Based on the true story of First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, a soldier deployed to Iraq who begins to keep a journal of love and advice for his infant son. Back at home, senior New York Times editor Dana Canedy revisits the story of her unlikely, life-altering relationship with King and his enduring devotion to her and their child. A sweeping account of a once-in-a-lifetime love, the film is a powerful reminder of the importance of family.... (Full plot summary below)
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Based on the true story of First Sergeant Charles Monroe King, a soldier deployed to Iraq who begins to keep a journal of love and advice for his infant son. Back at home, senior New York Times editor Dana Canedy revisits the story of her unlikely, life-altering relationship with King and his enduring devotion to her and their child. A sweeping account of a once-in-a-lifetime love, the film is a powerful reminder of the importance of family.
Leave your thoughts about A Journal for Jordan.
| RogerEbert.comNell MinowIt wears its heart on its sleeve, unpretentious and sincere as a homemade valentine. |
| The Film StageJohn FinkA film such as this lives and dies by its leads, and both are wonderful on-screen together, creating a realistic love story that works well as they navigate the situation they both find themselves in. |
| The New York TimesLisa KennedyDenzel Washington directs this adaptation (the screenplay is by Virgil Williams) with care, respect and a deep-seated knowledge of the Black love stories that don’t make it to the big screen nearly enough. |
| Boston GlobeMark FeeneyJournal is Canedy’s story, but it’s Michael B. Jordan’s movie. Stalwart, quietly forceful, he seems positively . . . Denzelian. |
| Washington PostPat PaduaDespite a story line that covers such fraught historical events as 9/11 and the Iraq War, the movie is too tidy to ever really feel like a living, breathing thing. |
| San Francisco ChronicleCary DarlingA Journal for Jordan...is such a sweetly, well-intentioned film — one meant to bring a Christmastime lump in the throat in a year that gave us so many lumps of coal — that it feels churlish and downright Scrooge-like to point out its flaws. But the subject matter deserves better than this overlong melodrama spiked with occasional moments of welcome humor and pathos. |
| Movie NationRoger MooreIt’s an ungainly film that loses focus time and again, drifting off to indulge its stars with extraneous scenes and badly-handled or simply unnecessary story threads. |
| Entertainment WeeklyMary SollosiUninspired though it is, A Journal for Jordan delivers on the heartbreak of its premise. You will weep. So if that's what you're after, you couldn't ask for anything more. |
| Los Angeles TimesMichael OrdonaThe picture’s too rosy to feel real. Its elements of posthumous, loving advice and inevitable tragedy make for good bones. But this portrait is too clean, too unquestioning, too accepting, to get to the marrow. |
| The Associated PressMark KennedyWashington earns his audience’s tears with an unrushed, unshowy style, letting an adult and very human relationship evolve on camera, skipping back and forth through years as it goes from love, birth, death and acceptance. |
