Review: Widows (2018)

* * * 1/2
Director: Steve McQueen
Starring: Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Elizabeth Debicki, Cynthia Erivo, Colin Farrell

Widows is more than the movie that you might be expecting, which stands to reason since it's directed by Steve McQueen, who is known for art films (Hunger, Shame, 12 Years a Slave) rather than crowd pleasers. Widows is, perhaps, the happy medium between the two. It's a heist thriller of no small amount of skill, filled with tension and action and reliant on some of the familiar tropes of the genre, but it's also a character piece about four women who are underestimated by everyone around them. Only three of them are widows (there is a fourth widow, but she takes a different path), but they are all women that the men around them take for granted can be walked all over. Now is the time of year when the studios release the last of their great big blockbusters for the year and the last of their great big award hopefuls, which might leave little time left to catch up on films that have already been in release for several weeks, but Widows is a movie worth making the time for.

Review: Fences (2016)

* * *
Director: Denzel Washington
Starring: Denzel Washington, Viola Davis

Fences is a great collection of performances. I'm not sure that it's great cinema, per se - in fact it's so aggressively anti-cinematic and so tightly tied to its theater origins that director/star Denzel Washington might as well have just filmed it on a stage a la Dogville. To be fair to Washington, even if he had found a way to open things out a bit more and take advantage of the scope that film is able to capture that theater simply cannot, the sheer talkiness of the screenplay (which playwright August Wilson adapted himself) would set Fences apart from most of what's at the cineplex. Fences unfolds as a glorious hurricane of words that help some truly great performances (Washington and Viola Davis are the stars and are as excellent as you would imagine, but there is no weak performance anywhere to be found) take flight. Watching these actors on screen is a captivating experience. I'm just not entirely sure it's a "movie."

Review: Prisoners (2013)

* * * 1/2
Director: Denis Villeneuve
Starring: Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal

Prisoners begins with a prayer and, in a sense, ends with one as well. It's that sense of quiet and stillness that bookend the story (revisited, sporadically, throughout the film in a series of beautiful, silent shots) that allows what might otherwise be a conventional thriller to burrow deep and leave a lasting mark. Soaked in atmosphere, this dark and gripping drama is a beautifully rendered piece of work, a triumph of technical craft even if, on a narrative level, it verges on the preposterous. As the best part of the movie watching season gets underway, Prisoners makes for an excellent primer.

Review: The Help (2011)

* * *
Director: Tate Taylor
Starring: Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain

The North American trailer for The Help did it a great disservice. The impression you may have gotten from the trailer is that this is a feel-good, uplifting chick flick with just a dash of "white people learn important things" mixed in. While The Help is by no means the most searing indictment of racism ever made, it isn't totally lightweight either and it really isn't the typical "oppressed minority seen through the eyes of a noble white person" type story that it might at fist appear to be, either.