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A.V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One” was the somewhat surprising winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance a couple of months ago, a trophy taken home by major movies like “ CODA ” and “ Whiplash ” in past years. While other films were considered frontrunners, it feels like Rockwell’s heartfelt drama took the prize largely because of the sheer force of its central performance, a true breakout for Teyana Taylor . It’s easily one of the best performances so far this year, one of those turns in which you have to remind yourself that you’re watching an actress—that’s how completely she fades into the character, a woman who makes some tough decisions to protect her son. Taylor has a remarkable ability to be present in a scene, responding as if she’s interacting in the moment, not reciting rehearsed lines or blocked movement. She's organic in a way that elevates a script that has some significant structural problems and battles credulity in the final act. She's so good that, by that time, you won’t care. You’ll be too invested in her story to question where it ends.

Taylor’s Inez is a New York resident returning from Rikers Island when the film opens. Only 22 years old, she carries herself with the determination of someone who has already lived so much life and knows what she needs to get through this tough world. What she needs more than ever is her son Terry (played by Aaron Kingsley Adetola , Aven Courtney , and Josiah Cross at 6, 13, and 17, respectively), but he’s been in the foster system while Inez was behind bars. When six-year-old Terry has an accident that lands him in the hospital, Inez makes the impulsive but understandable decision to take him home. Who could possibly raise him better? And what’s one more kid out of a broken foster system, one that damaged Inez too?

Inez forces Terry to change his name and not tell anyone about his background. And yet “A Thousand and One” is less of a thriller than that synopsis might suggest. Inez and Terry share a secret that defines their relationship, something that bonds them as their NY neighborhood shifts and changes around them over the ‘90s. Rockwell regularly uses sound bites and news items to convey the energy of NYC in this era and comments on the gentrifying world around Inez. It gives her arc the tenor of a survival story by making her the rock-solid center of a world that spins around her. She’s not on a set. She’s in the real world that’s zipping by her as she holds so tightly to her child.

Inez eventually marries a man named Lucky, played by  William Catlett . But the film centers on the Inez/Terry dynamic, giving the traditional mother/son drama a new structure by emphasizing how quickly it could be taken away. Without turning it into a genre piece, the decision that Inez makes and the secret that Terry has to hide creates a symbolic urgency to their relationship. Every mother worries their son could be taken away by violence or tragedy, but Inez has to raise her boy in a world where that threat is more immediate. We have seen dozens of stories about single mothers who overcome adversity, but the narrative here makes it feel new again as we feel Inez’s tough decisions and how they shape Terry’s worldview.

Much of that veracity collapses in a final act I’m not sure the film needs. Without spoiling, there’s another secret in Inez and Terry’s life that completely recasts everything that came before in a different light, and the narrative decision pushed me out of a story that had felt so intimate for so long. The movie doesn’t need a twist. It’s done so much to make Inez, Terry, and the world they inhabit feel real; it's a splash of cold water to be reminded this is a melodrama, and maybe always was. The final scenes are manipulative in a fashion that the movie otherwise defies for most of its runtime.

However, Teyana Taylor holds her head high through it all. Even as the film falters narratively, she’s a force of nature embodying a person more than just playing a role. She captures the soul of a woman who knows her son needs her to navigate this dangerous world. And that she needs him too.

In theaters now.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

A Thousand and One (2023)

Rated R for language.

116 minutes

Teyana Taylor as Inez

William Catlett as Lucky

Josiah Cross as Terry

Aven Courtney as Terry (Age 13)

Aaron Kingsley Adetola as Terry (Age 6)

Terri Abney as Kim Jones

Delissa Reynolds as Mrs. Jones

Amelia Workman as Anita Tucker

Adriane Lenox as Miss Annie

Gavin Schlosser as Pea (Age 6)

Jolly Swag as Pea (Age 13)

Azza El as Simone (Age 14)

Alicia Pilgrim as Simone

Jennean Farmer as Ms. Janie (Foster Mom)

Kal-El White as Shawn (Foster Brother)

Jamier Williams as Michael H. (Foster Brother)

• A.V. Rockwell

Cinematographer

• Sabine Hoffman
• Kristan Sprague

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‘A Thousand and One’ Review: A New York Love Story

A mesmerizing Teyana Taylor stars in A.V. Rockwell’s feature directing debut, about motherhood and survival in a fast-changing city.

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By Manohla Dargis

The first time you truly see Inez De La Paz, the galvanic center of “A Thousand and One,” she is framed against a wall that’s as red as a fire alarm. Inez is on the move, as she often is in this heart-clencher, the low-angle camera worshipfully pointed up at her. And no wonder: Inez is a dynamo, a force. She’s tough and beautiful, mouthy and unwaveringly loyal, but if she moves fast it’s often because she has no other choice. All she has is forward momentum, her unbending will and the small, somber boy at her side.

Played by a mesmerizing Teyana Taylor , Inez holds you rapt throughout this sweeping New York story of love and survival, motherhood and gentrification. It opens in 1994 and then jumps first to 2001 and later to 2005, a time frame that takes it from the beginning of the zero-tolerance years of the Giuliani mayoralty to the start of the Bloomberg boom times. Along the way, buildings fall and rise, and Inez raises that small boy, Terry (she usually calls him just T), an unsmiling, guarded child who grows into an anxious teenager and then, under Inez’s hawkish watch, continues to grow and thrive, eventually becoming some kind of miracle.

“A Thousand and One” is the feature debut of A.V. Rockwell, and it too can feel like a wonder. It’s a small movie only in the most pedestrian sense: It’s intimate, humanly scaled and concerns ordinary people with ordinary struggles. It doesn’t have stars, just a few familiar faces and names, including Taylor, a musician, as well as the actor Will Catlett, who plays Lucky, Inez’s gruff love interest. But these faces have character, personality, history, as does this vision of New York and its crowded byways and sagging buildings, with their faded grandeur, smeary windows, fragile pipes and impastos of paint lacquering the halls.

What interests Rockwell are the lives in the apartments and how these lives joyfully and chaotically flow back and forth into the streets, pumping energy into the city, enlivening and sustaining it. Rockwell, who also wrote the movie, was born and raised in Queens. (Her parents are from Jamaica.) She knows New York, and she wants you to know (and feel) it, too. She has a documentarian’s sense of place, and while she shows the grime and the mess, she also finds the beauty — and the poignant history — in how the city’s jagged, kaleidoscopic parts restlessly fit together to make a vibrant whole.

The movie opens on a brief, darkly lit scene of Inez styling another’s inmate’s hair in a cell at Rikers Island that is soon followed by shots of her, now liberated, navigating a sun-drenched Brooklyn. Rockwell has a raft of earlier short movies and music videos on her résumé , work that showcases her talent for economically turning faces into stories, moods and feelings into images. In “A Thousand and One,” she packs a great deal into her filmmaking, which bristles with looks, gestures, bodies in breakneck motion and expressionistic jolts of color that — like Gary Gunn’s gorgeous score — complicate and deepen the outwardly simple story.

That story clicks in after Inez is released from Rikers and spots Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), who’s six and in foster care, hanging out with some friends. It’s an uneasy reunion, and while the details of their past life and separation are sketchy (the characters talk like people, not narrative delivery systems), Inez has soon charmed her way back into Terry’s affections. She buys him a toy (a Power Ranger) and coaxes reluctant smiles from him, but when she learns that he has been injured at the foster home, she abruptly makes the decision that will shape the rest of their lives: Inez snatches Terry, ushering them into a new reality.

After some missteps, they settle into an apartment in Harlem, where she grew up and which becomes an instructive, mirror-like backdrop. Inez secures fake documents for Terry and gives him a new name, allowing them to remain under the radar. She wants do hair; she settles for the steady paycheck of a cleaning job. The work wears her down, but she keeps going. Lucky moves in, they marry and the story shifts to 2001, the year Terry (now played by Aven Courtney) turns 13; after a while, the movie takes another leap and Terry, now 17 (Josiah Cross takes over), is thriving at school and the neighborhood is newly humming.

As time passes, Rockwell plays with genre — the social-issue drama, the maternal melodrama — as well as with color, light and texture, variations that complement, and comment on, the changes happening outside Inez and Terry’s apartment. Rockwell also repeatedly folds in panoramas of the city, using long shots and aerial views to anchor New York (and you) in specific times and places. When she lingers on an image centered by the glowing red sign of the Apollo Theater, she is offering up a glimpse of beauty. She’s also tethering the story and its people to a history, one that’s soon imperiled by new neighbors and jackhammers.

Rockwell is too cleareyed is to be nostalgic for the old, grittier, grimier New York; she’s also too much of a dialectician. There’s no angry chest-thumping about the ravages of capitalism in “A Thousand and One.” Yet in telling the story of Inez and Terry — who make a home with each other and who have both been repeatedly failed by institutional forces — Rockwell is simultaneously chronicling the intersecting life stories of a neighborhood, a city and a world. It takes a village to raise a child, or so the saying goes. Yet what happens when power descends, razing that village to the ground and remaking it in its own pitiless image?

A Thousand and One Rated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters.

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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‘A Thousand and One’: A film worth not just seeing — but celebrating

Gritty drama is a dazzling showcase for teyana taylor, who delivers a fierce, career-defining performance as a mother struggling to raise her son in new york city.

Writer-director A.V. Rockwell makes a triumphant debut with “A Thousand and One,” an award winner at this year’s Sundance Film Festival that takes hold and never lets go.

Inez (Teyana Taylor) has just been released from Rikers when she searches the Brooklyn streets for the little boy she left behind, a quiet, watchful 7-year-old named Terry. He’s been put in foster care but has ended up in the hospital with a head injury. After a tortured moment of indecision, Inez gathers him up and takes him up to Harlem, eluding city authorities and trying to build the family she never had.

A scrapper, fighter, hustler and striver, Inez — portrayed by Taylor in a fierce, career-defining turn — will not back down when it comes to the son she insists on fighting for. “A Thousand and One” is pointedly set in 1990s New York, at the dawn of the stop-and-frisk policies and gentrification efforts that would change the city forever. As Terry grows into a wary but clearly intelligent teenager, his and Inez’s existence grows ever more precarious, even with the arrival of Lucky (William Catlett), the ex-con who will become Inez’s husband and Terry’s ambivalent but committed father. As Harlem changes around them, their modest apartment begins literally to fall apart, a physical manifestation of the apprehension Inez can’t shake when it comes to the people she loves most.

