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" There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things. "
Wesley Morris
Past
Illuminate
Current
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" '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
" 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
" 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. "
Wesley Morris
Culture
Way
Long
" '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
" Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York. "
Wesley Morris
New York
American
Art
" Sidney Poitier became a star in part by helping black and white Americans negotiate their new relationship in the post-Civil Rights era. "
Wesley Morris
Relationship
Black And White
Black
" 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.' "
Wesley Morris
Much
Well
America
" 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. "
Wesley Morris
Tiger
Road
Black
" '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
" Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films. "
Wesley Morris
Bad
Bad Luck
Decisions
" My favorite bad thing about 'Three Billboards' is its ambition to play around with America's ideological and geographical toys. "
Wesley Morris
Three
America
Bad
" 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. "
Wesley Morris
Up
She
Rage
" Suddenly, stories of abuse and harassment are being believed; abusers and harassers are being toppled. Yet, at the same time, one of the top movies in the country right now is 'Daddy's Home 2,' which has a biggish, comedic part for Mel Gibson. He's the man whose anti-Semitism and racist rants became part of the cultural lore. "
Wesley Morris
Country
Movies
Home
" This country is rich with awful things to say about everybody. There's a slur for you and a slur for me - more than one. And because we're terrified of dealing with them head on, we've made them just as easy to warp and defang. "
Wesley Morris
Easy
Rich
Say
" Robert Pattinson has the face of a film-noir dupe. It's a face that is searching and open and kind. It's a face that a certain type of woman might want to fool because, in its intensely old-fashioned kindness, the face says, I love you. Fool me. "
Wesley Morris
Fool
Woman
I Love You
" Sometimes a movie knows you're watching it. It knows how to hold and keep you, how, when it's over, to make you want it all over again. "
Wesley Morris
Watching
You
Want
" '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
" '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
" 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
" Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I'm both annoyed and relieved. "
Wesley Morris
Annoyed
Show
American
" '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
" 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
" 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. "
Wesley Morris
Grace
Skin
Beauty
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Anyone who watches a lot of television, or listens to pop music, is familiar with a certain vision of America. If not exactly colorblind, this America is one in which different races easily interact, in which a white person might have an Asian boss, Hispanic stepson, or African-American frenemy. "
Wesley Morris
Boss
Vision
Music
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Wesley Morris
Feel
Good
Care