Sharp-witted and clever, Get Out splendidly satirizes privileged white liberal racism, while also managing to scare the socks off us. This is Jordan Peele’s first film as writer/director–you know him from the sketch comedy team Key and Peele–and he’s super-smart, and his film is cringe-worthily funny and the last half hour, I was on the edge of my seat. Even if you don’t much like horror as a genre, this film is so well done, so perfectly poised between terrifying and hilarious, it’s a film you need to see. FWIW, its Rottentomatoes.com score is a straight up 100%. Deservedly.

Meet the Armitage family. Dad (Bradley Whitford) is a neurosurgeon, Mom (Catherine Keener) is a psychiatrist/hypnotist, and they live in a gorgeous, huge home way off in the woods somewhere. Daughter Rose (Allison Williams) is coming home with her latest boyfriend, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a photographer who also happens to be black. She hasn’t told her parents, and Chris is nervous, but, she reassures him, needlessly. They’re cool. They’re liberal. Her Dad voted for Obama twice, and would have voted for him a third time if he’d been running. So it’s Guess Whose Coming to Dinner, updated. There’s another Armitage too, younger brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), also a doctor, but also something of an annoying brat sibling. Anyway, they’re all nice people, the Armitages, though perhaps just a teensy too anxious to mention, as though in passing, how much they admire Jesse Owens.

But before getting to her parents’ house, Rose and Chris have an unsettling episode. Their car hits a deer, and the police officer who investigates the accident is just that much too interested in this white woman’s black guest. She backs the cop down, but Chris is already uncomfortable before he even meets the fam.

Also–this is so embarrassing–the Armitage household includes two black servants. I know; the optics aren’t great. But, you see, Georgina (Betty Gabriel) and Walter (Marcus Henderson) are basically family. Though every time Chris interacts with them, Georgina and Walter are . . . off. Giving off weird and creepy vibes. But Chris is probably just overreacting. The Armitage’s are surely nothing worse than privileged and accordingly clue-less.

I don’t want to give away spoilers here. But part of what makes this movie so scary is the way it literalizes prevailing retrograde white liberal attitudes towards race. Do we not, in a sense, rather wish we were black? While still insisting that having blacks serve us is okay as long as they’re treated as family, respected and admired and all that. The evil at the heart of this oh-so-pleasant family perhaps doesn’t quite stand up to a lot of scrutiny, but for the two hours of the movie, it’s beyond chilling.

One thing I love about this movie is how even basic plot points are conveyed, not through dialogue or some discovery, but through acting, through the choices made by the cast. I mean, sure, there’s revelatory dialogue and opportune discoveries, but sometimes, there’s just an actor’s face, telling us what we need to know. This is particularly true of Betty Gabriel, Georgina, who smilingly offers the most innocuous explanation for having misplaced Chris’ cell phone, with a single tear undercutting every word from her mouth. It’s a brilliant scene, and without even knowing what it means, you want to shout to Chris to run, escape, Get Out.

Comedic filmmaking of this kind, this kind of character-driven social satire, requires carefully composed shots with little camera movement, so we can focus on what they’re saying. This is especially true of the film’s comic tour-de-force, a garden party with the Armitage and 50 of their closest friends. And after a golfing enthusiast Armitage buddy tells Chris how much he loves Tiger Woods, and after a woman asks Rose, with a wink and a nod, if it’s true, what they say about Black men, Chris has basically had it with these people. It’s a funny scene, and Peele knows how to frame it and shoot it and cut it to highlight the comedy.

But horror is more about what we can’t quite see; it’s about slow camera movies, panning past harmless (but maybe not quite so harmless) objects, letting tension mount. Peele knows how to do that too. He’s great with the camera and he’s great with lighting, and he knows how to sustain a joke, and he’s amazing with actors, and he also knows how to scare us.

It’s a great piece of filmmaking, you know? And a terrific film for our age. If you’re not already woke, this film should do the job. Especially if you are willing to admit you’re both in on, and the butt of the joke.