Working with cinematographer Eric K. Yue, Rockwell creates a vibrantly precise portrait of New York in the 1990s, when boomboxes, beepers, pay phones and street life gave the city a vital, dangerous pulse. Gary Gunn’s alternately delicate and lush musical score lends lyricism to scenes that often burst with barely contained anger and violence. With an attuned sense of tonal balance and atmosphere, Rockwell doesn’t tell the story of an unconventional family so much as plunge viewers into the daily realities of building a life, one mistake and fragile victory at a time.

For the most part, though, she creates a canvas and safe space for some of the most riveting and uncompromising performances of the year. Three actors — Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Aven Courtney and Josiah Cross — play Terry at different ages, each one of them with extraordinary self-possession and sensitivity. Catlett plays Lucky with menace at first — a misdirect that is just as much about the audience’s assumptions as it is his own character’s evolution. Terri Abney, Adriane Lenox and Alicia Pilgrim all deliver impressive supporting roles as women who come into Inez and Terry’s life, Pilgrim as Terry’s smart, no-nonsense teenage crush.

As accomplished as the ensemble cast is, “A Thousand and One” is a dazzling showcase for Taylor, who embodies Inez’s hustle and bristling energy with ferocity and compulsively watchable charisma. Through the course of the film, she undergoes a breathtaking physical transformation, her sacrifice and devotion to Terry visible in a face that grows increasingly drained. (Inserting real-life speeches from mayors Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, Rockwell points out how, even though Inez personifies the principles they pretended to espouse, she and her peers were the victims of their most draconian policies.)

The reference point for “A Thousand and One’s” title hides in plain sight through most of the movie, as does an astonishing third-act twist that leaves viewers and fictional characters alike in a state of numbed shock. As much as Rockwell astutely limns how lives are shaped by forces out of their control, she’s no fatalist: She gives Inez and Terry their happy ending, as hard-won and ambiguous as it is. This is a tough, beautiful, honest and bracingly hopeful movie about mutual care and unconditional love, with a transformative and indelible performance at its core. “A Thousand and One” isn’t just worth seeing — it’s worth celebrating.

R. At area theaters. Contains strong language. 117 minutes.

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Movie Reviews

A mother faces 'a thousand and one' obstacles in this unconventional nyc film.

Justin Chang

Teyana Taylor and Aaron Kingsley Adetola play a mother and son in A Thousand and One. Sundance Institute hide caption

Teyana Taylor and Aaron Kingsley Adetola play a mother and son in A Thousand and One.

A Thousand and One begins in 1994, shortly before a 22-year-old woman named Inez is released from Rikers Island. We don't know much about her, but Teyana Taylor , the electrifying actor who plays her, tells us plenty just from the brashly confident way Inez strides through her old Brooklyn stomping grounds after a year away.

As she greets old friends and looks for work as a hairdresser, Inez is determined to put the past behind her — though that becomes impossible when she runs into her 6-year-old son, Terry, on the street. Terry was sent to foster care when Inez went to prison, and while he resents her for leaving him, he'd clearly rather be with her again than in his current situation.

And so when Terry has an accident at home, Inez impulsively springs him from the hospital and takes him to the Harlem neighborhood where she grew up. They lie low for a while, though it soon becomes sadly clear that nobody's really looking for Terry, who's just one of many kids who've slipped through the cracks of the foster-care system. Inez grew up in that system herself, and she wants to give Terry the loving home she never had.

Soon she finds them a rundown Harlem apartment — the number on the door, 10-01, is one explanation for the movie's title. Over the next several years, this apartment will be their home, but it's a precarious one, where every happy moment feels both fleeting and hard-won.

Inez works long hours to provide for herself and Terry, a gifted student whose teachers think he could be Ivy League material. Eventually, Inez marries Lucky, an old boyfriend played by a charismatic William Catlett. While not the most faithful husband, Lucky becomes a genuinely loving father figure to Terry.

Terry is played at ages 6, 13 and 17 by the actors Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Aven Courtney and Josiah Cross. The use of three actors to play a young Black man at different ages has already earned the movie comparisons to Barry Jenkins ' sublime 2016 drama, Moonlight . But those similarities aside, A Thousand and One focuses more specifically on the young man's mother. Taylor, an R&B performer in her first leading film role, conveys the full weight of Inez's sacrifices. By the end, the sensual, free-spirited woman we met in the opening scenes has become visibly sadder and wearier, though still possessed of the same devil-may-care defiance.

If A Thousand and One were just a story about a mother and son overcoming the odds, it would be moving enough. But the writer-director A.V. Rockwell, making a strong feature debut after years directing shorts and music videos, gives this intimate drama a sharp sociopolitical context. Even as Inez and Terry grow older, the city around them is changing, too. At the beginning, the Harlem we see pulses with grit and energy, shot in a vibrantly kinetic style and set to a '90s hip-hop beat. By the end, the neighborhood has been gentrified beyond recognition, as reflected in the movie's cooler, gloomier palette and its many shots of anonymous-looking office and residential buildings.

Rockwell doesn't shy away from detailing how these shifts have impacted communities of color in general, and Inez and Terry in particular. They're gradually forced out of their apartment by a new landlord who wants to tear the building down. Terry and his friends face routine police harassment — a development that Rockwell intersperses with real news clips covering Mayor Giuliani's embrace of "stop and frisk" policies .

None of this comes off as didactic; Rockwell deftly weaves her commentary into a story that turns out to be less conventional and more surprising than it looks. She also reminds us that there's more to both Inez and Terry than their tough circumstances. We see this in the playful scenes of 17-year-old Terry flirting with a girl behind a restaurant counter, or the poignant moment when Inez — rather than picking a fight with one of Lucky's girlfriends, as she might have once done — instead treats her with decency and grace.

Rockwell has such a sure grasp of her characters and their complexities that she's able to end the story on a boldly unresolved note. I left the movie thinking about what might lie ahead for Inez and Terry, and feeling grateful for the time I'd spent in their company.

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‘a thousand and one’ review: teyana taylor powerfully embodies a woman’s fight to keep home and family together.

Writer-director A.V. Rockwell’s feature debut is a volatile account of a mother-son relationship set against the vivid backdrop of rapidly gentrifying 1990s New York.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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When Inez first re-encounters her 6-year-old son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), he’s reluctant to talk to her, still distrustful after she abandoned him on the street. But the boy lands in hospital after an accident in his foster home and she starts visiting, getting past his petulance with a Power Ranger toy. Inez tells him she’s due to be moved to a new shelter but gives him her beeper number and vows to find him. “Why do you keep leaving me?” he asks, triggering her impulsive decision to whisk him away to Harlem.

Rockwell tracks their lives together over 15 years, with Terry played at 13 by Aven Courtney and at 17 by Josiah Cross, the seamless transitions between the three actors recalling the similar progression in Moonlight .

Rockwell’s empathetic gaze keeps us rooting for both Inez and Terry as his teenage growing pains create friction between them. She resumes a rocky romance with Lucky (Will Catlett) following his release from prison. He provides a father figure for Terry but also makes him blame Inez unfairly when fights cause him to disappear for weeks at a time.

All three of the actors playing Terry capture the hurt of a kid who grew accustomed to disappointment at a young age and remains constantly on the alert for signs that he’ll be set adrift again. Inez seems painfully aware of that tension in her son. Both of them are damaged people, as is Lucky, which threads a vein of melancholy even through scenes in which the fragile family unit finds moments of harmony.

Taylor is especially good at showing how the strain of holding them together — giving more than she gets back from either Lucky or Terry — eats away at her. A scene where she’s simultaneously laughing and sobbing while eating a cup of instant noodles and watching inane reality TV pierces the heart.

There’s a meandering quality to A Thousand and One that at times makes it feel slightly underpowered and overlong. But the drama is fully inhabited and its relationships drawn with love and compassion for the characters’ failings as much as their hopes, qualities enhanced by Gary Gunn’s mellow score.

That process — with callous new landlords taking over maintenance responsibilities and forcing tenants out by making homes basically unlivable — is shown in all its pitiless indifference. It dumps one more major crisis onto Inez’s shoulders while she’s dealing with a saddening loss and facing the dilemma of what to do about Terry’s future. Rockwell then radically alters the perspective with a closing-act reveal that shows Inez’s sacrifices in a new light.

Shot by DP Eric K. Yue with a sharp eye for the evolution of the city and its toll on marginalized communities, the film benefits enormously from the authenticity of its locations and the director’s sensitivity to the casualties of societal change. It’s a quiet drama despite its characters’ many volatile arguments. Most of all, it’s a moving character portrait of a complicated woman who makes good and bad decisions but is motivated solely by the desire to create a better life for herself and the people she loves.

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Review: ‘A Thousand and One’ offers a gritty New York story of survival

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Mothers are often the keepers of secrets, borne from a primal instinct for survival. But secrets fester, grow bigger and inevitably burst with the resonance of truth, as they do in “A Thousand and One,” the debut feature of writer/director A.V. Rockwell . The film, which won the U.S. dramatic grand jury prize at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, casts the harrowing story of a mother and her son against the backdrop of a gentrifying Harlem.

“A Thousand and One” proves to be a showcase for multihyphenate star and Harlem native Teyana Taylor, who brings to her astonishing performance the coiled physicality of a panther ready to pounce. Her character, Inez, is on the offense as her only form of defense, a stance and ethos that never wavers throughout the years we follow her.

Sweeping aerial shots set to soulful strings introduce us to the iconography of New York City: the Empire State Building, Central Park and, of course, Rikers Island, holding New York City’s largest jail. It’s 1994 and we meet the incarcerated Inez in a tender moment: gently applying makeup to another female inmate. Soon, she’s released back on the streets of Harlem, hawking her services as a hairstylist and desperately trying to stay out of the shelter.

