Boston Globe
Journal is Canedy’s story, but it’s Michael B. Jordan’s movie. Stalwart, quietly forceful, he seems positively . . . Denzelian. - 50
Movie Nation
It’s an ungainly film that loses focus time and again, drifting off to indulge its stars with extraneous scenes and badly-handled or simply unnecessary story threads. - 50
San Francisco Chronicle
A Journal for Jordan...is such a sweetly, well-intentioned film — one meant to bring a Christmastime lump in the throat in a year that gave us so many lumps of coal — that it feels churlish and downright Scrooge-like to point out its flaws. But the subject matter deserves better than this overlong melodrama spiked with occasional moments of welcome humor and pathos. - 50
The Associated Press
Washington earns his audience’s tears with an unrushed, unshowy style, letting an adult and very human relationship evolve on camera, skipping back and forth through years as it goes from love, birth, death and acceptance. - 50
Los Angeles Times
The picture’s too rosy to feel real. Its elements of posthumous, loving advice and inevitable tragedy make for good bones. But this portrait is too clean, too unquestioning, too accepting, to get to the marrow. - 42
IndieWire
No, it’s not what you’re expecting, and what it is isn’t very good, either. - 42
The Playlist
As the overly long movie becomes about 130 minutes of his own propaganda, Washington romanticizes an ideal of man that has never actually existed, instead of a human being who did.
