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" '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. "
Wesley Morris
Need
Never
Serious
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" There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that. "
Wesley Morris
World
Look
Failure
" 'Get Out,' of course, is the surprise hit movie that Peele wrote and directed about a black man named Chris, who discovers that his white girlfriend's family is running a nasty racist conspiracy. "
Wesley Morris
Family
Man
Out
" Most Pixar films are better than most live action films. "
Wesley Morris
Pixar
Action
Better
" 'The Dictator' lands somewhere between wan Mel Brooks and good Adam Sandler, whose 'You Don't Mess With the Zohan,' about an Israeli Special Forces soldier at a hair salon, manages to strike better contrasts with vaguely similar culture differences - it's a nuttier movie, too. "
Wesley Morris
Hair
Better
Good
" 'America's Dad' is what we called Bill Cosby. And we called him that because, well, what a revolutionary way to put it. Through him, we were thumbing our noses at the long, dreary history for black men in America by elevating this one to a paternal Olympus. In the 1980s, he made the black American family seem 'just like us.' "
Wesley Morris
America
Black
Family
" When Oliver Stone and Woody Allen came forward to express sympathy for Mr. Weinstein, everybody rolled their eyes at them, too. "
Wesley Morris
Sympathy
Eyes
Too
" I feel like I've always approached criticism with a degree of morality, right? Like, not as a moralizer, but just as somebody who wants to make sure that the culture we're getting is at least morally aware of how it's functioning. "
Wesley Morris
Feel
Culture
Criticism
" Part of what's mesmerizing about 'The Mechanics of History' is its physical eloquence - how dancerly it is. The men don't fall; they float. And when the trampoline restores them to the staircase, they move at a half speed. Cinema, they say, is 24 frames per second. "
Wesley Morris
History
Fall
Men
" '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. "
Wesley Morris
Perfection
Perfect
Bird
" The Huxtables laughed and bonded and debated and lip-synced. They were glamorous and simple and extraordinarily human. And affluent. And educated. And so many different kinds of black. You'd think that all of that would make them the Howard University of African-American family life. But white people wanted to matriculate, too. "
Wesley Morris
You
Simple
People
" 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. "
Wesley Morris
Middle
Why
Race
" The enormous success of 2009's 'The Blind Side,' in which Sandra Bullock makes a black teenager one of the family, demonstrates that America isn't post-racial. It is thoroughly mired in race - the myths that surround it, the guilt it inspires, the discomfort it causes, the struggle to transcend it. "
Wesley Morris
Family
Race
Success
" Every once in a while with Twitter, you find something that breaks through the bilge and recrimination. Or sometimes, something finds you. One night, 'The Mechanics of History' found me. "
Wesley Morris
History
Find
You
" The reason to do any barking - well, the reason for me - is that 'Three Billboards' feels so off about so many things. It's one of those movies that really do think they're saying something profound about human nature and injustice. "
Wesley Morris
Human Nature
Think
Saying
" 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. "
Wesley Morris
Bird
She
Mother
" 'Savage' is a trait that might get you into business school or retweeted 10,000 times. It's what a kid might say after somebody does something awesome or gnarly or fierce: 'Oh, that's savage!' It's the skate park. It's the high-school cafeteria. It's the YouTube comments section. "
Wesley Morris
School
Kid
Fierce
" Racism is old, but Peele found a poetic new way of talking about it. He gave us language we didn't know we lacked. "
Wesley Morris
Way
Us
Know
" '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. "
Wesley Morris
Time
Stand
People
" My mother very rarely skipped a Thanksgiving turkey. And yet, none of them ever tasted quite the same, landing somewhere on a sliding scale of succulence. She'd try new methods. "
Wesley Morris
Mother
Try
New
" There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things. "
Wesley Morris
Past
Illuminate
Current
" When a black person is acting up or showing off, somebody might say she's 'wilin' out.' In sports, an athlete who really takes it to another level has entered 'beast mode,' which happens to be the nickname of the former Seattle Seahawks superstar Marshawn Lynch. "
Wesley Morris
Black
Acting
Sports
" Ms. Sciorra is a member of a dwindling fleet of actors who actually sound like they come from somewhere. In her case, 'somewhere' is Brooklyn. In most movies, and perhaps especially in a handful of singeing 'Sopranos' episodes, 'somewhere' makes her vital. She's what you'd call an around-the-way girl. "
Wesley Morris
Movies
She
You
" Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I'm both annoyed and relieved. "
Wesley Morris
Annoyed
Show
American
" If Judge Steven T. O'Neill sent Mr. Cosby away for the rest of his life, that sentence couldn't undo what he's convicted of having done to Andrea Constand, his accuser in two trials. It also can't undo what he once did for me, which was to make me believe in myself. "
Wesley Morris
Believe
Rest
Myself
" 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.' "
Wesley Morris
Child
People
See
" The bravery of Stanley Kramer's 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' amounted to two Hollywood legends - Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy - telling the world that a black son-in-law is something they can live with, and so should you, especially if he looks like Sidney Poitier and has degrees. "
Wesley Morris
Legends
Live
Dinner
" 'Bloodlight and Bami' is all verite. The director Sophie Fiennes began filming Ms. Jones in the mid-2000s and simply observes her on stage and off. She follows her home to Jamaica, where the diva mellows, almost unconsciously, into a daughter, sister, and parishioner. "
Wesley Morris
Her
Home
She
" The relief of 'Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami' is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse. "
Wesley Morris
Grace
Square
Seeks
" Movies and television have a way of using a soundtrack not just to create a mood but to literalize it. You could always count on a master class in splitting the difference between artistry and obviousness during the so-called Blaxploitation era. "
Wesley Morris
Mood
Create
Movies
" Computers are scary. They're nightmares to fix, lose our stuff, and, on occasion, they crash, producing the blue screen of death. Steve Jobs knew this. He knew that computers were bulky and hernia-inducing and Darth Vader black. He understood the value of declarative design. "
Wesley Morris
Blue
Death
Black