Her swift, confident movements are captured in snippets of grainy, handheld images. Cinematographer Eric K. Yue also employs pans and zooms that harken back to the New Hollywood films of the 1970s, placing this film in a long lineage of gritty New York City indie filmmaking.

A wrinkle in Inez’s survival story manifests, a wrinkle that soon becomes her purpose and her driving force: her young boy Terry (the wonderfully instinctive Aaron Kingsley Adetola), who is living in foster care. When an accident lands him in the hospital, Inez works her way back into his heart with Power Rangers toys and quality time. She asks if he’d like to come stay with her for a bit — a son should live with his mother, after all. They crash at a friend’s, and eventually land their own spot in a brownstone, Inez doing hair in her room for cash. Since she’s essentially abducted him from the government, she pays a guy for a fake birth certificate for Terry, who goes by Darryl at school.

The story of Terry and Inez and, later, Lucky ( William Catlett ), her boyfriend who becomes a father figure for Terry, is a simple one. But the lived-in quality of the material makes this story feel so real, and almost stranger than fiction at times. It’s not a true story, but it comes from a place of truth, and in her writing and direction Rockwell brings a hyper-specificity to the film, whether in the way young Terry passes the time alone at home, or in the fumbling courtships he undertakes as a teen (played by Aven Courtney). It’s in the speeches that Lucky and Inez deliver to Terry about striving for more beyond what they experienced, which manage to never seem phony or labored.

The film is utterly absorbing, anchored by the unpredictable performance of Taylor, playing a hopelessly complicated, but deeply caring woman. When faced with dire circumstances, she survives, then dares to imagine a life for Terry beyond the cycle she’s experienced, forging a family unit she never had. Through sheer willpower, she gets them to a point where she can see his bright future; yet when 17-year-old Terry (a remarkable Josiah Cross) finds himself inadvertently repeating some of his mother’s actions in 2005, it seems a grim kind of fate.

Gentrification can suck the ‘vitality’ out of a city. This new film captures how

Filmmaker A.V. Rockwell and star Teyana Taylor open up about their ‘heartbreak letter’ and Sundance prizewinner ‘A Thousand and One,’ opening Friday.

March 30, 2023

There are larger forces at play beyond the decisions Inez made out of fear and anxiety when she was 22 and fresh out of jail. The home she’s made starts to crumble in tandem with the fracturing of their family unit. Their new landlord puts on a helpful face and offers to fix things, but underneath his smiling exterior, seems to want them gone, the home eventually becoming inhospitable when Terry needs it the most.

Rockwell evolves the film’s style over the years, using the ghostly aerial shots of the city as a stylistic motif and device to situate the viewer and signify time bleeding into the atmosphere. During a climactic conversation between Terry and Inez, all color has been drained from the image, the two pictured in stark contrast to the white walls. All that is left between them is the messy, complicated truth, though the shades of gray are thrown into shocking black and white.

“A Thousand and One” is a fascinating portrait of the maternal, feminine instinct caught in an unforgiving world. Taylor’s Inez, possessed of a hard-bitten skill for self-preservation, stays one step ahead, constantly moving forward, a soft shred of hope her only cold comfort.

Katie Walsh is Tribune News Service film critic.

'A Thousand and One'

Rated: R, for language Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes Playing: In general release

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A Thousand and One Reviews

Teyana Taylor is magnetic as a young mother trying to do what is best for herself and her son against the tide of an increasingly gentrified New York City, many broken systems, and little support.

Full Review | Apr 19, 2024

...through Taylor’s excellent screen work, it functions so potently as a portrait of the real people left by the wayside by institutions designed to catch them when they fall.

Full Review | Feb 13, 2024

A Thousand and One never ceases to engange and, at times, even move. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 30, 2024

A Thousand One stands out for its sophisticated direction and imaginative visual representation that captures the beauty and vitality of the city, as well as the specific economic struggles of lower-middle-class African Americans. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Jan 29, 2024

Terry and his friends are frequently harassed by police under Mayor Rudy Guiliani's 'stop-and-frisk' policies. Against all these social currents, Inez struggles heroically. Even when it looks like she's defeated, her love for Terry and Lucky triumphs.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jan 27, 2024

Rockwell's direction achieves a perfect sense of intimacy in its portrayal of this complicated and even extreme situation, and avoids falling into too many melodramatic tendencies to explore an evolving relationship... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 5, 2024

Several knife-turning twists will rattle you whole before the end, but there’s no gimmick. The pain is real. A Thousand and One is an astoundingly accomplished debut film that stays with you long after the curtain falls.

Full Review | Dec 29, 2023

First-time feature writer/director A.V. Rockwell deftly navigates the epic narrative, including a finale that somehow both breaks your heart and sends your spirit soaring.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 21, 2023

It helps that Rockwell found actors who were able to give the material the authenticity it demands by portraying imperfect souls struggling to be better even as they find themselves failing again and again.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Nov 22, 2023

A very dynamic family portrait in which the characters are molded by their own decisions as well as external forces. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Oct 5, 2023

A Thousand and One is one of the most absorbing and immersive dramas of the year.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 21, 2023

Rockwell maintains simmering tension beneath a rock-solid character-driven story...

Full Review | Sep 20, 2023

Taylor is the secret weapon here. She's gorgeous and ferocious and never hits a false note.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.4/5 | Sep 16, 2023

Overall, A Thousand and One is a solid film, with a good script, particularly from a dialogue standpoint. The characters don’t often overdo their lines and the team brings fresh approaches to common situations.

Full Review | Sep 7, 2023

The best revenge is living well, and Inez, a criminal mastermind, rejects the laws of this world and their condemnation to navigate life on her own terms.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 16, 2023

A.V. Rockwell writes a love letter to mothers and the marginalized communities of New York through a painful character study following a mother-son relationship living in an ever-changing city.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

A Thousand and One will shatter your heart & with a third act mic drop that completely changes the story it only becomes more devastating. A strong debut from A.V ROCKWELL!

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Jul 22, 2023

Reminded me of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films, and their method of allowing time and occurrences to build the movie, until a sort of emotional plateau is achieved.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 7, 2023

The film is anchored by the unforgettable powerhouse performance from Teyana Taylor as Inez, a young woman whose swagger and defiant scowl mask a lifetime of neglect and pain.

Full Review | May 26, 2023

A Thousand and One will be tough to swallow but it’s rooted in reality. That’s what makes it great.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 17, 2023

‘A Thousand And One’ Review: Teyana Taylor Electrifies a Tough, Graceful Tale of Us-Against-the-World Motherhood

Director A.V. Rockwell's feature debut is a deeply felt, decades-spanning portrait of a woman raising her boy on the margins of legality in rapidly gentrifying New York City.

By Jessica Kiang

Jessica Kiang

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One of the many things that sets “ A Thousand and One ” apart from other, similarly tough-minded stories of urban struggle, poverty and marginalization can be felt practically from the start, as director A.V. Rockwell introduces Inez (R’n’B performer and choreographer Teyana Taylor ) walking the pavement along a painted brick wall in early-’90s Harlem. The way composer Gary Gunn’s symphonic music swells and swirls on the soundtrack, and the way the camera gazes up at her from below as it tracks her purposeful stride, give this ordinary woman, whom we already know has only recently been released from Rikers Island, a heroic kind of dignity.

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On an impulse, but with Terry’s eager complicity, Inez simply walks him out of the hospital. She’s determined to be a mother to him even if it means she’s guilty of kidnapping a ward of the state, even if she has no job, nowhere to stay and few friends she hasn’t already alienated somehow.

Still, the years pass (the film spans almost two decades) and Inez’s guard relaxes a little. But surely they are on borrowed time, especially when Terry (played at 17 by Josiah Cross) starts to want to assert his independence, to get out into the world that doesn’t know his real identity. Secrets so long kept are doubly dangerous when breached. Who knows what other revelations will come tumbling out in their wake?

Inez is a gift of a role for a performer of Taylor’s commitment, and she tears into it, giving what deserves to be her breakthrough performance (she made her film acting debut in 2021’s “Coming 2 America”). Onscreen almost every moment, she’s the energetic, extroverted personality whose abrasive, combative flaws are difficult to tell from her abrasive, combative virtues. “I’ll go to war for you,” she vows to Terry, “fight this whole fucked-up town for you.” Hers is a streetwise, experience-hardened love. Tenderness manifests as anger, protectiveness is expressed through scolding. The ferocity of her maternal affection is both wonderful and terrifying, but she knows it’s what is needed to keep her little family together, in a callous world that will never fully believe her intentions are pure.

Deeply felt though it is, the Inez/Terry story is really only half the achievement of “A Thousand and One.” The other, parallel strand is an impressively drawn portrait of a changing New York City, tracked via offscreen TV news reports of Giuliani’s jaywalking crackdown, his notorious stop-and-frisk policy and eventually Mayor Bloomberg’s election. Inez’s early-’90s kiss curls and chunky golden hoop earrings fade out of fashion, white neighbors move in, old locals move out. Even the tenor of Erick K. Yue’s rich, dynamic cinematography changes, with the gritty vibrancy of the earlier sections giving way to a cooler palette, and a more restrained, less mobile aesthetic.

Soon Inez herself is met with the smiling face of gentrification, in her apparently affable new landlord Jerry (Mark Gessner), who comes to make unnecessary upgrades that “accidentally” render the apartment all but unlivable. “Be from Harlem, but not of Harlem,” her friend Kim (Terri Abney) had advised her many years before. But in so many ways, Inez is Harlem, and the story of her trying to keep the system at bay in protection of her son becomes, in Rockwell’s sensitive handling, also the story of an embattled neighborhood fighting a valiant but losing battle against erasure in the name of progress.

Reviewed at Universal Screening Room, New York. In Sundance Film Festival (U.S. Dramatic Competition). Jan. 17, 2023. Running time: 117 MIN.

