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Title: Jamarcus Rose and Da 5 Bullet Holes (2025) Director: Marcellus Cox Writer: Marcellus Cox Studio: Films With A Purpose IMDb Plot: A talented high school MLB prospect spends the day with his new mentor from the Big Brothers of America Program. Joe Says: Jamarcus Rose and Da 5 Bullet Holes is a quietly devastating short that confirms Marcellus Cox as a filmmaker working with rare emotional clarity and control.

Marcellus Cox is a young filmmaker with a steady, confident voice, one already attuned to both the triumphs and the tragedies of inner-city life. His latest short, Jamarcus Rose and Da 5 Bullet Holes, stands as his most striking achievement to date. Beautifully composed and professionally assured, this film is also his most heartbreaking, a work that finds power in its restraint and irony in its tenderness.

Following his feature-length debut Mickey Hardaway and the short Liquor Bank, Cox has consistently returned to themes of mentorship and guidance. Where Liquor Bank examined recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous and Hardaway explored therapy and self-reflection, Jamarcus Rose turns its focus to the influence of Big Brothers of America. Jasper (Stephen Cofield Jr.) serves as a mentor to Jamarcus (Duane Ervin), a gifted high school baseball prospect with his eyes fixed firmly on the horizon. Jamarcus wants the day to unfold on his own terms. Jasper, along with Jamarcus’s grandmother Ester (Ruthie Austin), gently insists otherwise. What follows is a deceptively simple, beautifully rendered day of baseball, conversation, and promise. Yet this is present-day Los Angeles, and as the sun lowers, that promise is shadowed by a reality shaped by fear, chance, and loss.

Jamarcus Rose and Da 5 Bullet Holes is a quietly devastating short that confirms Marcellus Cox as a filmmaker working with rare emotional clarity and control.

As a piece of craft, Jamarcus Rose and Da 5 Bullet Holes represents a clear evolution in Cox’s filmmaking. The stylistic leap seen between Liquor Bank and Mickey Hardaway continues here with even greater confidence. Cox’s camera is rarely still, and when it is, the frame itself breathes. Scenes set at a dining room table, on aluminum bleachers, or inside a car carry a quiet momentum, driven by subtle movement and precise blocking. The dialogue, too, has sharpened. Conversations unfold with a rhythmic call-and-response that keeps even the most intimate moments alive with tension and purpose. This is Cox operating at his most assured.

Ultimately, Jamarcus Rose and Da 5 Bullet Holes is a sorrowful reminder that violence often arrives without warning and without reason. Cox never leans into polemics, choosing instead to speak politically through metaphor and lived experience. The grief expressed by a shattered grandmother is not framed as commentary but as truth, something universally understood. That such maturity and perspective emerge from such a short body of work speaks volumes. Marcellus Cox is not only telling stories worth hearing, he is doing so with a control and compassion that marks him as a filmmaker to watch.