Hidden Figures is a pretty good film on an absolutely tremendous subject. Viewing it, you’re overwhelmed by the story and the acting and the musical score, and some outstanding characterizations; that’s the initial impression. And then its impact fades, and the weaknesses of its comparatively pedestrian screenplay come to the forefront. It’s a story about the early years of NASA and the space program and the civil rights movement, and the contributions of some extraordinary women. That’s enough to carry the movie, at least initially.

In the early 1960s, the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia was tasked with computing the trajectories for the rockets and space capsules of the Mercury space program. A lot of those calculations were done by ‘computers.’ A ‘computer’ back then wasn’t understood to be a machine, but a person; someone with math skills, who could quickly and accurately do calculations. They had a machine too, what we would call a computer, only they called it an IBM. And nobody knew how to use it.

The Langley site was strictly segregated, with a West building for African-American ‘computers,’ almost all of them women, and an East building for the main NASA scientists, all of them white men. The film tells the story of Mary Jackson (Janelle Monae), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Katherine Goble Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), three ambitious and talented African-American women who wanted to be part of the space program, like most patriotic 1960s Americans did.

Jackson gets a job in the engineering program, designing the space capsule. She’s held back by the fact that she doesn’t have an engineering degree. There’s a program available through NASA, but she can’t quality for it until she passes a remedial class offered through night school at a local high school. A white high school. So she files a lawsuit to become the first African-American woman in a Virginia white high school class. That’s a terrific story right there, and it’s also the story that gets the least attention in this film, because the other two main stories are even better.

Dorothy Vaughan, meanwhile, is doing the work of a supervisor, but does not have the job title, seniority or salary of one. She’s been given a supervisor’s responsibilities, and has a leadership personality; she can do the job. But she’s Black; NASA doesn’t seem able to recognize her. That’s her battle; to become an supervisor. In the meantime, she teaches herself Fortran, studying IBM programming on her own time. And so she sneaks into the IBM control room, and quietly programs the machine in the evenings. And when NASA needs precise and fast calculations done, she knows how to get the computer machine working to provide them, and how to teach her ‘computers’ how to program.

Another great story, right? But the movie’s third story is the best of all. Katherine Goble (who marries mid-film and changes her name to Johnson), is a math whiz, who has skills that get her assigned to the main building, and to a team made up entirely of white men. The main mathematician there is a guy named Paul Stafford, played here by Jim Parsons. (It did rather crack me up; the idea of Sheldon Cooper as a (shudder) rocket scientist). Anyway, Stafford has no faith in her, blocks her efforts at every turn. Is he racist? Sexist? Sure, like most white dudes in 1961.

Meanwhile, the boss, the head of Langley, Al Harrison (Kevin Costner), cares about one thing only; getting astronauts into space, and back again safely. If that requires that he become a civil rights pioneer, so be it.

In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Katherine needs to go to the bathroom at work, and the nearest colored women’s rest room is a half mile away. And so, a couple of times a day, she has to walk, in high heels, over half a mile just to take care of that most basic need. There’s a women’s restroom in the building where she works, but it’s for white women only. When an exasperated Harrison asks why she has to take such long breaks, it’s difficult for her to tell him–gender, race and workplace protocols all collide. Plus, it’s raining out, and she’s soaking. She finally does, though; she is able to speak out, and tell the truth. It’s one of the best scenes in the movie, and leads to a scene where Harrison personally rips a ‘colored’ sign off a bathroom door. Thereafter, all the women are free to use whatever restroom is closest.

There are a lot of bathroom scenes in the film, including a nice one between Spencer and Kirsten Dunst, who plays the supervisor of all NASA women at the facility. They’re both terrific in that scene, as Dunst is forced to confront her own racism in that most basic of settings.

So there’s a lot about this film to savor. Outstanding acting performances, and a powerful story; what’s not to like?

It’s just so conventional, though, and in ways that really do harm the telling of these stories. It’s a Hollywood biopic; of course, the heroines have to be superhuman, and the villains made of cardboard. This is clearest in the scenes with Katherine and the other mathematicians with whom she works. Every major breakthrough comes from her. We get the distinct impression that the mathematicians at NASA are not top talent, but in fact the remedial class in math school. There’s one scene, for example, where Katherine points out that their task is to turn the Mercury capsule’s orbit from an elliptical orbit to a parabolic orbit. I’m not kidding; the other mathematicians in the room stare at her like they’ve never heard of a parabola before. Jim Parson’s Paul Stafford literally moves his lips as he tries to figure out some calculation Katherine Johnson has put up on their communal chalkboard. Honestly, it looks like the Mercury program would be in much better shape if they fired all their white guy mathematicians, and just let the one Black lady do the whole job.

