Film

“Personally, i blame Dunaway more than Beatty.”

High risk

Writer-director Jordan Peele, the comedic performer from TV’s Key & Peele, and the adorable, funny cat movie Keanu, delivers a huge cinematic surprise with Get Out, a twisted, darkly satiric, nasty little horror film that pulls no punches when it comes to race relations and dating.

Peele has cited Night of the Living Dead and The Stepford Wives as inspiration for this journey to the dark side of his creative soul. Those films’ influences are detectable, and I’d say you could throw in a pinch of Rosemary’s Baby with a side of Being John Malkovich as well.

Two of the hardest things to accomplish with a movie are to make people laugh and get them legitimately scared. Get Out manages to do both for its entire running time. Peele takes taboo subjects and stereotypes and doesn’t let his pen get restricted by fear of offending anybody. This is an appropriately evil, scabrous movie.

Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young African-American man, is a little nervous. He’s going to visit the parents of Rose Armitage (Allison Williams), his white girlfriend. Rose is relaxed about the trip, but Chris is a little anxious. His anxiety proves justified shortly into the trip.

Upon arrival at her large estate, her parents like Chris. They really, really like Chris. Actually, parents Missy and Dean (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) like Chris at a level that’s a bit unsettling. Chris shrugs it off at first, as does Allison, but strange things start happening.

For starters, Walter and Georgina (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel) two black people employed by the Armitages, have personalities that are a little off. They have vacant stares. They are overly polite, and Georgina does that thing where you cry projectile tears while smiling and carrying on a conversation. Something is definitely wrong with them.

Chris smokes, and Missy doesn’t like that. When he gets up to sneak a cigarette in the middle of the night, Missy offers to hypnotize him. Chris is reluctant, but eventually finds himself under Missy’s antismoking spell. Or does the spell cover more than just smoking? I won’t give away too much more other than to say Missy and Dean are not what they seem, and I think this movie will put a lot of people off using hypnosis as a means of quitting smoking. Kaluuya (Sicario) delivers a performance that should put him on the map for a long time to come. The role requires him to go to many extremes, using his abilities for both comic timing and being paralyzed with fear. His big scene with Missy is an acting powerhouse, with Keener setting the pace. It’s going to go down as one of the year’s most memorable scenes. Williams absolutely nails her part. The movie simply wouldn’t work if Williams Get Out delivered one wrong note with her work. What she does here is a deft 12345 display on how to act in a horror movie. She will knock you on your ass. Providing solid, pure comic Director: Jordan Peele relief, LilRel Howery is the perfect Starring: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison goofball as Rod, Chris’s TSA friend Williams, Catherine Keener who thinks his buddy has been sold into sex slavery. Stephen Root has a couple of memorable scenes playing a blind man, something he did so memorably in O Brother, Where Art Thou? His character is among the horde that shows up for the family gathering. Also in attendance: Andrew (Lakeith Stanfield), another oddly behaved black man who really hates it when you take his picture. Whether it’s trying to make you laugh, make you squirm, or just plain freak you out, Get Out is a victory on all the horror and comedy fronts. Peele demonstrates a keen sense of what is scary/funny and has also made one of the better-looking horror films of recent years. Oh, and it should be pointed out, this is his first movie as a director. When it comes to daring, risktaking feature film directing debuts, Peele moves toward the top of the list. This is one of those times where a groundbreaking piece of work just comes out of nowhere and bedazzles. Don’t miss it. Ω

1The Great Wall Matt Damon stars in this mess, and this may very well represent the low point of his career, a career that has included the atrocious JasonBourneand Hereafter. He probably thought he was in safe hands because TheGreatWallis helmed by director Zang Yimou, maker of such masterpieces as Hero, HouseofFlyingDaggersand—one of my very favorite movies—TheRoadHome. Damon was probably all like, “Hey, Yimou is calling the shots. If anything, I’m going to look good in this pic!” Then … he saw his wardrobe. A wardrobe that begins with big furry wigs and beards, and then declines into a sad man-bun wig as the film progresses. He looks silly from frame one. He sounds silly, too. He’s attempting some sort of accent here, a cross between Irish, Scottish and just plain dickweed. Every time he talks in this movie, it hurts the ears and the soul—especially the souls of those who love Matt Damon. It’s all in the service of a wannabe period epic about non-distinctive, stupidlooking CGI monsters attacking China’s Great Wall, with Damon’s character being the savior with a bow. It’s a meandering, dull, ugly waste of everybody’s time.

4Hidden Figures Katherine Johnson was part of a segregated division at NASA in the ’50s, a wing of mathematicians who did the work that computers do today. HiddenFiguresdepicts the humiliation she and two other historical African-American figures, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson, went through while solving equations that helped put men safely into space. The women had to put up with a lot of racist bullshit, and the film shows their hardships, albeit in PG fashion. Taraji P. Henson plays Johnson, the “smart one” astronaut John Glenn personally demanded check the coordinates before his historical flight launched. Octavia Spencer is her usual great self as Vaughan, doing the work of a supervisor without the title and curious about that new IBM thing they just installed down the hall. Vaughan would become crucial to the implementation of computers at NASA, as well as being the agency’s first African-American supervisor. As Jackson, NASA’s first female African-American aeronautical engineer, singer Janelle Monae is so good, it’s easy to forget that this is just her second movie role. As a composite, fictional character named Al Harrison, Kevin Costner does some of his best acting in years.

