Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films.
A week before Thanksgiving, my mother bought the turkey, frozen. Then she froze it some more. Then she let it thaw and cleaned it - and I mean really cleaned it, because nobody wanted a 'dirty bird.' She salt-and-peppered the turkey, buttered, paprika-ed, and nominally stuffed it.
Sunken-place entrants include Clarence Thomas, Ben Carson, Tiger Woods, O.J. Simpson, sometimes Kanye West, and any black person with something nice to say about President Trump. It's more generous than 'sellout' and less punitive than 'Uncle Tom,' a dis and a road to redemption.
What about Hong Chau? In typical supporting-part fashion, she shows up halfway through 'Downsizing,' already shrunk, an imperious Vietnamese house cleaner with a limp and sharp angles. The movie's satirical cleverness upstages its rage; then Ms. Chau proves she's capable of managing both.
We don't yet call it 'Thxgvng,' because any holiday whose centerpiece sits in an oven for four to six hours, after having sat out for as long to reach room temperature, must be spelled all the way out. Cook a turkey. You'll see. This is to say that you're not just roasting a turkey, obviously.
Most Pixar films are better than most live action films.
Nudity has never seemed to bother Grace Jones. Her art has thrived, in part, on a physical candor that both shocked people and redrew the boundaries of taste, beauty, and eroticism around her masculinity, ebony skin, and unrelenting intensity.
'Bloodlight and Bami' delivers. Ms. Jones shucks her own oysters - stressfully. She does her own make up and performs her own vexed yet amusing contract negotiations.
American popular culture has long been marked by an absence of empathy for American Indians. Westerns doubled as a campaign against so-called savages in a way that desensitized us to the savages we'd become.
When Oliver Stone and Woody Allen came forward to express sympathy for Mr. Weinstein, everybody rolled their eyes at them, too.
'Suburbicon' feels like a last gasp of some kind of middle. It thinks it's both frivolous and serious. But, for that, you need a touch that George Clooney's never had.
Spare a thought for 'Suburbicon' as it swiftly vanishes from America's megaplexes. This is George Clooney's movie about - well, I'm not sure. It's supposed to be the sort of movie that doesn't get made much anymore: starry, not that expensive, 'middlebrow.'
There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.
'Polisse' is the sort of cop thriller where people do things like angrily bang on a desktop or sweep everything off it. If it happens once, it must happen six times. But every time it did, I wanted to stand up and cheer, which I've never wanted to do for any such thriller.
I don't like turkey. I mean, I do. But I don't like it on Thanksgiving. I don't need it. There are about 20 other dishes that get put on a table or a counter or that stay warming on the stove that I'd rather eat than turkey.
I couldn't have known how vertiginous the entire Huxtable project was. I was, like, 10, 13, 15 years old when the show was a thing. But eventually, I could see that Cliff became a play for respectability. 'This is how you comport yourself among white people, young black child. Take a little bit of Howard with you on your way to Harvard.'
Mr. Clooney has directed six movies; five are set in the middle of the previous century. And 'Suburbicon' clarifies why. Race is a blind spot.
'Lady Bird' probably doesn't need more attention than it has gotten. It's a perfect movie, and some of its perfection is in its casting, but this is a movie crammed with wonderful work by people who aren't Laurie Metcalf and Saoirse Ronan: people like Lucas Hedges, Tracy Letts, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and, yes, that Timothee Chalamet.
One result of moviemaking - and a side effect of moviegoing - is familiarity. If an actor is particularly good, familiarity opens into something deeper: care, concern, identification, empathy. Yet even those concepts can feel inadequate for some actors.
There is a tragic kind of joke. You really can't keep a man down - good but often otherwise - because history's mechanics are built to keep him climbing toward the top. Somehow, Icarus gets to be reborn as Iron Man.
