Words matter. These are the best Wesley Morris Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
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.
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.
‘The Tree of Life’ is a collection of conversations that lost souls and true believers have with themselves while keeping their heads to the sky. But the movie is church via the planetarium.
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.
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.
‘In Bruges’ featured two hit men on a chatty stroll in Belgium, and certain people’s passion for it is fit for Valentine’s Day. But it was Tupperware Tarantino to me.
I don’t see a lot, but I think what the movie studios know and what they always know but they kind of ignore, which is that a there’s an audience for movies like ‘Get Out,’ and ‘Hidden Figures,’ and to some extent ‘Moonlight,’ which made a lot less money than ‘Hidden Figures’ did.
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.
I like Rob Morgan in ‘Mudbound.’ Most of the attention being paid to this movie has focused on Rachel Morrison’s cinematography and Mary J. Blige’s stiff but intensely stoical performance.
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.
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.
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.
‘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.
Sidney Poitier became a star in part by helping black and white Americans negotiate their new relationship in the post-Civil Rights era.
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.
Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I’m both annoyed and relieved.
‘Playboy’ operated with a patina of civility that granted the average man a presumption of pleasure that went one way – his. And that permission flourished in the psyches of all kinds of men.
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.
‘Three Billboards,’ which is not based on a true story but does have some reality flavoring, must appear worthy of elected office in some way. This was, at first, the illusion presented by the people running the campaigns and, in turn, over the years, has become the custom for lots of us.
Standing beneath the white light of an Apple store is like standing on a Stanley Kubrick movie set. His ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ predicted Jobs and a future where technology was our friend. Kubrick, of course, didn’t like what he saw. And occasionally, I have my doubts.
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.
Lesley Manville comes at ‘funny’ from a totally different direction in ‘Phantom Thread,’ using snootiness and froideur. The effect of her performance – as the difficult manager of her difficult brother’s couture dress business – stems in part from the chill she puts into her line readings.
‘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.
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.’
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.
When Oliver Stone and Woody Allen came forward to express sympathy for Mr. Weinstein, everybody rolled their eyes at them, too.
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.
The difference between me and, say, the opera critic is that I’m charged with thinking about the world beyond opera. I could go see ‘Die Fledermaus’, for instance. I’ve never done any of this, by the way. I’ve never written about one opera since I’ve had this job.
‘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.
‘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.
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.
Most Pixar films are better than most live action films.
The relief of ‘Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami’ is that it seeks to square the person with the provocateuse.
In ‘The One Who Falls,’ three women and three men, in everyday clothes, negotiate each other while moving, often in unison, on a giant spinning tile.
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.
My favorite bad thing about ‘Three Billboards’ is its ambition to play around with America’s ideological and geographical toys.
Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films.
‘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.
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.
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.
