It made history as the first foreign language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and director Bong Joon-ho is a big reason why it deserves that honor. He illustrates the differences between the upper and lower classes through complex yet subtle filming techniques, such as by dividing two actors with a vertical line hidden in the set. Yet there’s more symbolic imagery: Water represents capitalism pushing the already poor further down the economic ladder while those already high up get to remain above the rising floods. The poor people are always looking down at things while the rich people never look down at anything, and to enhance that detail, the poor people behave in ways that are comparable to bugs.
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Making the gears grind for the intense symbolic imagery required lots of preplanning and visual effects work, starting with the street of the poor neighborhood, which was built entirely from scratch inside a massive water tank. The house of the rich people was made up of the most expensive décor the set dressers could find while the exterior of that house was two separate sets combined digitally with the upper-level set on top of the lower-level set. The extreme expertise of how Parasite was concocted, as well as the moral grey in every single character, is evidence enough as to why this heavily entertaining art film deserves its title as the best movie of 2019.

Of all the slasher films that started their own endless franchises, Scream is perhaps the best of all of them. With its self-aware storytelling that cleverly mixes humor and terror, it leads to no surprise that the movie’s original title was going to be, "Scary Movie.” Its plot revolves around a bunch of teenagers who love scary movies and ultimately are forced to face the very scenarios from the genre they claim to know so much about, and on the way, every cliché of the slasher genre is addressed. In fact, the script is so self-aware that director Wes Craven even includes critical references to himself and the movies he’s directed!
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Yet this film also works as an excellent showcase of generating fear, as established by the famous opening scene where Drew Barrymore’s character is the victim of a tense phone call. The rest of the cast was full of actors who were well-known on television until starring in this movie helped launch their careers on the big screen. But the real star of this genre-defining piece of entertainment is its chilling soundtrack, which kicks up the adrenaline as it turns the suburban setting into a massive house of horror. It’s hard to think of anyone who wouldn’t get the creeps from watching Wes Craven’s masterpiece, a movie that made future slasher films lean more toward the real world instead of the supernatural.

R (DLSV)
Horror/Thriller
1 hr. 51 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY.
​Watch it to feel AFRAID.

It was Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, a surprise blockbuster that experimented with what can be considered entertainment in a post #BlackLivesMatter world. Peele got the idea to make this movie when everyone started to believe racism was over after Obama became president, and this idea resulted in a motion picture that provides commentary on serious topics while still being fun entertainment for the masses. Peele pulls that off with the ways he orchestrates the audience’s fear; there are the familiar cinematic elements such as shaky cam, dark lighting, extreme closeups, and creepy music, but this steps it up with its treatment of the “Sunken Place,” which represents the metaphorical place people from minority groups cannot speak because White supremacists have marginalized them.
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It’s also worth mentioning how, unlike other horror films, the characters here use common sense to get out of danger, which gives it the needed layer of authenticity and credibility to the way it represents what it’s like being Black in an all-White setting. There’s really so much that Get Out will change about the entire movie industry, but the biggest change will be its evidence that movies about Blackness could indeed do great critically and financially, even when marketed to a primarily White audience. That in turn will open the door for more talented artists who are outside the racial majority and are in the most overdue need of attention.

R (DLV)
Horror/Thriller
1 hr. 44 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to THINK.
Watch it to LEARN.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY and AFRAID.