• Production: A Focus Features presentation of a Sight Unseen, Hillman Grad, Makeready production. Producers: Eddie Vaisman, Julia Lebedev, Lena Waithe, Rishi Rajani, Brad Weston. Executive producers: A.V. Rockwell, Jamin O'Brien. 
• Crew: Director, writer: A.V. Rockwell. Camera: Erick K. Yue. Editors: Sabine Hoffman, Kristan Sprague. Music: Gary Gunn.
• With: Teyana Taylor, Josiah Cross, Will Catlett, Aaron Kingsley Adetole, Aven Courtney, Terri Victoria, Abney Delissa Reynolds, Amelia Workman, Adriane Lenox.

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“A Thousand and One,” Reviewed: Family Dreams Meet American Realities

By Richard Brody

Though A. V. Rockwell’s first feature, “A Thousand and One,” sticks close to one woman amid her struggle to keep her family together in the face of formidable obstacles, it’s an epic story, stretching over more than a decade and seemingly inscribed on the mighty map of New York City at large. The large scale of the action is itself an artistic achievement; the movie’s scope is essential to its emotional impact, which is inseparable from its dramatization of individuals who, in their daily and private lives, find themselves inevitably, grindingly confronting public power as a relentless counterforce to their ambitions, their dreams, and their basic well-being. By inscribing the action over a large span of time, and by specifying matters of public policy that play a role in the drama, Rockwell (who both wrote and directed the film) simultaneously looks deeply at her characters’ experiences and appropriately exalts them as figures in a panorama of history.

That’s the very essence of melodrama—casting everyday people as characters in tragedies—and it’s also the borderline comedy with which melodramas are tinged. It’s why viewers, when watching them, often laugh at times that seem inappropriate. But no one is likely to laugh during “A Thousand and One,” because Rockwell diagnostically reconfigures the very terms of melodrama—her characters’ hazardous adventures are inextricable from the world in which they live. Their tragic conflicts are inseparable from the overarching tragedies of American society—the cruel indifference and the deep-rooted callousness, hatred, and injustice that their institutions embody and their authorities enact. There’s no contradiction, absurdity, or disproportion in the characters’ desires and strivings, but only in the thickly hostile political environment that opposes and resists them, and that Rockwell reveals in action, as if in a cinematic X-ray.

The movie, which opens Friday in theatres, starts in 1994. The protagonist, Inez (Teyana Taylor), a twenty-two-year-old hairdresser, is released from Rikers Island after a year and a half of incarceration. She returns to her neighborhood in Brooklyn, where she finds Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), who is six, and who was taken from her amid her legal troubles and then put into foster care. Inez is energetic and resourceful; while housed in a shelter, she gets freelance work doing hair. Believing that Terry has been neglected and mistreated in foster care, she kidnaps him and takes him to Harlem. The kidnapping makes the news. Inez is in hiding with Terry, but, reunited with him, she is invigorated with a ferocious sense of purpose and pursues her goals of family life with sharp-minded practicality. She rents an apartment, she finds steady work, and, in order to enroll Terry in school without alerting the authorities to his whereabouts, she procures false papers for him (including a birth certificate and a Social Security card) under a different name.

When Inez reunites with her boyfriend, Lucky (William Catlett), he resents Terry’s presence. Lucky, too, is formerly incarcerated and recently released, and he didn’t bargain for the risk that Inez is willing to take. But, when they marry, he takes his paternal role seriously and devotedly. By 2001, Terry, at thirteen (played by Aven Courtney), is academically successful and counselled to take the citywide test for specialized (i.e., highly selective) public high schools. Inez has been raising him strictly; Lucky senses how to talk to him man-to-man, to build character by instilling a sense of freedom. By age seventeen, Terry (played by Josiah Cross) is preparing for college, but the household is enduring overwhelming pressure from many directions, including from within. Unresolved traumas play out consequentially; heavy-handed policing creates a sense of fear; the accumulated burdens of poverty involve medical issues; the rapid and unchecked gentrification of Harlem threatens the roof over the family’s head; and the secrets and evasions of the distant past emerge with potentially devastating results.

Throughout, Rockwell brings to the fore the media hum of politics, the electoral results and the matters of law that give rise to Inez’s daily difficulties, starting with the matter-of-fact separation of families by way of the foster-care system and the enduring, multigenerational miseries that such cavalier interventions inflict on parents and children alike. The Giuliani administration’s so-called cleanup of the city unleashes an ambient authoritarianism that criminalizes poverty, treats Black residents like suspects-in-waiting for crimes to fit the arrest, and fabricates pretexts, excuses, and justifications for deadly police violence. The suburbanization of the city through a uniformly repressive order finds a gentler, cheerier, yet no less racially unjust, economically unfair, or relentlessly destructive market-based power in the Bloomberg years.

From the moment of Inez’s release, she has to fight against absurdly difficult circumstances, and it becomes clear that she has been doing so her entire life. Her furious determination to forge and sustain a family life and a sheltering household, of the sort that she’d been denied as a child, spurs her pugnacity, whether in her urgent efforts to find a place to live, her discipline of Terry, her expectations of Lucky, or her actions to keep Terry from returning to the foster-care system. Taylor’s incarnation of Inez’s concentrated passion is awe-inspiring; the actress ardently expresses how frustration, desperation, and fierce maternal love can be channelled into constructive action. Whether in managing a marital argument to maintain both her dignity and her authority, in the careful attention to the gracious details of home life, or in making grand gauntlet-throwing decisions with life-changing consequences, Inez has a focussed fury in the face of a world of irrational hostility dressed up as order. (With her gestures and inflections, Taylor endows even seemingly ordinary interactions with the overwhelming heat of fiercely principled and protective energy.)

The large-scale performances, along with the scope of the visual compositions (the cinematography is by Eric Yue) and even the span of the settings and the locations, seem to place the movie’s action on a city-size stage and to bring the surrounding bustle and clamor into every frame. The script builds the drama incrementally: sharp scenes reveal character in depth by way of critical situations of daily life, ones that echo with the historical burden and stifled pain of the city’s Black communities. “A Thousand and One” gives voice to the hidden struggles of Black women, as in one powerful sequence in which Inez meets a potential landlord (Adriane Lenox) who is confronting her own grief over her adult daughter’s sufferings as she raises her grandson, who’s about Terry’s age. Lucky has several dramatically nuanced, emotionally intense scenes, performed by Catlett with hearty grace and wounded grandeur, centered on the manhood of men who were born stigmatized. (Oddly, it’s only the teen-age Terry whose character is underdeveloped—he’s assigned traits but gets little subjectivity.)

Rockwell’s vigorous detailing of personal life—with its evocation of inner lives—is at the heart of its political vision and of its dramatic strength. It’s why the epic mode of the movie’s melodrama averts the genre’s habitually jarring contrasts between the characters’ everyday circumstances and the loftiness of their struggles. The movie’s fundamental concept is that, under such pressures as its characters confront, there’s no such thing as ordinary life—or, rather, that creating and sustaining ordinary life requires heroism of a sort that goes all too often unrecognized, and that, here, takes its place in history. ♦

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‘A Thousand and One’ Review: Teyana Taylor Towers Over A.V. Rockwell’s Vivid New York Story

Ryan lattanzio, deputy editor, film.

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Focus Features releases the film in theaters on Friday, March 31.

There are two bruising lines that bookend first-time feature director A.V. Rockwell’s “ A Thousand and One ,” a vivid portrait of Harlem life from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s.

“There’s more to life than fucked-up beginnings,” Inez, a woman living life in New York on her own terms and brilliantly played by R&B super-artist/actress Teyana Taylor, tells her young son Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola). She has kidnapped him out of the foster care system, which has kept them separated after her stint in Rikers Island beginning in 1993, and now hopes to give him a better life. But at the end of the movie, after a decades-spanning, bittersweet bond forms and fizzles between them and shattering revelations are had, she tells the older Terry (Josiah Cross), “I fucked up. Life goes on. So what?”

Rockwell’s direction is sophisticated and visually imaginative even as the movie could benefit from a tighter edit around its New York cast of characters and the rapidly changing city in the hands of mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg.

Inez, out of jail and a job, learns that Terry is in hospital after falling out a window trying to escape his foster parents. “Would it make you feel better if you came to stay with me?” she asks the small boy. “I’ll go to war for you, against anybody, against this whole fucked-up city.” And so it’s Inez and Terry against the city, even as Inez tries to bring a paternal figure into the child’s life by marrying Lucky (William Catlett), her on-and-off-again romantic partner. As Terry gets older, he bonds with Lucky over a shared love of music, and Lucky becomes as much of a father to Terry as he possibly could. But in the background, Lucky and Inez’s relationship has its own complications. And meanwhile, reports of Terry’s abduction loom around their lives.

Terry, in his teen years, shows a preternatural giftedness in school that catches the notice of his teachers, including a kindly one played by Amelia Workman (restrained but emotionally potent here). An abandonment complex seems to prevent Terry from wanting to succeed, though Inez, in another showcase of a moment for Taylor, pushes him to apply to a better school.

Curiously, “A Thousand and One” mostly elides the particulars of September 11, even though its shadow looms over the movie’s last act. Inez and Terry continue to live in a crummy apartment that’s been taken over by a white landlord, who promises largesse before he turns out to be another purveyor of gentrification’s soul-crushing machine.

Cinematographer Eric K. Yue, working with the Arri Alexa Mini, lenses New York across two decades with a mix of vintage and contemporary lenses. As Inez and Terry’s world becomes darker and their relationship more strained and distant, so do their visual surroundings. Yue and Rockwell seem indebted to both the iconic 1970s cinema of New York streets and the Black American cinema revolution of the early 1990s. There hasn’t been a New York movie this vividly articulated since Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret,” though overheard shots of the cityscape, while witnessing its mutations and evolutions, tend to feel meandering.

Terry and Inez’s story is only one of many, but it serves as a microcosm for the specific economic struggles of any Black lower-middle-class Americans trying to keep up with gentrification’s engine and NYPD indifference to Black people. “A Thousand and One” culminates in a gutting conclusion that turns the entire movie on its head — it’s one best left entirely unspoiled — and serves as a sobering reminder of how fucked-up beginnings can hopefully bring about better endings. Cross is effective in a key scene surrounding this revelation, but it’s Taylor who anchors Rockwell’s direction and screenplay with her powerhouse performance. Taylor has worked with the likes of Tyler Perry in comedies, but it’s her seeming kinship with Rockwell (and Taylor’s own story as a New Yorker) and a performance as fiercely committed to the project as Inez is to Terry that signal a major acting talent.

