Miracle at St. Anna

After complaining about the lack of African-American representation in previous WWII dramas, Lee steps up and directs his own. His version focuses on four American soldiers from the all-black 92nd Buffalo Solider Division who get separated from their unit while trying to save a young Italian boy and become trapped behind enemy lines in a small Tuscan village in 1944. Lee goes for epic with a 160- minute runtime, but it backfires on him, resulting in a scattered, tedious, meandering patchwork of takes on history, war, race, religion, and sentimentality, all under the guise of a mystery/crime story. Pic has its moments, but a heavy dose of editing and focus would have resulted in a much stronger finished product. McBride adapted his own 2002 novel.