4 Best Movies To Watch After The Shape of Water (2017)

A Different Man is all about what it means to be seen, in all the best and worst ways. It’s what it means to avoid eye contact with the unhoused man on the subway and to gawk at anyone who looks remotely outside the norm. It’s the difference between simply being noticed and being intimately seen, the way only someone who actually understands you can. Writer and director Aaron Schimberg looks for as many ways as possible to play with these ideas, fitting the seer and seen inside each other in a little matryoshka doll. But first and foremost, our gaze is on Edward. Adam Pearson isn't internationally known, but he's known to rock a microphone. (Matt Infante/A24) Edward (Sebastian Stan) is a struggling actor with a rare condition that covers his face with large, benign tumors. He’s quiet and reserved. His every movement reveals a discomfort even existing in the world, never mind taking part in it. So when he gets the chance to take an experimental new drug that can completely heal him, he does so without a thought. Reborn as his new, more handsome self, he finally gets what should be the part of a lifetime in a local play based on his life. That is until Oswald, a man with the same condition as Edward, steals the part. In the process, this new arrival reveals just how exactly Edward has actually transformed.  Continue Reading →

While the general world of theatrical comedies remains elusive at multiplexes everywhere, one strain of the genre keeps on chugging in theaters. The Last Vegas/Going in Style/Book Club-style comedy is still going strong. Titles focusing on a wacky trio or quartet of famous actors over 60 persist at Cinemarks everywhere. Even Book Club 2: The Next Chapter’s box office failure last year couldn't stop this subgenre. On the surface, The Fabulous Four looks like another breezy summertime entry in this domain. In many ways, including its flat third act, it totally is. Yet, some distinctive and even downright weird touches keep it from being another Wild Hogs pastiche. Back in the day, Marilyn (Bette Midler), surgeon Lou (Susan Sarandon), singer Alice (Megan Mullaly), and botanist Kitty (Sheryl Lee Ralph) were best friends growing up in New York City. After a few decades, though, those friendships have grown complicated. Lou and Marilyn, specifically, are no longer on speaking terms. However, that frayed dynamic is about to get “repaired” now that the latter character is getting married. While preparing for a lavish wedding in Key West, she yearns for her best friends to be her bridesmaids—all three of them. Alice and Kitty tricking Lou into traveling to Key West was only the beginning of their struggles. Once these former pals reunite, tensions clearly haven't frayed between the duo. Unresolved conflict looms over every pre-wedding celebration, even once Lou begins a flirty rapport with local DILF Ted (Bruce Greenwood). Can this quartet reunite and become “the fabulous four” again? Or will yesteryear’s turmoil capsize a once beautiful friend group? Continue Reading →

The Netflix documentary uses historical evidence and modern scholarship to demonstrate racism's continued role in US society. At the start of the new documentary Stamped from the Beginning, filmmaker Roger Ross Williams asks his various interview subjects, “What is wrong with Black people?” Considering that all the interviewees in question are also Black, it is unsurprising that the question’s seeming hostility initially throws many. However, once they recognize the context of that query—Williams is asking for a historical context as to what Blacks have done to deserve centuries of institutionalized racism and violence—they are more than willing and able to discuss the subject at length throughout this strong and often provocative film. Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s book of the same name inspired the Williams’ film, a karmic debt the director pays back by including the doctor among a number of knowledgeable Black female scholars and activists. Together, they discuss how the twin stains of racism and white supremacy permeate American society in ways that continue to fester today. They explain how the concept of deeming people as greater or lesser by the color of their skin was born out of slavery. The aim was to simultaneously remove enslaved people’s distinguishing characteristics to make them seem like one undifferentiated mass and drive a wedge between them and white “indentured servants” to prevent the groups from joining forces against their common enemy, the wealthy landowner. Continue Reading →

If Sorcerer’s sole highlight was Roy Scheider's descent into hallucinatory madness amidst an almost lunar rock field, it would still be a special movie. Scheider is Jackie Scanlon, an American getaway driver turned washed-up exile in the isolated Columbian village of Porvenir. He’s the last survivor of a desperate mission to transport increasingly unstable dynamite to a burning oil well. The blaze is so bad that only controlled explosions to burn off its fuel stand a chance of extinguishing it. Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong, including Jackie’s kibashed truck giving out a long walk from the well. Haunted by—or just plain hallucinating—the laughter of his dead co-driver, he stumbles forward. Surrounded by the surreal with nothing but a rickety crate between him and the hair-trigger death, it’s all he can do besides die. Continue Reading →