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Best recent movies 201711/8/2023 ![]() ![]() The second half of the year already looks strong with July fare like Spider-Man: Homecoming, War for the Planet of the Apes and A Ghost Story, but here are the best movies so far (through June): 10. The first half of this year has unleashed cinematic social movements (thanks, Wonder Woman!), another Disney uber-hit in Beauty and the Beast that’s making sure Scrooge McDuck has plenty of gold coins to swim in, and a remarkably deep bench of indie films where stuff goes bump in the night, including the post-apocalyptic It Comes at Night, cannibal-crazy French film Raw and Kristen Stewart ghost movie Personal Shopper. When Pinkett-Smith took to Twitter in mid-December, it was emblematic of the one true message threaded throughout Girls Trip: no matter what, your girls will always have your back.Here’s a creepy fun fact: Thrillers are killing at the cinema in 2017. The result landed her a standup special on Showtime, a book deal, and a starring role alongside Kevin Hart in an upcoming film. Though Pinkett-Smith, Queen Latifah, and Regina Hall were marquee names, it was Haddish who stole the show as Dina, an uninhibited riot of a woman, all heart and sincerity. (Think 12 Years a Slave, Precious, Selma, even Moonlight.) Girls Trip, though, was an entirely different outfit: an ensemble comedy that followed four college friends over the course of a weekend in New Orleans. One of Hollywood’s unspoken and long-practiced traditions, is the recognition of a certain genre of black film come award season-those that peddle in the business of pain, poverty, and suffering. “Hollywood has systems in place,” she wrote on Twitter in response to the snub, “that must learn to expand its concepts of race, gender equality and inclusion in regard to its perceptions of art across the board.” In this case, the underlying “perception of art” was obvious to many. Jada Pinkett-Smith, who starred alongside Haddish, spotlighted one of the many perils within the movie industry. When the nominations for the 2018 Golden Globes were announced, one name was notably left out-Tiffany Haddish, the breakout star of Girls Trip, the summer comedy that starred four black women and surpassed $100 million in a historic box office showing. As I sat in a darkened midtown theater in late February, watching Peele put a name to a shape and color of evil I’d encountered before, I remember thinking: Yes, that’s it. I don’t know if Peele’s film will trigger a real and needed shift in Hollywood, if it will open up more doors for more inclusive stories to be told, or if white people actually confronted their demons in the months since, but I do know the feeling the film left me with, the feeling of acknowledgement, Peele’s knowing head nod. ![]() The genius of Get Out, framed as it was in a more psychologically perverse vision of Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, was its insistence on airing what many black people have long known to be true-just how draining white people can be on our existence, sometimes quite literally. ![]() ![]() Still, our America-the one that gives rise to plutocratic womanizers, the one that fetishizes the death of black men and women, the one that has done its very best to gut the middle class and believes in lawless gun control despite a continuous wave of mass shootings-makes it easy to hide a particular kind of evil (or just as easy to broadcast it). Evil has always lived in the open here, in the land of the free. For one to properly discuss even the bare essentials of Get Out, Jordan Peele’s social thriller about a white and seemingly liberal family that, secretly and for generations, has lobotomized black people, one must make peace with an obvious truth: white evil has always been a characteristic of American life, from the earliest days of colonization, when the blood of slaves first dampened U.S. ![]()
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