“A Thousand and One” premiered in the 2023 Sundance Film Festival U.S. Dramatic Competition. Focus Features will release the film in theaters March 31, 2023.

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A thousand and one review: taylor is a powerhouse in poignant debut [sundance].

It doesn’t nail everything it set out to accomplish, but A Thousand and One is a breathtaking character study of perseverance in Black motherhood.

Sundance alum A.V. Rockwell brought her stunning debut feature film to the 2023 Sundance Film Festival . A Thousand and One , also written by the talented filmmaker, stars triple threat Teyana Taylor as an unapologetic and determined mother ready to risk it all for her son. A beautiful examination of life in New York City spanning several decades, Rockwell brings her skill as a visual storyteller to magnify motherhood under destitute circumstances. It doesn’t nail everything it set out to accomplish, but A Thousand and One is a breathtaking character study of perseverance in Black motherhood.

Struggling to make ends meet after her release from prison, Inez (Taylor) moves from shelter to shelter in mid-1990s New York City. Inez is determined to provide a good life for her six-year-old son, Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), who spends his nights trying to escape his foster parents. Inez kidnaps and runs away with him so that they can build their life together. As the years progress, Inez and a now older Terry (Josiah Cross) rely on each other even as their family grows. Terry becomes a smart, yet quiet teenager, while Inez finds love from a past relationship with Lucky (William Catlett). However, a family secret threatens to destroy their livelihood, and the two must decide their future as a result.

Related: Shortcomings Review: Park's Debut Aptly Mines Racial Politics For Humor [Sundance]

Rockwell’s poignant feature directorial debut examines the life of an African American family in a city that rarely works in their favor. A thought-provoking tale of poverty and gentrification, the director expressively reveals the ugly truth of survival and perseverance through the lens of a Black mother. Specifically, her examination of these concepts over decades works well to emphasize the hardships that Inez endures. And as described by Inez, “ there’s more to life than fucked-up beginnings, ” a sentiment Rockwell so courageously explores vividly and with the utmost compassion.

A big turning point in A Thousand and One arises that enables viewers to finally experience a sense of serenity within the story. Yet, situations like Inez and Terry’s rarely end that way, and that’s just the reality of single parenthood. Rockwell does well with capturing these types of uncertainties, playing her cards right with both subtlety and exaggeration (and with good reason). But through this method, her exposition exposes a heartbreaking reality in which many viewers will be able to identify. Yet, her storytelling approach may also justifiably anger others unfamiliar with the truth of a gentrified New York.

Within the seamless transitions of the different time periods in Inez and Terry’s lives, Rockwell works her magic in partnership with cinematographer Eric K. Yue to capture the spirit of 1990-2000s Harlem. The film possesses a vintage and contemporary appeal, which both celebrate the style and criticizes the renovations at the expense of Black livelihood. Together, with Gary Gunn’s classical score against the rambunctious sounds of the city, these components heighten the senses in real time, providing an immersive experience that is impressive.

Throughout the film, the script introduces various side characters in the story. These are moments when A Thousand and One doesn’t maintain the focus it needs. As a result, the second act of the film tends to drag, losing its grip on the most compelling features of this remarkable story. However, thanks to a powerful performance from Teyana Taylor, these stodgy moments are short-lived. Her dedication towards exposing various sides to Inez — enthusiastic, abrasive, and compassionate — is sensational, and there’s no doubt that her performance will be talked about throughout the year.

A delicate exploration of Black motherhood during an uncertain time in a changing New York, A.V. Rockwell’s sophisticated and gut-wrenching story is a standout from the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. The film was awarded the grand jury prize in the U.S. Dramatic category and with good reason. It’s a beautiful film about the power of perseverance and the resulting desire for a better life. Thanks to a powerhouse performance from Taylor, who serves as the film’s character study, Rockwell’s debut is sure to leave a lasting impression on its viewers. Indeed, A Thousand and One serves as an essential reminder that “life goes on” despite past and current mistakes, and the tribulations one experiences in between.

More: Theater Camp Review: Heart & Humor Collide In Sunny Showbiz Parody [Sundance]

A Thousand and One premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival on January 22. The film is 117 minutes long and is not yet rated.

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I Have Already Seen the Scariest Movie of the Year

And it’s not what you’d expect..

This piece contains spoilers for A Thousand and One .

One of the most powerful emotions driving A Thousand and One , A.V. Rockwell’s arresting drama about a young Black mother who will stop at nothing to stay with her son, is nostalgia. The movie, starring a heartbreakingly good Teyana Taylor as Inez, begins in mid-1990s Harlem and follows the growth of Inez and her son, Terry, through the early 2000s. Naturally, nostalgia contributes to the movie’s ability to draw you in—it’s a commodity so sought after that the filmmakers wanted to shoot the first half of the movie on analog film , eventually finding a way to emulate the look of film grain on digital. Nostalgia may buckle you into A Thousand and One , but the ride you take is one of emotional turmoil, beauty, love, and terror. Yes, terror.

A Thousand and One starts with a bustling, vibrant view of a Black New York City as Inez, a formerly incarcerated Black woman in her early 20s, reacquaints herself with life on the outside after a stint at Rikers Island. Inez walks down summer streets full of Black people; she sits on stoops doing other Black women’s hair. Inez finds Terry, who had moved to a different group home while she was away, takes him under her permanent care (kidnapping him, legally speaking, from the foster care system), and moves them to her former neighborhood of Harlem. The thing about any movie that follows a Black inner-city community from the ’90s into the 2000s, especially one incorporating audio of Rudy Giuliani’s promise for New York City at the start of his mayoral term, is that it will be a movie about change. A Thousand and One , maybe predictably, is a movie about a young, Black, semi-single mother who fights for things to stay the same, though everything around her is changing. At some point, Terry will leave for college, though the jury is out on how far he’ll go. Inez is hoping her on-and-off-again partner, Lucky (William Catlett), will stick around. Of course, the neighborhood is changing, too.

Toward the second half of the movie, A Thousand and One begins to drop some not-so-subtle hints that the characters’ beloved Harlem is gentrifying. After the second time jump, to Terry’s late teens—the film starts with 6-year-old Terry (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), then jumps to 13-year-old Terry (Aven Courtney), then to 17-year-old Terry (an astounding Josiah Cross)—the Harlem we’ve come to know looks different. As Giuliani’s mayoral tenure ends, Michael Bloomberg’s NYC begins to peek through. More white people are moving into the building across the street, Inez begins to hear quick mentions of neighbors becoming former neighbors, Terry is constantly being stopped and frisked by a more belligerent NYC police force , and their building eventually comes under new ownership. When the new landlord knocks on their door—Jerry (Mark Gessner), a white man, seemingly in his 40s, all smiles and pleasantries—my stomach sank. This moment of the landlord simply showing up on their doorstep terrified me more than any moment in NOPE , Barbarian , Malignant , or Nanny . In fact, I could confidently say that A Thousand and One will be the scariest movie of the year, without having yet seen what else 2023 has to offer. When Jerry knocked, instantly the small audience at my screening shifted in their seats and sighed deeply, murmurs of “Oh, God” permeating the air.

There was nothing surprising about Jerry’s arrival, and it was clear where the movie would go from there, but it was still devastating to watch. At the hardest moment in Inez and Terry’s life (Lucky falls gravely ill; Terry is terrified at the idea of his academic success taking him farther away from home and the people he’s used to, while also facing the imminence of losing the only father figure he’s ever known), the mother and son fall victim to predatory practices orchestrated by the landlord to ensure their exit. In a move that hints at  “renoviction,” Jerry promises to remodel their aging kitchen and bathroom for free. Then, once a crew renders everything that was previously working in their apartment inoperable, Jerry ghosts them. When Inez finally sees Jerry again, he apologizes for the mayhem—their apartment is now one big mess: their ceiling is leaking profusely, their shower and sink barely work—and says it will take a few months to fully finish the upgrade he promised. When asked what they should do in the meantime, Jerry suggests they move out, the mask of friendliness finally off.

A Thousand and One is not the first movie to take gentrification to task; 2019’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco noted an already changed version of the California city, following a young Black man as he attempted to reclaim a home that was taken from him. Spike Lee was calling gentrification out way back in 1989 with Do the Right Thing , when Clifton (John Savage’s character, donning a Larry Bird t-shirt) accidentally ran over Buggin’ Out’s (Giancarlo Esposito) new Jordans. This prompted Buggin’ Out to let out a tirade against the gentrification of his beloved Black neighborhood. Just a few years ago, fictional New Yorkers sang about the changing of Washington Heights in the film adaptation of the musical In the Heights . But none of them have showcased gentrification in such personal, deeply unsettling terms. Even 2021’s Candyman , which cites the gentrification of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green as the real monster, a breeding ground for the continuation of a long line of wrongs against Black men that result in supernatural comeuppance via Candyman’s hook hand, didn’t frighten me as deeply.

Home: What it’s made up of, how to keep it, and what to do when it’s gone, is what A Thousand and One seeks to explore. This is perhaps most evidenced by the title, which took me far too long to realize was the spelled-out form of Inez and Terry’s Harlem apartment number, 1001. Taking “home” away from the characters, whose relationship as we come to know it hinges upon this very place, is a devastating blow. It is the only constant, the only thing Inez was actually able to keep from changing, until she couldn’t. A Thousand and One may not be the only movie about gentrification, but it personifies it so closely—giving it a face and a name in Jerry, and watching it wreak havoc in very specific ways on individual people the audience has come to care for.

Inez and Terry are not particularly naïve—just unaccustomed to all the legal ways they can be taken advantage of, as the entire neighborhood seems to be. By not simply showing a neighborhood that is changing, but also particular examples of how longstanding residents are swindled out of their homes, how their vulnerabilities are further exploited to create that change, A Thousand and One paints one of the most helpful portraits of urban gentrification so far. It brings something that may feel abstract to some to the forefront. It evokes the rage and horror you feel when you hear about families being pushed out of their homes, or listen to a friend explain why they recently called 311 . Knowing what is going to happen doesn’t make watching it play out any easier. It hurts deeply to know you can’t warn Inez, and soon, it’s too late.

