Jordan Peele's smart, scary "Get Out" taps into a terrifying world of white devils.

Get Out, a savvy, unpredictable comic-horror film written and directed by actor and comedian Jordan Peele of Key and Peele fame, opens on a stately suburban neighborhood at night, where a young black man is walking to a house, feeling disoriented in an ostensibly white neighborhood. Cinematically speaking, of course, this neighborhood feels familiar, as though Peele had found and recaptured the same shooting locations of John Carpenter’s Halloween, a film which subverts the cozy banality of suburbia and turns it into a venue for nightmares: the big houses and the maze-like streets lined with tall, massive trees. Carpenter introduced the Boogeyman into this otherwise safe place as a dangerous outside force disturbing the peace; in Get Out, the Boogeyman isn’t a stranger, but a resident, and the silence isn’t the presence of peace, maybe just the absence of life.

Jordan Peele possesses a keen understanding for how the horror genre works, and his nods to John Carpenter continue in this scene as an ominous (white) car sidles up next to the unsuspecting young man, and we know, instantly, that the driver of this car is a threat. “Not tonight,” the young man keeps saying, feeling nervous and instinctively expecting trouble, and redirecting himself, away from the car. But it’s already too late. The director’s use of visual trickery, not to mention his talent for building suspense, give us a pleasurably tingly feeling. Thrillers work best when we feel we’re in the hands of a capable filmmaker, and with Get Out, Jordan Peele proves himself more than capable.

In an era when the horror genre seems mostly exhausted (sidetracked by countless demon possession thrillers and mostly forgettable remakes and reinventions), Jordan Peele has fashioned something unique: a racially tense thriller where the black guy is the victim-hero, a reinvention of the Jamie Lee Curtis character in Halloween. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya, giving a fine, perfectly measured performance), a Brooklyn photographer, has been dating Rose (Allison Williams), a rather typical, boring-ass white girl, for five months.

Nothing captures whiteness quite like the image of Rose, sitting in her bedroom, eating dry Fruit Loops in a bowl and drinking a tall glass of milk through a straw as “I’ve Had the Time of My Life” blasts from her earbuds and she looks up pictures of shirtless, musclebound black men on Bing (!). We may be wondering what Chris sees in Rose, until an incident with a police officer, who clearly exhibits hostility toward Chris, reassures us: Rose stands up for her man, and the policeman backs down. And now they’re off to the country to meet Rose’s family. But it’s clear from almost the moment Chris steps foot inside their secluded, perfectly manicured brick house that Mom and Dad (played by Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford with a chilling degree of restrained hostility) are shifty, that Rose has misjudged them when she assures Chris that “they are not racist.” After all, they voted for Obama: the new white proof against prejudice.

The parents are well-educated professionals: Mom is a shrink who specializes in hypnosis, and Dad is a neurosurgeon. But these learned white liberals, it turns out, are just as scary as any blue-collar white conservatives. Mr. and Mrs. Armitage have invited a bunch of old (and I do mean old) friends over for the evening, and these guests exhibit a creepy fascination with Chris: one old man asks him about his golf swing and waxes on about his love of Tiger Woods; one woman grips Chris’s bicep, gushing over his muscles. Another lady, standing beside her frail, oxygen-tank-carrying husband, asks an embarrassed Rose: “Is it true? Is it better?” (Meaning, the stereotype about black men in the bedroom.) Chris is a specimen, the embodiment of white fantasies of blackness, whether it’s the thrill of being ravaged by a “black beast” or the lust after his perceived physical and athletic superiority.

The Armitages have a pair of black servants: Walter and Georgina (played by Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel), and they are the Black Stepford wives, creepily cheerful and uptight, and about as formal in their speech as the Queen of England. Both Georgina and Walter walk around as if in a fog: she keeps house, he tends to the grounds, and they serve their “masters” with the utmost devotion, unless something upsets them, like when a tear rolls down Georgina’s cheek, and we know, although we cannot quite put our finger on it, that something has control of her, that the real Georgina has been captured and locked away, screaming and crying out, but unable to communicate the terrifying truth.

The same is true of Logan (LaKeith Stanfield), the only other black guest at the party, who’s the apparent husband of a white woman more than twice his age. Logan dresses and talks and walks like a prep school kid turned law student, studying for the bar in between bouts of pleasuring his lustful white cougar-woman. But when Chris snaps Logan’s picture, the flash of his phone triggers a violent, frantic outburst: Logan rushes at Chris with his arms outreached in agony, pleading with him to leave. Again it feels like the real “Logan” has been a prisoner all this time, momentarily freed, it seems, by the flash of a camera.

Peele uses all kinds of smart visuals and sounds to make us jump, and to paint suggestions in our minds: the flash of the camera, the sound of Catherine Keener clinking her teacup with a spoon (which puts Chris into a trance), the close-up shot of Georgina, a harried battle raging inside her mind between her true self and the brainwashed/hypnotized self: tears stream down her face as she locks into a smile, repeating “No. No. No.” But Peele doesn’t give in by explaining everything away. He’s planted enough clues, and plotted Get Out so masterfully, that exposition is basically unnecessary, and that’s the mark of a good director.