The same thing’s true of the scenes where Dorothy Vaughan figures out how to use the IBM. She’s got a library book on Fortran, and this brand new mainframe, and she figures out how to make the thing work, while the guys from IBM who are setting it up stand by, flummoxed.

Believe me, I’m not making some kind of alt-right argument about how egregiously this movie disrespects white people. Not even remotely. What I am saying is that the movie’s approach, in which Katherine Johnson is the Michael Jordan of mathematicians, and the guys she’s working with are the New York Generals ends up diminishing her actual accomplishments. Which is the better story: Black Supergenius astounds a village of idiots, or a brilliant African-American woman holds her own, and gains the respect of some of the top mathematicians in the world, and becomes their esteemed teammate and colleague? In 1961?

The truth makes a better story than a fictionalized, distorted version of the truth that this film, sadly, relies on. And I know you’ve only got two hours to tell your story, and that narratively, you need to conflate some characters or it just becomes unwieldy. I know that. But in fact, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson were not particularly close friends, and the scientists they worked with were not dopes, and their contributions to the Mercury program, though significant and ground-breaking, were not as all-encompassing as this film makes them appear. Tell that story, the real story. They were remarkable women, and their achievements were extraordinary, especially in that time and place. They were patriotic Americans, and civil rights pioneers, and I’m thrilled that this movie got made. I just wish it were a better screenplay.

Still a fascinating, entertaining and educational piece, and well worth your time. Just not as good as it could have been, and should have been.

For the fourth time, my wife and I tried to see Hidden Figures, and couldn’t, because it was sold out. But we were in the mood for some filmed entertainment, and decided to see Lion instead, as an adventure, knowing essentially nothing about it.

This is rare for us. We make every effort to be informed film consumers; reading reviews, checking metacritics and rottentomatoes.com, watching trailers, referencing IMDB. This isn’t difficult or time consuming, and we feel like it’s well worth our time to make sure our movie-going dollars are well-spent. We made an exception for Lion. We knew exactly three things going in. We knew it was nominated for Best Picture. We knew it had a high rottentomatoes score (via hearsay; we didn’t look it up). And a friend on Facebook had said she was glad it was Oscar-nominated, as it was the kind of family-friendly entertainment that never gets nominated for big awards. That was it. We didn’t know who was in it, what it was about, who directed, or anything else.

The experiment was a rousing success. Lion tells a powerful, moving, human story. It’s exceptionally well filmed, written, and acted. It is one of those ‘celebration of the human spirit’ movies that ends up, on reflection, raising more troubling questions than the immediate issues it addresses. Still, I recommend it highly. And it’s possible I may have caught my eyes watering a time or two. Air quality in the theater, probably.

As the movie begins, we see two young brothers, Saroo (Sunny Pawar) and Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), climbing on and around a train somewhere in India. Saroo looks to be around 5, and Guddu is maybe 8. The train is transporting coal, which they steal, and eventually sell for two modest bags of milk. They’re poor kids, in other words, and their home is a single room about the size of a single cow stall. Their Mom (Priyanka Bose), works lugging rocks. That appears to be the only work she can find. She asks Saroo to watch his younger sister Shekila (Khushi Solanke), which Saroo complains about. There is no evidence that this anything but a loving family, but these boys aren’t in school, run around in dangerous places, and steal for food. Poverty doesn’t get much more abject.

Guddu also works, at a laborers job, and as he heads out, Saroo wants to go with him. This would leave 3-year-old Shekila alone and unsupervised, but Saroo doesn’t care; he wants to prove he’s a big boy and can work too. Finally, Guddu relents, and he and Saroo head off. They reach a train station, and Guddu tells Saroo to wait on a bench, while he goes to see about work.

And so Saroo waits. Eventually he falls asleep. Guddu does not return. A train pulls in. Saroo wakes, sees the train and is curious. It has one door open, no passengers. He climbs aboard. The one door closes, and the train begins moving.