‘A Thousand and One’ Review: Teyana Taylor Shines in Tumultuous Family Drama

A portrait of a family and the often cruel city in which they live, it reveals how "progress" can come at the expense of those most vulnerable.

This review was originally part of our coverage of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival .

Over the course of writer-director A.V. Rockwell ’s feature debut A Thousand and One , time can feel like it is slipping through our fingers. Much like life, the choices we make and the paths we take can only be understood upon looking back when it is too late to do anything different. When seen via film, this can have a devastating impact. When done well, it becomes something like experiencing life in short snapshots with all its many moments of heartbreak and happiness. In this story of a mother doing all she thinks is best for her son, the strongest moments are when we get a chance to sit with the characters and let them reflect on these parts of their lives. From the opening scene, where the sounds of mid-90s New York City draw us into the world of the characters all the way to the end when they get swallowed up by it, there is a rich tapestry of ideas and themes that are brought to life in stunning detail. It ensures that, even when the story itself can often feel like it is losing sight of its characters, there is a poetic beating heart that still finds an emotional resonance as the years slip away.

Initially, the driving force of all this is a riveting Teyana Taylor as Inez, who is trying to get back on her feet in Harlem after a year in Rikers Prison. This is not so easy as the world remains a harsh one that is compounded by the fact that she does not have a place to stay. Taylor, who most recently did voice work for the animated film Entergalactic , captures the fortitude that Inez carries with her to survive which is also crossed with a growing desire to build a life for herself and her son Terry, who she ends up kidnapping out of desperation. Played at a young age by Aaron Kingsley Adetola , he understands much about what is going on around him.

In one scene where Inez is getting into a confrontation as her frustration boils over, Rockwell makes sure to subtly draw our attention to Terry nearby on the stairs. This is done with a light touch, but it already begins laying the foundation for how he will grow into a teenager that has to contend with as much, if not more, as his parents before him. It is almost like a novel in how expansive it is, providing a sense of scope that can frequently leave this story feeling scattered. As the city is in a constant state of change, the lives of the characters are similarly in flux as their already pressing problems only become more and more dire.

RELATED: ‘Fancy Dance’ Review: Lily Gladstone Is Magnificent as a Hustler With a Heart of Gold | Sundance 2023

Rockwell makes this explicit as we hear multiple interjections from a figure who was once hailed, at least by certain segments of the country, as a hero though has now been exposed as a hateful fraud from the very jump. Rudy Giuliani , the former mayor of New York City, and his endorsement of the debunked “broken windows” theory in a response to crime not only didn’t work but led to the use of discriminatory "stop and frisk" policing. This is conveyed via the voice of the man himself that echoes throughout the streets where Inez and Terry live.

It takes on a nightmarish quality as we know that this will only have a negative impact on them as well as other Black residents of the city. Rather than addressing the root causes of the city’s problems like poverty, which is baked into the fabric of this family’s daily life, the leaders seek to punish those most struggling to survive. Rockwell shows that alongside this is the increasing erosion of businesses and culture through gentrification. Both of these elements are intertwined to serve as a historical backdrop for Terry on the cusp of adulthood where we see the world more through his growing perspective and understanding of it.

This refocusing, while not entirely misguided, means that we lose much of what Inez is going through after all these years. It is done to make clear that there is a growing schism between the two, which connects to a revelation that this piece won’t give away, but it holds her a little too far out of frame. Taylor still gives a multifaceted performance, with one closing monologue hitting home unlike anything else in the film, but the story still feels a bit empty without her. In many ways, it lessens the impact of what happens when the past comes knocking and upends the already precarious life that she had been building for so long. Eschewing any catharsis which would be experienced in a conventional film, it creates a more crushing conclusion that reveals how the trajectory of the era always meant that Inez was living on borrowed time. It serves as a tragic time capsule where the characters don’t know what joys they were able to have together will be taken away in the blink of an eye.

There is something rather pointed about how, of the few other characters we get to meet, all believe they are looking out for Terry even as they set in motion events that will cause more harm for him and those he cares about. Even those that speak compassionately are, at the very least, complicit in crushing the small life he was able to live for a little while with his mother. In this closing series of cascading catastrophes, Rockwell reveals that the political belief of needing to punish has painfully personal implications for those caught in the system’s crosshairs. Though it can feel like the characters are lost in this, much of this is the point as they're stripped of their humanity and merely identified as a problem to be fixed.

There is no attempt to find true restorative justice as, like the outstanding recent film Saint Omer , we see that far too much has gone wrong over the course of several years to be fixed so easily. This film is not as sharp as that, but it remains clear-eyed in the moments when it counts. It provides a snapshot of the life of one family that, for better and worse, could be any other that gets swept aside in the pursuit of a "safer" world that comes at their expense.

A Thousand and One is now in theaters.

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A thousand and one, common sense media reviewers.

Gripping, heartfelt, mature story of motherhood and family.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Themes of compassion and empathy, particularly whe

Inez embarks on a journey of personal growth as sh

Cast is primarily Black (as is writer-director A.V

Scenes with pushing (Inez pushing Lucky into a sto

Inez makes a comment about her youthful sexual pro

Swear words ("damn," "hell," "goddamn," "f--k," "f

Brands seen/used include Kit Kat, Air Jordans, Sea

Parents need to know that A Thousand and One is a powerful drama about a mother (Teyana Taylor) who kidnaps her child from the foster care system in 1994 and raises him in a changing New York City landscape. Showcasing perseverance against adversity as well as love and loyalty among family members, the film…

Positive Messages

Themes of compassion and empathy, particularly when it comes to understanding family and family members' triggers or sticking points. Messages of perseverance and courage regarding doing what it takes to care for a young child and someone you love. Despite parents' mistakes and failures, what they want most is for their child to be happy, healthy, successful, and loved.

Positive Role Models

Inez embarks on a journey of personal growth as she takes care of Terry; she shows perseverance as she strives to make sure he has a better life than she did. Even though Inez commits a crime by kidnapping Terry, she still shows courage in her motherhood journey. Inez and Lucky both demonstrate compassion and empathy regarding Terry. Lucky gives Terry a father figure despite being unstable as a parent.

Diverse Representations

Cast is primarily Black (as is writer-director A.V. Rockwell). Story offers a specific perspective on Black life, capturing the experience of living in a city that's quickly gentrifying and marginalizing Black and Brown people to make way for White occupants. Setting A Thousand and One in Rudy Giuliani/Mike Bloomberg-era New York City calls attention to serious issues faced by minority New Yorkers, such as police brutality and shootings, stop-and-frisk policies, rising living costs. Individual characters represent thornier aspects of life for Black people: A minor character in particular bases attractiveness on colorism, calling a darker-skinned woman "midnight" and using other colorist statements and sexual slurs. Another Black character demonstrates classism against Inez, while White characters display both overt and unconscious biases -- e.g., assuming that Inez raising her voice isn't acting like an adult, or calling out 13-year-old Terry for being more "articulate" than other minority students in his class. Lucky also displays sexism against Inez by telling her to be quieter, insinuating that her being quiet would keep him from leaving so much.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Scenes with pushing (Inez pushing Lucky into a stove, breaking it) and police brutality (a scene with Terry and his friend being victims of stop-and-frisk and a brief description of Amadou Diallo's death). Inez and Terry's first landlady warns Inez that if she or other tenants "try anything, I keep a .44 ready." Terry sustains a head injury as a small child; he wears a bandage in several scenes. Inez removes Terry from the foster care system without permission.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Inez makes a comment about her youthful sexual promiscuity ("my body was a playground"). Partial nudity (male torso and buttocks). A scene implies that Inez and Lucky have had sex.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Swear words ("damn," "hell," "goddamn," "f--k," "f---ing," "s--t," "deada--"), LGBTQ+ slur ("d-ke"). One character makes fun of a darker-skinned woman's complexion and hair ("midnight," "nappy"). Use of potentially ableist words ("dumb"), and the "N" word is used in a colloquial context between Black characters.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Brands seen/used include Kit Kat, Air Jordans, Sean John, TV One, Old Navy, Chuck-E-Cheese, Party City.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that A Thousand and One is a powerful drama about a mother ( Teyana Taylor ) who kidnaps her child from the foster care system in 1994 and raises him in a changing New York City landscape. Showcasing perseverance against adversity as well as love and loyalty among family members, the film offers a very positive example of diverse representation, with an all-Black main cast, a Black female writer-director, and themes pertinent to Black American life. It also has plenty of mature content. Language includes swearing ("f--k," "s--t"), slurs ("d-ke"), and the "N" word. Characters smoke, sex is implied, there's partial male nudity (torso, buttocks). There are references to and instances of violence, including police brutality. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (1)

Based on 1 parent review

A stunning, powerful film of found family and gentrification

What's the story.

A THOUSAND AND ONE follows Inez ( Teyana Taylor ), a woman recently released from jail in 1994 New York City. Inez removes her son, Terry (played by Aaron Kingsley Adetola at 6 years old, Aven Courtney at 13 years old, and Josiah Cross at 17 years old), from the foster system without permission -- in other words, she kidnaps him -- and raises him in an attempt to rebuild her family. Over the years, she acquires a husband, Lucky (William Catlett), and establishes herself and Terry in hopes that her son can live a better life than she or Lucky did. But a powerful secret threatens to destroy the bond between Terry and Inez.

Is It Any Good?

It's easy to see why this drama was both a crowd and critical favorite at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. A Thousand and One depicts a heartfelt truth about parenthood -- which is that, despite parents' inevitable mistakes and failures, what they want most is for their child to be happy, healthy, successful, and loved. The film also shows the way that deeply rooted racial and societal challenges, especially in a rapidly changing environment like mid-1990s New York City, can make that mission even tougher than it already is.

