Sorry to Bother You (Boots Riley, 2018)

Tessa Thompson and Lakeith Stanfield in Sorry to Bother You

Cassius Green: Lakeith Stanfield
Detroit: Tessa Thompson
Salvador: Jermaine Fowler
Mr. ______: Omari Hardwick
Sergio: Terry Crews
Diana DeBauchery: Kate Berlant
Johnny: Michael X. Sommers
Langston: Danny Glover
Squeeze: Steven Yeun
Steve Lift: Armie Hammer

Director: Boots Riley
Screenplay: Boots Riley
Cinematography: Doug Emmett
Production design: Jason Kisvarday
Film editing: Terel Gibson
Music: The Coup, Merrill Garbus, Boots Riley, Tune-Yards

Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You inevitably got compared to Jordan Peele's 2017 hit Get Out because both were satiric fantasies with sci-fi overtones made by black filmmakers with black stars. But while Get Out was a direct confrontation with racism, Riley's film seems more concerned with adding race to the mix of an assault on capitalist exploitation of all working people, regardless of race. It's a scathing but funny look at economic inequality and the illusion that upward mobility remains possible. The setting is, appropriately, Oakland, where the high and low of economic status can be glimpsed in the very geography. What keeps the film from descending into angry agitprop is Riley's anarchic wit -- you never know what improbable means he will use, from puppets to horse people, to keep you off balance. There are bad jokes -- a character named Diana DeBauchery, pronounced "de beau cheri" -- and near-subliminal puns -- the central character, played with finesse by Lakeith Stanfield, is Cassius Green, i.e., "cash is green." Armie Hammer's slick megacapitalist is named Steve Lift, an almost perfect evocation of the celebrity CEOs of our time, like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Some critics have voiced disappointment that Riley's satire starts out in something so old-hat and so frequently satirized as telemarketing, but in his hands it becomes a good vehicle for debunking the myth of upward mobility, as Cassius finds himself almost shoved up the ladder, betraying his old co-workers despite his better intentions. Sorry to Bother You goes out of focus sometimes, and there's really nowhere for what plot the film has to go at the end, but an enormously skilled cast and some very incisive jokes keep the energy high.

Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino, 2017)

Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name

Oliver: Armie Hammer
Elio: Timothée Chalamet
Mr. Perlman: Michael Stuhlbarg
Annella Perlman: Amira Casar
Marzia: Esther Garrel
Chiara: Victoire Du Bois
Mafalda: Vanda Capriolo
Anchise: Antonio Rimoldi
Mounir: André Aciman
Isaac: Peter Spears

Director: Luca Guadagnino
Screenplay: James Ivory
Based on a novel by André Aciman
Cinematography: Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Production design: Samuel Deshors
Film editing: Walter Fasano

Nobody dies or gets beaten up in Luca Guadagnino's Call Me by Your Name, which makes it something of an advance on previous Oscar-nominated films about same-sex relationships such as Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) and Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016), which carried the implicit warning that being gay is dangerous. On the other hand, that's because the film's characters are people in a supposedly tolerant milieu, an haute middle-class academic family, not cowboys or residents of housing projects. Otherwise, we're still dealing with sexual "deviance" and its societal consequences, which in Elio's case include a sensitive and well-meaning Talk from his father, a phone call in which Oliver announces that he's going to marry a woman he's been seeing for a while, and an extended closing shot of Elio weeping into the fireplace. Don't get me wrong: I like Call Me by Your Name, in which Guadagnino and his handsome, skilled actors beautifully sustain a mood of sexual tension throughout the film. The problem I have with it is that it seems compromised by what its producers and director believe a mainstream film is allowed to show audiences these days. Put it another way, if the characters in the scene in which two people consummate their relationship were male and female, would the director have panned away from the bed to a window for a lingering view of a tree? That's a cliché as old as movie love scenes, redolent of a bygone era of censorship. So instead of watching even a discreetly filmed moment of sexual congress, which we've grown used to in "straight" movies -- all deftly angled closeups of apparently nude bodies and orgasmic faces -- we're treated like easily shocked children. It's especially noticeable after the director has already taken the usual discreet approach twice in scenes in which Elio has sex with Marzia. Reportedly, James Ivory's Oscar-winning screenplay specified full nudity and more explicit sex in the scenes with Elio and Oliver, but Guadagnino shied away. The result is a kind of emasculation of their relationship, turning Call Me by Your Name into all foreplay and no climax.

Nocturnal Animals (Tom Ford, 2016)

Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Shannon in Nocturnal Animals

Amy Adams in Nocturnal Animals

Susan Morrow: Amy Adams
Edward Sheffield / Tony Hastings: Jake Gyllenhaal
Bobby Andes: Michael Shannon
Ray Marcus: Aaron Taylor-Johnson
Laura Hastings: Isla Fisher
India Hastings: Ellie Bamber
Hutton Morrow: Armie Hammer
Lou: Karl Glusman
Turk: Robert Aramayo
Anne Sutton: Laura Linney
Samantha Morrow: India Menuez

Director: Tom Ford
Screenplay: Tom Ford
Based on a novel by Austin Wright
Cinematography: Seamus McGarvey
Production design: Shane Valentino
Film editing: Joan Sobel
Music: Abel Korzeniowski

Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams are two of our best actors, but even they can't do what writer-director Tom Ford calls on them for in Nocturnal Animals: pull the two halves of his movie into coherence. Part of the film is a savage satire on the art world's high end and its wealthy patrons. The other part is a story of sexual violence and revenge. Adams's Susan Morrow exists in the first part as a wealthy gallery owner in Los Angeles with a husband who is cheating on her. One day she receives a manuscript from her ex-husband, Edward Sheffield. It provides the second story, about Tony Hastings, who is waylaid by vicious young thugs while driving across West Texas by night. His wife, Laura, and his teenage daughter, India, are in the car with him, but Tony, who survives by hiding from the men, is unable to save Laura and India from being raped and murdered. With the help of Bobby Andes, a detective who is dying of lung cancer, he gets his revenge but, as they say, at a cost. As Susan reads the manuscript, she envisions Tony as Edward, whom she had betrayed by leaving him and aborting their child, then marrying the wealthy Hutton Morrow, with whom she has a now-grown daughter, Samantha. The story so disturbs Susan that she wonders why Edward chose to send it to her after so many years -- is this tale of revenge itself  a kind of threat? As well-done as the Tony Hastings story is, with strong performances by not only Gyllenhaal but also Michael Shannon as Andes and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the vicious Ray Marcus, it never comes into the same focus as the "real" story of Susan and the rather decadent art world in which she moves. That said, the best scene in the film may be the one in which Susan has lunch with her mother, a big-haired Texas grande dame played with finesse by Laura Linney. Ford has a way of tossing in secondary characters whose backstories sound potentially more interesting than the ones in the foreground. Nocturnal Animals is a disappointment, but only because it feels like it skims the surface of what it has to tell us.