Viola Davis takes the lead. (Images via 20th Century Fox)

With Widows, opening Friday, director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Shame) and writer Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) have delivered a rare animal — an Oscar-baiting thriller that offers all the action of a heist movie as well as organically interwoven ocial commentary. It's a blast.

"I'm dark, I'm 53, I'm in my natural hair – I'm in bed with Liam Neeson. And he's not my slave owner. I'm not a prostitute. We simply are a couple in love. I've never seen it before." pic.twitter.com/0vtaUM8338

— Diversity School (@DiverseSchool) November 10, 2018

Viola Davis is Veronica, a Chicago schools union rep married to a career criminal (Liam Neeson) who finds her cushy lifestyle — and her life — threatened when her man and his crew are immolated in a shoot-out at the end of a job gone wrong. He's gone, but so are the millions they had just stolen, and that means she will have to pay back the money's unrightful owner, a mobster running for alderman named Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry). Her only choice is to contact the other overnight widows whose men were killed along with hers and lean on them to help her pull off a heist of their own.

The plan is to steal a cache of stolen public funds that Veronica's dead husband detailed in a notebook he left behind.

How do you spell disbelief? (Images via Amazon Studies)

I'm becoming disenchanted.

I have a soft spot for the horror genre, but increasingly, it feels as if horror films that horror fans praise as brilliant are really just unapologetically of the genre; they're not necessariIy good films overall.

Case in point: Suspiria, which has generated enthusiasm among the crowd that had previously been wary of Luca Guadagnino remaking the 1977 Dario Argento classic. Yes, it's a serious entry in the genre, yes it is exquisitely well-shot and is taken as seriously as death by its talented cast, but it's also maddeningly dry, pretentious, nonsensical and relentlessly nihlistic. Like the far more over-praised Hereditary, it's claustrophobic claptrap. Unlike Hereditary, it's also embarrassingly self-indulgent filmmaking that proves the impossible — that too much of Tilda Swinton can be a bad thing.

Hedges, the boy erased (Images via Focus Features)

Boy Erased, based on Garrard Conley's 2016 memoir about his time in conversion therapy at the insistence of his religious parents, has been brought to the screen by producer, director, writer and actor Joel Edgerton, who has given the book an empathetic, sobering, unimaginative yet affecting adaptation that rises above its shortcomings to pack an emotional punch.

Lucas Hedges on His Sexual Orientation

Coming after the release of the gutsier The Miseducation of Cameron Post, whose protagonist and director are female, Boy Erased can't help but feel decidedly more conventional, focusing on the story of an attractive white male who endures a stint at Love in Action just long enough to discover it's a harmful fraud, and who is immediately delivered from its clutches — the end.

(Image via Making Montgomery Clift)

Playing at NewFest, Making Montgomery Clift is an utterly absorbing recasting of the image of the trailblazing actor by his nephew, one that meticulously pares away propaganda — Hollywood and otherwise — in place for decades that would have us believe Clift was a self-loathing gay man who all but killed himself.

Monty Clift was a new kind of emotional actor, one whose style was soon embraced by contemporaries James Dean and Marlon Brando. He made only 17 films, but they included such classics as The Heiress (1949), A Place in the Sun (1951) and From Here to Eternity (1953). His gayness was an open secret in Hollywood, and fairly jumps off the screen in many of his appearances; it's shocking that Red River (1948), with its gun-comparing scene between Monty and John Ireland, wasn't banned for promoting homosexuality.

(GIF via GIPHY)

So why does everybody think Clift drank himself to death in an increasingly tiny closet of his own making?

Massive Monty Photo Gallery!

Co-directors Robert Anderson Clift and Hillary Demmon had at their disposal an unprecedented amount of material for any subject, let alone one so private. Most compelling are the hour and hours (weeks?) worth of audio tapes made clandestinely by co-director Clift's dad, Monty's brother Brooks Clift. These pristine tapes (there is a momentary Capturing the Friedmans vibe as his son ponders why the tapes were so obsessively made) hold the private thoughts of Monty and his entire family, including his mother, a direct window into what made Clift — and the Clifts — tick.

Jordan Doww & Garrett Clayton (Image via movie still)

Reach, the teen family drama about suicide, bullying and drug addiction starring Garrett Clayton, has some bright spots that rise above quite a few strikes against it.

Book 'er (Image via Fox Searchlight)

Lee Israel (1939-2014) was a noted biographer who turned to selling forged literary letters — and famously got caught. Though she didn't live to see the film based on her confessional memoir, she couldn't have asked for a better or more empathy-generating actress than Melissa McCarthy to portray her. McCarthy (who replaced Julianne Moore) has a built-in charm that counteracts Israel's reputed anti-charm. Even though McCarthy studiously tamps down her appealingly broad persona, she can't help but make Israel into a sympathetic curmudgeon, albeit one who is portrayed in the script as brusque, rude and disloyal to everyone but her ailing cat.

In spite of those traits, we can't help but root for the disheveled wordsmith who can't compete with the Tom Clancys of the world.

(Image via 1985)

Director Yen Tan's 1985 is a painfully fleeting remembrance of a time when HIV was a death sentence, one that often left its victims too fearful to reach out for help, even to their own families.

ABOVE: For him, a chill Sunday. For us, time to overheat.

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