While the film authentically captures the feeling of the '90s through the early 2000s, its other notable success is the actors' exceptional performances. They give their characters the realism they need to ground the story. Taylor knocks it out of the park as Inez, and while all three actors portray Terry well, Adetola and Cross stand out for how they let the character's shy sensitivity shine through the slight veneer of toughness that Terry had to acquire to get through his early life. Catlett is also stellar as Lucky, a man who tries his best to be a good father despite his own mistakes. Overall, A Thousand and One portrays Black humanity in a story that, if told by a different person, might well have flattened or stereotyped the characters as casualties of the system.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the themes of A Thousand and One . What is it saying about New York City in the 1990s? How have things changed since then? How are they the same?

How does Inez and Terry's relationship progress throughout the film? In what ways is Inez a good mother? What are some of her mistakes?

How do the film's characters demonstrate perseverance , empathy , and compassion ? Why are those important character strengths?

How is Terry impacted by his environment, his family, and his friends?

How is New York portrayed as a character here? Why is it important to show how the city changed over time?

Movie Details

• In theaters : May 23, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : May 23, 2023
• Cast : Teyana Taylor , William Catlett , Aaron Kingsley Adetola , Aven Courtney , Josiah Cross
• Director : A.V. Rockwell
• Inclusion Information : Female directors, Black directors, Female actors, Black actors
• Studio : Focus Features
• Genre : Drama
• Character Strengths : Compassion , Empathy , Perseverance
• Run time : 117 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language
• Last updated : March 2, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

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A Thousand and One

After unapologetic and fiercely loyal Inez kidnaps her son Terry from the foster care system, mother and son set out to reclaim their sense of home, identity, and stability, in a rapidly cha... Read all After unapologetic and fiercely loyal Inez kidnaps her son Terry from the foster care system, mother and son set out to reclaim their sense of home, identity, and stability, in a rapidly changing New York City. After unapologetic and fiercely loyal Inez kidnaps her son Terry from the foster care system, mother and son set out to reclaim their sense of home, identity, and stability, in a rapidly changing New York City.

• A.V. Rockwell
• Teyana Taylor
• Aaron Kingsley Adetola
• Aven Courtney
• 44 User reviews
• 81 Critic reviews
• 81 Metascore
• 9 wins & 52 nominations

• Inez de la Paz

• Terry 6 Years Old

• Terry 13 Years Old

• Terry 17 Years Old

• (as Will Catlett)

• Anita Tucker

• Pea 6 Years Old

• Pea 13 Years Old
• Simone 14 Years Old

• Simone 17 Years Old

• Ms. Janie …
• Michael H …
• Foster Sister

• Shelter Resident
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia A.V. Rockwell 's feature film directorial debut.
• Goofs In 1994, young Terry is seen playing a video game with a Nintendo GameCube controller, but the Nintendo GameCube would not be commercially released until the year 2001.
• Connections Features Ricki Lake (1992)
• Soundtracks Shaolin Brew Written by Ghostface Killah (as Dennis David Coles), RZA (as Robert F. Diggs), U-God (as Lamont Hawkins), Raekwon (as Corey Woods) Performed by Wu-Tang Clan Courtesy of Wu-Tang Productions

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 57 minutes

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A Thousand And One Review

Before you see a single frame in  A Thousand And One , you hear the sounds of the New York City neighbourhood the film takes place in. It’s a smartly deployed recurring gambit that helps establish a sense of time and place in A.V. Rockwell’s layered and affecting feature debut, and it proves to be an effective backdrop for a rich story of Black motherhood, sacrifice, and community.

The inciting kidnapping might have you thinking this is a duo-on-the-lam story, but Rockwell’s smarter, more unconventional approach yields impressive results. Patient storytelling allows her to take in the rapidly gentrifying Harlem neighbourhood that the bulk of the film takes place in, and how it impacts people of colour in the community. The socio-political context is at first deftly woven in – audio of former NYC Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg’s controversial policies is heard at one point – and then explicitly slammed in our faces in a standout scene with Inez’s landlord trying to force them out of their apartment. Both approaches are effective, all aided by Gary Gunn’s ethereal, '90s R&B influenced score, and Eric Yue's lush cinematography.

At almost every turn, Teyona Taylor unveils new capabilities.

It’s a perfect foundation for a  Moonlight -esque triptych of impressive performances from Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Aven Courtney, and Josiah Cross, as Terry goes from kidulthood to adulthood. Each actor is so emotionally in sync with the character that the time jumps are never jarring. Although the backbone of the film is on his perfectly imperfect dynamic with Inez and father figure Lucky (Will Catlett, in a nicely nuanced turn), each version of Terry is allowed ample time to showcase his complexities. A teenage Terry’s courtship of a young girl and the misogynoir Inez calls him on is especially playful and enlightening, if not fully mined.

No multiple castings were necessary for Inez, in large part because Taylor – an R&B artist in her first leading role – is never less than authentically honest in capturing her character’s outward appearance and determinedness as well as her loving tenderness. At almost every turn she unveils new capabilities, playing all of Inez’s varied notes without sanding off her raw edges. It’s an eye-opening performance that should have us all excited about her future onscreen work.

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Movies & tv | movie review: ‘a thousand and one’ a fascinating portrait of maternal instinct caught in unforgiving world.

Mothers are often the keepers of secrets, borne from a primal instinct for survival. But secrets fester, grow bigger and inevitably burst with the resonance of truth, as they do in “A Thousand and One,” the debut feature of writer/director A.V. Rockwell. The film, which won the U.S. dramatic grand jury prize at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, casts the harrowing story of a mother and her son against the backdrop of a gentrifying Harlem, New York.

“A Thousand and One” proves to be a showcase for multi-hyphenate star and Harlem native Teyana Taylor, who brings to her astonishing performance the coiled physicality of a panther ready to pounce. Her character, Inez, is on the offense as her only form of defense, a stance and ethos that never wavers throughout the 20 years we follow her.

Sweeping aerial shots set to soulful strings introduce us to the iconography of New York City: the Empire State Building, Central Park, and of course, Rikers Island, holding New York City’s largest jail. It’s 1994 and we meet the incarcerated Inez in a tender moment: gently applying makeup to another female inmate. Soon, she’s released back on the streets of Harlem, hawking her services as a hairstylist and desperately trying to stay out of the shelter.

Her swift, confident movements are captured in snippets of grainy, handheld images. Cinematographer Eric K. Yue also employs pans and zooms that harken back to the New Hollywood films of the 1970s, placing this film in context as part of a long lineage of gritty New York City indie filmmaking.

A wrinkle in Inez’s survival story manifests, a wrinkle that soon becomes her purpose and her driving force: her young boy, Terry (the wonderfully instinctive Aaron Kingsley Adetola) who is living in foster care. When an accident lands him in the hospital, Inez works her way back into his heart with Power Rangers toys and quality time. She asks if he’d like to come stay with her for a bit — a son should live with his mother after all. They crash at a friend’s, and eventually land their own spot in a brownstone, Inez doing hair in her room for cash. Since she’s essentially abducted him from the government, she pays a guy for a fake birth certificate for Terry, who goes by Darryl at school.

The story of Terry and Inez, and later, Lucky (William Catlett), her boyfriend who becomes a father figure for Terry, is a simple one, but the lived-in quality of the material makes this story feel so real, and almost stranger than fiction at times. It’s not a true story, but it comes from a place of truth, and in her writing and direction Rockwell brings a hyper-specificity to the film, whether in the way young Terry passes the time alone at home, or in the fumbling courtships he undertakes as a teen. It’s in the speeches that Lucky and Inez deliver to Terry about striving for more beyond what they experienced, which manage to never seem phony or labored.

The film is utterly absorbing, anchored by the at times unpredictable performance of Taylor, playing a hopelessly complicated, but deeply caring woman. When faced with dire circumstances, she survives, then dares to imagine a life for Terry beyond the cycle she’s experienced, forcing a family unit she never had. Through sheer willpower, she gets them to a point where she can see his bright future, and when 17-year-old Terry (a remarkable Josiah Cross), finds himself inadvertently repeating some of his mother’s actions in 2005, it seems a grim kind of fate.

There are larger forces at play beyond the decisions Inez made out of fear and anxiety when she was 22 and fresh out of jail. The home she’s made starts to crumble in tandem with the fracturing of their family unit. Their new landlord puts on a helpful face and offers to fix things, but underneath his smiling exterior, seems to want them gone, the home eventually becoming inhospitable when Terry needs it the most.

Rockwell evolves the film’s style over the years, using the ghostly aerial shots of the city as a stylistic motif and device to situate the viewer and signify time bleeding into the atmosphere. During a climactic conversation between Terry and Inez, all color has been drained from the image, the two pictured in stark contrast to the white walls. All that is left between them is the messy, complicated truth, though the shades of gray are thrown into shocking black and white.

“A Thousand and One” is a fascinating portrait of the maternal, feminine instinct caught in an unforgiving world. Taylor’s Inez, possessed of a hard-bitten skill for self-preservation, stays one step ahead, constantly moving forward, a soft shred of hope her only cold comfort.

‘A Thousand and One’

3.5 stars (out of 4)

• Rated: R (for language)
• Running time: 1:57
• How to watch: In theaters Friday

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A Thousand and One review – Sundance hit cuts deep

The poignant story of an ex-con mother struggling to raise her son amid a changing Harlem is powerfully poignant

T he deserving winner of the grand jury prize at Sundance this year, the directorial debut from AV Rockwell is rather special. Set in Harlem, New York, and spanning from 1994 to 2005, it’s a dual coming-of-age story, simultaneously following a mother – firecracker Inez (an incendiary Teyana Taylor), at the start of the film an impulsive ex-con recently released from Rikers Island prison – and a son, Terry (played by Aaron Kingsley Adetola as a six-year-old, Aven Courtney at 13, Josiah Cross at 17). When Inez reconnects by chance with Terry, he’s a broken little child, already half chewed up by the foster care system. Something in the subdued way that he assumes that abandonment is inevitable cuts deep, triggering Inez’s own memories of a childhood in the care system. She makes a fateful decision and snatches Terry, with little plan other than to be there for him, to make a home for him.

