Us (Jordan Peele, 2019)

Lupita Nyong'o in Us

Cast: Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Evan Alex, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon, Madison Curry, Ashley McKoy, Napiera Groves, Lon Gowan. Screenplay: Jordan Peele. Cinematography: Mike Gioulakis. Production design: Ruth De Jong. Film editing: Nicholas Monsour. Music: Michael Abels.

The Wilsons have met the enemy and they are them. Jordan Peele's Us is a darker film than his Oscar-winning Get Out (2017), more purely a horror film than that satiric horror-comedy, but it's just as assured in achieving its aims, which are largely to scare us while making us think. Peele has said that the movie's theme is the consequences of "privilege," and by making his central characters a well-to-do black family who suffer in part because of their assumptions about the world they feel entitled to, he gives the theme a sharp focus. There is a sci-fi explanation for the encounter of the Wilson family and others with their doppelgängers, who call themselves "the Tethered" and emerge from their subterranean hiding places to torment the privileged surface-dwellers, but it fades into the background of the battle for survival. Lupia Nyong'o gives a brilliant performance as Adelaide Wilson and her doppelgänger, Red, building toward a shocking moment of recognition at the film's end.

Travels With My Aunt (George Cukor, 1972)

Maggie Smith and Alec McCowen in Travels With My Aunt

Cast: Maggie Smith, Alec McCowen, Louis Gossett Jr., Robert Stephens, Cindy Williams, Robert Flemyng, José Luis López Vázquez, Raymond Gérôme. Screenplay: Jay Presson Allen, Hugh Wheeler, based on a novel by Graham Greene. Cinematography: Douglas Slocombe. Production design: John Box. Film editing: John Bloom. Music: Tony Hatch.

Graham Greene's novel Travels With My Aunt is a contribution to the "wacky aunt" genre whose most popular constituents include Arsenic and Old Lace and Auntie Mame. Greene, a more substantial writer than the authors of either of those works, added his usual layers of international intrigue and espionage to the story of a mild-mannered bank clerk dragooned into risky business by his elderly aunt -- who may in fact be his mother. The film version jettisons most of Greene's subtext and a good deal of his plot, especially toward the end of the film. The project began with director George Cukor's interest in the book and his hope that he could persuade Katharine Hepburn to play Aunt Augusta. For a time Hepburn was interested even to the point of helping write a screenplay, but the original deal fell through. It was revived for Maggie Smith, playing to her strength as a specialist in eccentric and imperious women, which helped her win an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Ronald Neame, 1969). But Smith was in her late 30s, much too young for the film's Aunt Augusta, so she is heavily made up and affects a drawn-down mouth and a fluty treble for much of the role. (She was not too young for the flashbacks that show Augusta in her earlier years -- scenes that may have would have been impossible for Hepburn.) Smith was also nine years younger than the actor playing her putative nephew, Alec McCowen, who seems a little ill at ease in some of the film and never quite makes Henry's transition from mouse to lion convincing. The best performances in the film, surprisingly, are given by the American actors, Louis Gossett Jr. as Augusta's lover Wordsworth and Cindy Williams as the hippie known as Tooley. Though Travels With My Aunt fails to capture the spirit and depth of Greene's novel, suffers from miscasting, and ends weakly, it has some amusing moments and some opulent views of Paris locations.