The premise behind Peele’s film is a canny metaphor for how white people have taken everything from black people. During their drive to the house in the country, a deer jumps in front of their car. After they have investigated the damage to Rose’s vehicle, Chris stares forlornly at the dying creature as it utters haunting cries. Right then, we know that this deer is Chris. Later, when he’s being held prisoner inside a wood-paneled game room with a retro television set, Chris stares at the glassy-eyed head of a buck mounted on the wall. That’s what Chris is to these people: a creature to be conquered, an assortment of valuable abilities and strengths to be harnessed, a commodity to be fetishized.

With Lil Rel Howery, who provides comic relief (and good advice, like the title phrase) as Rod, Chris's best friend, and a TSA employee; also featuring Caleb Landry Jones and Stephen Root. Written by the director.

Enough Said

Writer-director Nicole Holofcener has a knack for creating vivid characters whose worlds feel bigger than the movie we're watching. In Enough Said, which is a finely crafted romantic comedy, the romance isn't the only thing going on in the movie. Holofcener wants us to see the myriad relationships of her characters, as well as the many problems, most of which are not clearly resolved, that exist in them.

As Eva, a masseuse whose daughter is about to go off to college, Julia Louis Dreyfus is wonderful. When I saw she was playing the lead in this movie, I thought: Why isn't she in more movies? I've always adored her performances in shows like Seinfeld, Arrested Development and Veep. She's great in Enough Said. Dreyfus has always been able to make use of the full range of her acting abilities, even in sitcoms, but here she's not obliged to be funny all the time. We get to see the vulnerable side to her.

And as her unexpected love interest, Albert, James Gandolfini has the coolness of a Robert De Niro mixed with his own brand of laid-back comedy. Albert's in the same boat as Eva, unhappily counting the days til his daughter moves to New York to study interior design. Their similar circumstances of course contribute to their romance, but (SPOILER), things are complicated by Eva's realization that her latest client, a poet named Marianne, played by the wonderful Catherine Keener, is Albert's ex-wife. And she hasn't exactly been silent about her negative opinion of him.

The writing in Enough Said is clever but wouldn't have worked with just anyone. It's remarkable how much the actors are able to do with it. Holofcener's is the kind of conversational dialogue that can either sound brilliant or puzzling, depending on how it's said. This cast--which also includes the wonderful Toni Collette (as Eva's best friend), and Ben Falcone--knows how to make the comedy effortlessly funny and natural.

As with all of Holofcener's films, the serious grows out of the funny in an organic way. You feel like you're watching something of real life, which is alternately refreshing and uncomfortable. Enough Said has its moments of "eww...is this really happening" cringe-worthiness. But I say this mostly as a compliment to Nicole Holofcener, who is perhaps the best writer of realistic comedy-dramas we have right now. She's an actor's writer (and director), always giving rich material to her performers.

With Tracey Fairaway, Eve Hewson, and Tavi Gevinson. 93 minutes. ★★★

Out of Sight

Out of Sight (1998) is a crime comedy that's intermittently clever and dumb. It's got George Clooney, though, as a bank robber who's tired of prison and ready to retire, if he can make a final score that's large enough to sustain him. Director Steven Soderbergh demonstrates his ability to make fun movies here: it's sort of a breezier, less show-offy version of a Tarantino movie, with an interest in developing a relatively straightforward --but layered-- story, rather than twisting it like a pretzel. I'm not so much criticizing Tarantino's movies as noting the difference between this film and say, Jackie Brown (both movies, incidentally, come from novels by Elmore Leonard). Out of Sight is content to be entertaining without being overly clever. Soderbergh is a more conventional director than Tarantino, you might say. He knows how to transcend conventional movies and turn them into something fun and unique, and that's largely what he does with Out of Sight. It has so many funny, quirky moments that are fresh and interesting, and yet it never feels like something so disdainfully self-aware as a Tarantino film.

There are moments when you wonder if the screenwriter, Scott Frank, wasn't paying attention to his material closely enough. He lets characters do things that seem illogical, even stupid, for the sake of advancing the plot in a certain direction. The movie is almost gleefully disinterested in being realistic. You admire its casualness. Clooney has that sort of casual charm to him, and he's perfect for this movie. Jennifer Lopez, as the marshal who falls in love with him, isn't a great actress, but she does have a sense of comic timing, and she's a great beauty too. Her character downplays her obsession with "bad guys," even though she must know she's lying to herself the way the movie is lying to itself, playfully. This heist-farce was made purely for entertainment. But it has enough smarts not to be totally mindless, too.