And against the odds, she succeeds, forging a rocky domestic unit with Lucky (William Catlett). But Inez and Terry are not the only ones changing: the city around them, and in particular Harlem, is being reshaped into a space that no longer feels like home. This is captured visually through Eric Yue’s deft, empathic camerawork, but also through the soundscape around the frame, which evolves from the rowdy bustle of a community into the harder, less welcoming clatter of construction work. Tying it together is a phenomenal score by Gary Gunn. Lush strings pay tribute to the film compositions of Quincy Jones , but even the swell and sweep of the orchestra fails to prepare us for the emotive impact of the final act.

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A Thousand and One: how to watch, reviews, awards and everything we know about the movie

What to know about Sundance award-winner A Thousand and One.

The 2023 Sundance Film Festival put a number of titles on movie lovers' radars that for this 2023, including Past Lives . But one of the most well-received movies at Sundance 2023 was the US Drama Grand Jury Prize-winner, A Thousand and One .

The feature debut for its writer/director A.V. Rockwell, A Thousand and One has been described as "an admiring portrait of survivorship, determination and resourcefulness" with a "powerhouse performance" at its center.

Here is everything that you need to know about A Thousand and One .

How to watch A Thousand and One

A Thousand and One is streaming right now on Prime Video , so anyone with an Amazon subscription can watch it at no extra cost. Otherwise, viewers can rent the movie via digital on-demand.

A Thousand and One plot

This drama spans multiple years as it deals with the dynamics and importance of the relationship between a mother and her son. Here is the official synopsis:

" A Thousand and One follows unapologetic and free-spirited Inez, who kidnaps her 6-year-old son Terry from the foster care system. Holding onto their secret and each other, mother and son set out to reclaim their sense of home, identity and stability, in a rapidly changing New York City."

A Thousand and One cast

Playing Inez is Teyana Taylor. Taylor is a singer/actress who made her big screen debut in Stomp the Yard 2: Homecoming and has other credits that include Madea's Big Happy Family , Star , Coming 2 America , Miracles Across 125th Street and Entergalatic . Her performance has earned rave reviews, with some calling it "Oscar-worthy." Taylor was also crowned winner of The Masked Singer US season 7. 

There are going to be three actors that portray the character of Terry across different stages of his life. They are Aaron Kingsley Adetola ( Rise ) as Terry at age 6, Aven Courtney ( The Last O.G. ) as Terry at age 13 and Josiah Cross ( King Richard ) as Terry at age 17.

Also starring in the movie is Will Catlett as Lucky. Catlett has previously starred in The Devil You Know , The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey and Black Lightning .

A Thousand and One trailer

Watch the trailer for A Thousand and One directly below, which certainly previews the powerful emotions that people have been talking about. 

A Thousand and One reviews — what the critics are saying

A Thousand and One has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 97% and is "Certified Fresh." In particular Taylor's performance and Rockwell's handling of the subject matter are praised.

A Thousand and One awards

Here are the awards that A Thousand and One has either been nominated for or one to date:

Film Independent Spirit Awards

• Best First Feature — AV Rockwell (nominee)
• Best Lead Performance — Teyana Taylor (nominee)

Gotham Awards

• Best Feature (nominee)
• Best Breakthrough Director — AV Rockwell ( winner )
• Outstanding Lead Performance — Teyana Taylor (nominee) 

National Board of Review

• Breakthrough Performance — Teyana Taylor ( winner )
• Top 10 Independent Films of the Year

Sundance Film Festival

• Grand Jury Prize ( winner )

A Thousand and One director

A Thousand and One marks A.V. Rockwell's feature movie debut as a writer and director. Her experience prior to this movie was with short films, including a 2018 short, Feathers , that screened at Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival. 

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Michael Balderston is a DC-based entertainment and assistant managing editor for What to Watch, who has previously written about the TV and movies with TV Technology, Awards Circuit and regional publications. Spending most of his time watching new movies at the theater or classics on TCM, some of Michael's favorite movies include Casablanca , Moulin Rouge! , Silence of the Lambs , Children of Men , One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Star Wars . On the TV side he enjoys Only Murders in the Building, Yellowstone, The Boys, Game of Thrones and is always up for a Seinfeld rerun. Follow on Letterboxd .

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An Indie Studio Just Dropped the Best Sci-Fi Anthology You Haven’t Seen For Free

A Thousand Suns packs dark, emotional punches.

The most classic trick of science fiction is brevity. Although the genre is known for epic novels, dense films, and sprawling media franchises, historically, science fiction ideas propagated through short stories in magazines. Even Dune and Foundation were written and published in brief installments before becoming long-ish books. When big ideas of this genre seem long and complicated, very often, the best sci-fi ideas come in small packages.

One indie sci-fi anthology series, just released on YouTube, proves that the short form is still alive and well. A Thousand Suns is a series created by filmmaker Macgregor, a cinematographer who has worked on everything from music videos for Dua Lipa to the Gerard Butler spy thriller Kandahar. Produced by Blackmilk Studios, with work from directors Ruairi Robinson, Tyson Wade Johnston, Tim Hyten, and Philip Gelatt, A Thousand Suns is basically a miniature, independent sci-fi film festival that you can watch right now. The creators describe it as “a gateway to our hopes, dreams, and nightmares,” but that description isn’t quite enough. Instead, A Thousand Suns does what an old issue of Astounding or Fantastic or Amazing Stories — it delivers great science fiction in short bursts that all leave a lasting impression. Here’s why you should watch all six episodes right now.

What is A Thousand Suns ?

The best way to think about A Thousand Suns is close to how the creators describe it on their website: “Imagine if The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror had a mutant offspring with Heavy Metal . Each story stands alone...”

Because each of these shorts is about four minutes long, the Black Mirror -esque twists are sort of already happening as soon as you start watching. In the first short, “Ice,” a terraformer scout is hoping that a certain planet is devoid of life, in the third episode, “Exodus,” human beings are getting ready to escape the Earth, but the question of how long that will take isn’t exactly clear. But, just like the bigger budget versions of this kind of sci-fi storytelling, each short is haunting, smart, and best of all, adept at using visual language to tell a compelling story. These don’t feel like old short stories adapted for streaming TV; these feel like short films made by people who get how a certain visual palette can communicate quite a bit of “world-building” in a single frame.

All-in-all, because these are so brief, getting into the specifics of each will totally ruin your experience of each. But, in terms of packing an emotional wallop, A Thousand Suns is doing more with a few minutes than a lot of shows do with an hour.

How many A Thousand Suns episodes are there?

As of April 25, 2024, there are six episodes of A Thousand Suns up on YouTube and on the official site: 1Ksuns.com . But, there are several more episodes planned for the series, including 16 more titles revealed on the website. The creators also mention that the hope is to do more:

“Whether they’re three minutes or 30 minutes long, we have plans for many more episodes to come...we’d love to keep making these as a streaming series and also we have standalone feature film-length stories based on some of these episodes that would play great on the big screen.”

As an antidote to IP-driven science fiction, A Thousand Suns is a wonderful, back-to-basics approach to the genre. The stories deal with tropes you may have seen before, but as with all science fiction, the trick isn’t the idea itself, but the way it all unfolds. And as of right now, A Thousand Suns unfurls sci-fi ideas better than any other new genre anthology series this year.

You can watch A Thousand Suns on YouTube or the official website here .

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A Thousand Suns Shows Off Sci-Fi Anthology Series With Incredible First Look | GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT

T he indie sci-fi anthology series  A Thousand Suns  is available to stream on YouTube. But before the short film project officially launched, a trailer was released that showcases the brilliance of each story. "In the vastness of space and time, many tales weave into one under the light of a thousand suns," the 54-second clip says before viewers are presented with a montage of footage from the show.

Each installment of  A Thousand Suns  is approximately four minutes long and features a twist similar to the ones seen in shows like  Black Mirror  and  The Twilight Zone.  

A Thousand Suns  is created by filmmaker and cinematographer Macgregor, whose body of work includes the Gerard Butler spy thriller  Kandahar  and music videos for Dua Lipa. Produced by Blackmilk Studios, the series is described as a "gateway to our hopes, dreams, and nightmares." Various directors worked on the project, including Ruairi Robinson, Tyson Wade Johnston, Tim Hyten, and Philip Gelatt.

A Thousand Suns  was created as an alternate for those who are tired of all the sequels and remakes saturating the entertainment market.

Each installment of  A Thousand Suns  is approximately four minutes long and features a twist similar to the ones seen in shows like  Black Mirror  and  The Twilight Zone.  The first short film, titled "Ice," follows a terraformer scout who hopes to find no life on a specific planet. In another short called "Exodus" people are preparing to leave Earth, but the problems arise when the timeframe for escape is unclear.

Just like its high-budget sci-fi counterparts, each episode of  A Thousand Suns  possesses an eerie, intelligent quality and most importantly, demonstrates skill in using visual elements to tell a good story. Moreover, each short film is crafted by people who understand how to use specific visual styles to convey extensive world-building in a solitary frame.

But the biggest reason Macgregor decided to create  A Thousand Suns  was because he was repeatedly told that creating quality sci-fi content on a budget was impossible.

At present, there are six episodes of  A Thousand Suns  on the official series website 1Ksuns.com and YouTube . However, the creators have 16 more titles listed as "coming soon." The site also makes clear their intention to create more stories written in collaboration with screenwriter Philip Gelatt, in the 30-minute or short-film format, that promise to thrill sci-fi fans.

A Thousand Suns  was created as an alternate for those who are tired of all the sequels and remakes saturating the entertainment market. Macgregor, Gelatt, and their team of directors could not sit by and do nothing. Instead, they decided to give the sci-fi genre a fresh coat of paint that compliments the mind-bending, thought-provoking stories people grew up on.

But the biggest reason Macgregor decided to create  A Thousand Suns  was because he was repeatedly told that creating quality sci-fi content on a budget was impossible. In response, the team did it anyway without financial backing from any major production houses or studios. They just put everything they had into their passion project.

Macgregor and his team worked themselves to the bone to make every episode of  A Thousand Suns  feel like something right out of a million dollar movie. Via the official site, the creators also hinted at having standalone feature film length stories ready for the big screen. They make a mini jest-filled plea to viewers who may happen to work for a studio to perhaps pick up their project.

GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT

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