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‘Power’ Review: Yance Ford Provides a Detached, Academic Inquiry Into Policing
Netflix’s Sundance-selected documentary essay 'Power,' which unpacks the history of American policing, is highly detailed, but lacks rigor and force.
With few exceptions, the Netflix documentary/visual essay is more factual than emotional — let alone revelatory in its examinations — but the film covers enough historical ground to function as a contemporary cinematic flashpoint, aimed at a wide audience who isn’t already steeped in its academic analyses (which have become a fixture of social media these last few years). The depth of this historical scrutiny is aimed at imagining a world without policing by reinforcing the way it has descended from malevolent forces, though the film seldom touches on the alternatives and their own academic history. Ford, as a transgender man, is more than likely familiar with that legacy, but the decision to take a top-down view of systemic violence also ends up being embodied by a sense of personal detachment in the filmmaking.
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