what to make of it?

Rating: 8/10 (17 February 2018)

The acting was superb, the story was impeccably woven.
People tend to either love or hate this movie.
Some of the criticisms I have seen:
1). Lack of realism. Characters and situations not plausible. Certainly true but not necessarily strikes against the film. Extraordinary situations make for a gripping story. Implausible characters are legitimate if they serve as a path toward insight into real people.
2). Too formulaic. (this one I can't comprehend. Perhaps on a superficial level. I read one critic referred to something along the lines of there being a "interwoven stories of an alienated populace in Los Angeles" genre.
The most striking thing in this movie to me is the morally bipolar characters. Those characters who have a strong moral component alternately exhibit extreme good and extreme evil. None of the characters have the moral tenor of traditional dramatic characters- good guys, bad guys, bad guys with a streak of good, good guys who bend the rules, etc.
It doesn't seem obvious to me what this is trying to tell us about real people, but it does force us to look at people from a very different perspective than we have been taught and are accustomed to doing.
When I read that Ta Nehisi Coates loathed the movie, I knew that I had judged it correctly. This is not a film that will appeal to one dimensional minds.