Review: The Shape of Water (2017)

* * * *
Director: Guillermo del Toro
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Shannon, Michael Stuhlbarg

Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme, beauty and the beast. There's nothing new about stories of women seeing past the beastly exterior of a monster and falling in love with the soul that exists beneath the surface - movies called "Beauty and the Beast" are, at this point, a subgenre in and of themselves - but a filmmaker as creative as Guillermo del Toro, who is dedicated to mixing the sinister with the beautiful, leaving you at once enchanted and unsettled, is able to make an old formula feel fresh. The Shape of Water is a wonderful fairy tale for adults, impeccably put together on a visual level, masterfully unfolded on a narrative level, and built around one great leading performance and four great supporting performances. If you only see one movie this year about a woman falling in love with a fish man, make it The Shape of Water.

Review: Hidden Figures (2016)

* * * 1/2
Director: Theodore Melfi
Starring: Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kevin Costner

Given the opportunity, people can do extraordinary things. How unfortunate then that opportunities are so limited to the few, rather than open to the many. Hidden Figures, based on the book of the same name by Margot Lee Shetterly, is the story of three women - Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson - who broke barriers of color and gender to help send a man into space and it's as rousing and as crowd pleasing as its box office success would suggest. As biographical/historical movies go, it hits that sweet spot between being important and being highly entertaining, and manages at once to be very direct about its primary theme (racism), while still being subtle in the distinctions it draws between the different forms that racism can take, as well as the different means through which it can be combated. While certainly not the most technically sophisticated movie I saw from 2016, Hidden Figures is nevertheless one for the ages.

Review: Snowpiercer (2014)

* * * 1/2
Director: Bong Joon-ho
Starring: Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Go Ah-sung, Octavia Spencer, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell, John Hurt

Having now seen it, I can't really imagine how Harvey Weinstein could think that there's 20 minutes to cut from Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer. It runs at a robust 126 minutes but this is a taunt, white-knuckle science fiction thriller from beginning to end. Though it came at the price of sacrificing a large-scale theatrical release for an extremely limited theatrical run with simultaneous VOD release (which in hindsight I think will start to look like The Weinstein Company cutting off its nose to spite its face, as in what seems like an unusually quiet summer movie season this could have been at least a modest hit), Boon was able to successfully fight to keep his film intact - and thank God for that. This is a terrific film of incredible ambition and skilled execution. If you're lucky enough to have an opportunity to see it in a theater, seize the chance, but seek it out wherever you can find it.