We can see a sign informing us that the train is heading off for maintenance, and not accepting passengers. Saroo doesn’t know that, though, and for two days, he’s the only passenger as the train rockets through the Indian landscape. He finds an apple core, so he’s got that much food. Finally, the long train ride ends. He’s in Calcutta. He has no idea, though; he only speaks Hindi, and almost nobody he meets speaks anything but Bengali.  Saroo doesn’t know this, of course; he’s only five. He only knows that people talk nonsense to him, and don’t understand his responses. He’s lost in a huge, impoverished city, without money, family, any way to communicate, or any way to survive.

Somehow, he stays alive. He finds a Hindu temple, and is able to eat temple offerings. He finds the Hooghly River, and can drink from it. A nice-seeming woman, who speaks some Hindi, brings him home to her apartment and feeds him his first decent meal. But when she introduces him to her ‘friend,’ (Nawazuddin Siddiqui) a good looking guy in his forties, the boy’s creeped out, as well he might be–the guy appears to be a Fagin-type, a boy-prostitute recruiter. Saroo takes off, at a full sprint.

The first third of the movie is about this kid, this five-year old, surviving in a dangerous city, despite not speaking the language and having no resources at all except his courage, his intelligence, his instincts, and his ability to run away really fast. It’s terrifying and the sense of danger is palpable. The kid, Sunny Pawar, is absolutely terrific, but so is the filmmaking, which never lets us lose track of this one child, while also reminding us of the hundreds of thousands of impoverished and desperate children lost in the cruelty and danger of Calcutta.

Eventually, he ends up captured and placed in an orphanage. A notice is posted, with his picture, but we realize there’s no chance of his mother seeing it; and anyway, the notice is in Bengali. We see him in an orphanage school, sitting there, completely uncomprehending. But salvation awaits. An Australian family wants to adopt an Indian orphan. He’s got a new family, an ocean away.

And so, he gets on a plane, and at the airport, he meets John (David Wenham) and Sue (Nicole Kidman) Brierley. He’s going to be raised as an Aussie. He will move from abject destitution to middle-class luxury. He’s got a TV, and a sailboat. They teach him how to play cricket. He’s fine.

Not long afterward, he also gets a brother, Mantosh (Keshav Jadhav), a deeply damaged young boy, also Indian, but as troubled as Saroo is well-adjusted.

Cut ahead twenty five years, and Saroo is played by Dev Patel, and Mantosh by Divian Ladwa. And Saroo is fine. He’s in grad school, in Hotel Management. He’s met a fellow grad student, Lucy (Rooney Mara). (Manosh is still pretty screwed up). But Saroo is also discontented. He remembers his childhood, his home in India, Guddu and his Mom, the long train ride and those horrible months in Calcutta. He becomes obsessed with finding his Mom. Not that he doesn’t love his Aussie Mom; he and Sue are very close. But he can’t shake it, this need to reconnect.

He tells the other students in his program about his past, and they’re entirely supportive. And one of them suggests that he look on Google Earth. Maybe that could be a tool he could use to find his home. That’s the rest of the movie; about Saroo’s search on Google Earth for his home, and his growing obsession with finding his family.

Nicole Kidman is terrific as Sue Brierley. I think that’s one of the great acting challenges, to play a genuinely good human being. (Villains are comparatively easy). Anyway, she nails it. Rooney Mara is somewhat wasted, in this ‘world’s most supportive girlfriend’ role. Dev Patel is likewise great, though he might want to move on a bit from these ‘Indian urchin who becomes upwardly mobile’ roles. Anyway, it’s a fine movie, a glorious film debut for Garth Davis, who comes from the world of advertising, and who has another film in post-production, an as-yet untitled film about Mary Magdalene, starring Rooney Mara (with Joaquin Phoenix as Jesus).

Anyway, we took a chance on a film we knew nothing about, and feel well-rewarded for it. It’s a powerful and family-affirming film. It also reminds us that there are hundreds of thousands of desperately impoverished children all around the world, who don’t end up with a lucky second chance in the privileged West. So that’s also a thought that lingers.