5La La Land This is an all new, original musical from director Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) that’s surprisingly low on melodrama while full of vibrancy, beautiful tunes, outstanding set pieces and a stunning sense of realism for a movie where the characters bust out singing. It’s the best original movie musical ever made. The story follows wannabe actress Mia (Emma Stone) and jazz composer Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) as they try to make it in crazy Los Angeles. They meet, they don’t like each other much at first, but then they fall in love, which provides Chazelle and his performers ample opportunities for musical numbers that surprise at every turn. This solidifies Gosling as one of the best actors of his generation. Stone doesn’t just make her mark with a beautiful voice and expert footwork—she embodies the character trying to “make it” in the business.

4The Lego Batman Movie This is the great Batman story that BatmanvSupermanfailed to be. Even better, it has Will Arnett voicing Batman with a new, super amped, still dark, but amazingly well rounded and sometimes humorous incarnation. After all these years of dark—and admittedly sometimes brilliant—Batman movies, it’s nice to have a vehicle where we can just have fun with the character. Director Chris McKay, along with a long list of writers, has come up with a story that will please adult Batman fans as much as the kids who will most assuredly be dropped off at the local Cineplex to watch a movie while parents catch a break from the little mayhem makers. Arnett’s Batman not only faces off against the Joker (a very funny Zach Galifianakis), but finds himself in a scenario where he’s battling a smorgasbord of movie villains including King Kong, the Gremlins, Dracula, evil British robots and Voldemort (Eddie Izzard), to name just a few. It’s a nutty plot element that also allows for Batman mainstays like Bane, Two-Face (Billy Dee Williams, who was Harvey Dent in Tim Burton’s Batman) and the Riddler (Conan O’Brien!) to get in on the act. It’s a geek fest, a movie lover’s delight that has a funny little trivia bit at nearly every turn, and an emotional center.

4Split Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan has finally made his first good movie since Signs(2002) with Split, a down-to-thebasics, creepy thriller propelled by excellent performances from James McAvoy and Anya Taylor-Joy (TheWitch). The film reminds us that Shyamalan can be a capable director and writer when he’s not getting too carried away. Taylor-Joy plays Casey, a high school outcast who attends a birthday party but soon finds herself and two classmates imprisoned by a strange man with multiple personalities (McAvoy). In addition to the angry man who kidnaps them, he’s also a stately, mannered woman, a 9-year-old child and, well, a few others. One of those other personalities plays a big part in taking the film into other realms beyond psychological thriller. McAvoy goes nuts with the role, and Shyamalan takes things into supernatural territories in a chilling climax. Taylor-Joy is quickly becoming the new scream queen, and McAvoy’s work will surely stand as one of the year’s most fun performances.

3Toni Erdmann Ines (Sandra Huller), a terse, corporate type, is busy trying to conduct international relations involving big dollars when her dad, Winfried (Peter Simonischek), shows up with a goofy wig and fake teeth as Toni Erdmann, corporate coach. He throws a wrench in the works with his prankster ways, and Ines must learn to lighten up or reject the dad. The results, while a little predictable and long-winded, are fairly interesting thanks mainly to Huller, who anchors the sometimes silly film with a sense of realism. Her performance is top notch, and makes the film worth seeing. She also spends a good chunk of the film’s final act—which takes a major turn for the satiric—naked, which is pretty daring. Simonischek is fun in the dad role, although his antics are sometimes a little too outrageous to buy in what is basically a serious movie about father-daughter relationships and coping in a cold business world. This movie would work fine at two hours and didn’t need nearly three to tell its story. While I’m not convinced any daughter would allow her father to mess with her at work in this fashion, it is a movie where makebelieve things happen, and a nicely enjoyable one at that. It was recently announced that the film, made in Germany, will get an American remake.

3XX Four women direct short films in this horror anthology. Most notably, Annie Clark of the band St. Vincent—my hero!—makes her film directorial debut with a segment called “The Birthday Party,” where a frantic mom (Melanie Lynskey) panics when she finds a corpse just before her child’s birthday. The segment looks great, is acted well, and features some great sound and St. Vincent music. As a piece of horror, it’s a bit of a failure—it’s more jokey than horror—but the segment does show that Clark can direct performances and pull together the technical parts. It’s just not scary. Things get creepier in an EvilDeadsort of way with “Don’t Fall,” where some desert campers come into contact with demonic forces after seeing some sketches on a stone wall. There isn’t much of a story to the segment, but the scares come fast and furious once somebody gets possessed. The other segments, “The Gift” and “Her Only Living Son,” deal with starvation, parenthood and the antichrist, and they also have their moments. Available for download rental during limited theatrical release.