Slow and meandering. Despite my best efforts, I just couldn't get into it. My primary issue with this film is that it feels like I’m watching a play rather than a movie. It’s too dialogue-driven, with John David mostly talking. It’s also overacted. The performances seem to be a bit too much for the film. Characters are introduced and referenced haphazardly while backstory is eventually provided through long expositional monologues. I was disappointed by just how boring and uninteresting this whole thing felt.

I'm typically not a fan of John David Washington's acting, but this has to be his best performance so far. Danielle Deadwyler, however, steals the show. She has yet another commanding performance here. Pretty good full-length debut by Malcolm Washington. I thought the film looked great. The film does have some moments where my attention was tested, but sometimes that's the case with play adaptations.

I was looking forward to this, especially for Malcolm/David Washington and Samuel L. Jackson. Overall, the performances were repetitive and irritating. I think it's mostly down to it originally being a play, although I wasn't expecting the writing and acting to be that disappointingly poor. It was a struggle to keep up with the pace since some scenes were loudly explicit with what was going on and others prolonged implicitly. I'm still confused about mostly everything except for the message and music, which were both exceptionally executed. A shame those scenes are sandwiched in a migraine.

I don’t think you can really enjoy this movie if you never lived in african-american community or if you don’t fully understand their origins or culture. But there are some great characters and the acting is mindblowing. I definitely don’t regret watching this but I will probably never watch it again

'The Piano Lesson', despite peaks and troughs, is largely a good watch. I could feel my interest increase and decrease fairly consistently throughout though, so no doubting more could've been done to keep me more interested - but that I still was, in fairness. John David Washington and Samuel L. Jackson are two that perform well, but the person that I would rank as the standout is Danielle Deadwyler - great performance! I didn't actually know her 24 hours ago, though I do now after this and 'Carry-On'. Michael Potts merits props, too. It does feature a noteworthy enough story, the music is decent and there are some solid moments in there - the rendition of "Berta, Berta" with Jackson & Co. particularly stands out in my memory. I now see that this is based on a play, which is indeed very apparent in a few scenes.