Us begins with a sincerely spooky prologue taking place in 1986, when young Addy wanders away from her bickering parents at the Santa Cruz boardwalk and encounters what appears to be her own smirking, scary double, an experience that apparently leaves her traumatized. Cut to the present, and adult Addy (Lupita Nyong’o) and her husband (Winston Duke) and two children (Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex) return to their summer home near that same beach. Even while Addy feels constantly on edge…
The finest films of 2017 simultaneously offered us a respite from, and a deeper reflection on, our fraught and fractured social and political realities. In sharp contrast to our unfortunate tendency to segregate ourselves with social media-fueled enclaves and ecosystems that do little more than reflect our own thoughts, opinions, and POVs back at us ad infinitum, these films cut through all that, artfully, and often provocatively, reminding us of the common humanity we share even with those who would seem to…
Deviating from protocol a bit with our timing (we swear we know when the halfway point of the year is), the following list is nonetheless our best approximation of a staff consensus for best films released from January to June of this year. Admittedly, the favorites skews toward auteurs, but few films bare much resemblance—a period biopic, a race-conscious horror film, a superhero deconstruction, and an intimate, maybe-ghost story (no, not that one) constitute a few of the movies we’ve championed.…
2017—so far at least—hasn’t been spectacular. In between the deaths of beloved auteurs like Jonathan Demme and Seijun Suzuki, you had 25 beating Lemonade at the Grammy’s, Tom Brady smugly winning another Super Bowl, and Donald Trump being sworn into office (this one might be a little worse than those other two). But as Lil Yachty once…