12 Most Emotionally Devastating Movie Moments Of 2017

Director Kathryn Bigelow’s latest critically acclaimed feature Detroit brings to the big screen the historical events of July 25, 1967 at the Algiers Motel during the height of civil unrest in the Motor City, when a group of racist cops stormed the property thinking it was hiding a sniper and proceeded to unlawfully kill three young black men while brutally beating several more.

Though the film isn’t without its issues in skipping over the social and political context of the 1967 Detroit riots, Bigelow and her crew certainly know how to ramp up the unbearable tension, especially in its brutal execution scene.

Maniacal cop Philip Krauss is subjecting the occupants of the motel to mock executions with the aim of terrifying others into confessing the location of the so-called ‘sniper’, who isn’t actually a sniper at all but a civilian who was messing around with a starter pistol and who they’ve already shot dead by this point. A dim-witted cop takes over from Krauss to interrogate 19-year-old Aubrey Pollard and not realising it’s a ‘game’ shoots and kills the young man for real as he pleads for his life.

It’s a scene made all the more devastating by not only the fact that Pollard really died that fateful night and his killer went unpunished but also that this kind of police brutality still occurs regularly in the US in this day and age.