'Clemency': Alfre Woodard Soars as a Tortured Executioner

Nor can she save the next victim she's assigned, a guy (Underground's excellent Aldis Hodge) convicted of killing a cop, maybe unjustly. He and his sad-eyed attorney (The West Wing's Emmy-winning Richard Schiff, 64) say so; we never find out. This is his last case because he can't bear the futility anymore. “You can't save the world,” she tells him. “That's the problem,” he mourns.

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But her job is to explain people's last-meal options, like an attendant on a flight to heaven, to efficiently facilitate their extinction and to describe the particulars of their execution while they quietly weep. Her life is a kind of personal extinction, depicted with meticulous realism, yet it all seems like a waking dream.

Writer-director Chinonye Chukwu, the first black woman to win the Sundance Grand Jury Prize (for Clemency), plays everything ver-r-ry slo-o-ow, letting each moment linger and sink in and echo in memory, like a condemned man's last footsteps down a cold white concrete corridor.

This is partly good and partly bad. It's good because she has a nonpareil cast that nails every scene with uncanny perfection. It favors the deeply emotive acting style that has earned Woodard an Oscar nomination, a Golden Globe and 16 Emmy nominations, with wins for Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law, Miss Evers’ Boys and The Practice. If she doesn't get an Oscar nomination for Clemency, she got robbed.

But she's apt to get robbed because Chukwu's clunky plotting, poetical vagueness and aversion to resolution often make her muted style dull and aimless.

It's not the kind of drama that makes Oscar voters stand up and cheer — they prefer big, simple emotions and Hollywood endings. This is a film for the politically hyperconscious, glumness-loving crowd at the Sundance Film Festival.

Don't get me wrong, it's still a powerful experience. The story may leave you traumatized or unsatisfied, but the characters and the acting achievement you'll never forget.

AARP critic Tim Appelo was Amazon’s entertainment editor and a critic for The Nation, Hollywood Reporter, EW, People, MTV, LA Weekly, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times.