The supporting cast is a dream: Ving Rhames as Clooney's partner in crime, a tough, weathered criminal who nevertheless confesses his crimes--sometimes prior to committing them--to his ultra-religious sister, a bookkeeper for a televangelist; Don Cheadle as a fellow criminal, who agrees to join forces with Clooney and Rhames to break into the safe of a Detroit millionaire, played by Albert Brooks, who did time with them in Florida (presumably for embezzlement); Dennis Farina as Lopez's father, also in the business; Catherine Keener as one of Clooney's friends in the outside world: a former magician's assistant. She figures in a very amusing scene in which an escaped criminal, played by Luis Guzman, comes to her door to kill her, unaware that Lopez is already there questioning her about Clooney's whereabouts. Keener is another actress with a remarkable comic sensibility: she's subtle, too, never forcing herself on the camera or the audience. She lets her character's intelligence sink in gradually; Steve Zahn plays a moronic stoner who comes to Clooney's assistance (sort of), half-heartedly, and gives away more than he realizes whenever he encounters Lopez, who knows how to work him; Viola Davis as Cheadle's girlfriend; Michael Keaton as Lopez's married lover, an FBI agent who has a great scene with Farina in which he sneakily calls him out on his behavior; Nancy Allen, as Brooks' girlfriend; and, in a cameo appearance at the end, Samuel L. Jackson, as another convict.

Please Give

Please Give is a movie about the tragedy of existence. If that sounds like hell, that's because it is. Nicole Holofcener, who wrote and directed the movie, is keenly aware that her subject matter is grim and unappealing. She laces each scene with comic undercurrents. They're not throwaways--they're more like hilariously grim reminders that there isn't much value in taking things too seriously, whether it's age, work, or social relationships.

It's set in New York City, a place that seems ideal for capturing the feeling of a lost soul wandering through a sea of other lost souls, invisible in the noise and the quiet desperation. Kate (Catherine Keener) and Alex (Oliver Platt), a husband and wife who buy furniture from the children of dead people, are waiting for their 91-year-old neighbor Andra (Ann Guilbert) to die so they can expand their apartment into hers (which they've already purchased). Andra has two granddaughters, Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) and Mary (Amanda Peet). While Rebecca masks her disdain for her grandmother by taking care of her like a dutiful grandchild, Mary is openly hostile toward her grandmother. Andra doesn't give a shit about anything. She's too old to care about maintaining relationships, and her body parts are failing, rapidly decaying her quality of life.

Rebecca is a radiologist who specializes in mammograms. She deals with the beginning of death, the initial shock of bad news. Andra stands (or rather, hobbles) at the thresh-hold of death, waiting to go just as everyone else is waiting for her so they can move on with their lives. Kate works in the aftermath of death. She's got a bleeding heart but can't seem to find a way to deal with it. She keeps giving money to homeless people. And she tries assuaging the guilt she feels (for being some kind of Antiques Roadshow Grim Reaper) by helping the less fortunate, or at least thinking about helping them. She tries visiting with the elderly, then the mentally disabled, but she's all jelly inside and gets overcome by her own sympathy. It's like the sympathy she feels--as well as the correlating sense of helplessness--is the only thing that gives her life meaning. Kate wants to stop feeling guilt, but she isn't willing to really change the things that make her feel guilty (or think about why they do). Moreover, she's unwilling to face the bleak realities of her marriage and her relationship with her daughter, played by Sarah Steele.

Keener's character is just irritating. The things she doesn't seem to be aware of are matched only by her disgustingly patronizing good intentions. Peet's performance is wonderfully vivid as Andra's beautiful elder grandchild, who feels like a loser despite her beautiful features. She's having an affair with Alex for some untenable reason. Her callousness is made to be a point of comic release for us. It's like she says what we're thinking. She vents the inner frustrations of her nicer, shell shocked sister.

The performances make Please Give worth seeing. It has a slightness about it though, as though we will forget what we've seen. The humor--which is deep at the heart of the movie--lets us laugh at the characters' sense of self-seriousness, drawing something much more real out of them. But watching Please Give is also like catching a little glimpse into the lives of real people. Holofcener explored similar stories of frustrated women in Friends With Money. She's making good movies that aren't getting seen by very many people, but you can check out Please Give via netflix's instant streaming feature.

Friends With Money

Jennifer Aniston is a good actress but she seldom seems to get THE part. Usually we see her in a romantic comedy, in which she's clearly comfortable--and likable. But occasionally she gets to demonstrate her dramatic chops, like in this movie, Friends With Money. I found it in the comedy section of the video store, but I thought the categorization misleading. It's one of those movies where you feel like you're being a told a story completely objectively, just watching the lives of four women and their husbands unfold in a small splash of time. Aniston's character, Olivia, is single and has become a maid after quitting a teaching position she hated. Her three friends (played by Catherine Keener, Joan Cusack, and Frances McDormand), are all married and financially well-off. Olivia is, in many ways, their pet project. She's the one they're "a little worried about."
This is the kind of movie where conflict resolutions aren't necessarily inevitable, in that it's a movie that tries to be realistic. If you hate that sort of thing, you might not enjoy this, but if you do enjoy it, like I did, you'll find a very clever, honest, sympathetic picture that's about the intricate, unstable, chaotic, and familiar nature of relationships. ★★★