Jeffrey Wright

You don't have to press very hard for me to admit that Jeffrey Wright is among my top five favorite actors -- Joaquin Phoenix, Tilda Swinton, Viola Davis, post-Potter Daniel Radcliffe being the other four. I've not seen everything Wright has done (he seems to be everywhere and in everything) but in all that I have seen he is immersed and controlled, no superfluous motion or affect, a joy to watch. I remember first seeing him in Ang Lee's Ride with the Devil, in which he played a former slave attached to a young Reb fighting Union soldiers in Missouri. I then went backwards and sought out Julian Schnabel's Basquiat, the biopic of the legendary street artist. I saw him in Topdog/Underdog on Broadway with Yasiin Bey (Mos Def at the time) in 2002 and a year later he was starring in Angels in America on HBO. Wright won a Golden Globe for playing multiple roles but primarily the nurse Belize, arguably playwright Tony Kushner's alter ego, and had won a Tony for his Broadway performances. I know nearly nothing about Wright aside from what I see on the screen ... and that he was also born in D.C. Homeboy.

The Peanut Butter Falcon

Tyler Nilson and Mike Schwartz's touching road movie The Peanut Butter Falcon stars Shia LaBeouf and Dakota Johnson, imperfect strangers helping an abandoned man with Down Syndrome (Zack Gottsagen) find family while searching for his hero, a minor wrestler in the North Carolina Tidewater. Nilson and Schwartz, who also wrote the screenplay, keep the tone light throughout but do not dull the picture's messages about acceptance and affirmation. An especially wonderful set piece midway through involves a blind backwater preacher and baptizer offering the travelers the chance to wash away the past and start new, a clear foreshadowing of the film's second act.

Blinded By The Light

Gurinder Chadha's Blinded By The Light takes giddy exuberance seriously in recreating the late '80s story of a Pakistani-British youth (a charmingly earnest Viveik Kalra) who is inspired by Bruce Springsteen's universalization of human life to dream of a world beyond his bigoted, stifling town. It’s not the freshest of storylines but Kalra’s young cast mates (Nell Williams, Aaron Phagura and Dean-Charles Chapman) are toothy and appealing, the conflicts and villains are broadly brushed and the closing 10 minutes a calculated weepfest of affirmation and reconciliation. No, there’s not enough of Springsteen’s music but enough synth pop to last several lifetimes.

True Detective Season Three

Mahershala Ali is a Hollywood A-lister whose performances exude discipline and craft. He strikes me as an actor who studies, prepares, presents, all with deliberation and precision. In True Detective Season Three, Ali is an Arkansas detective during three time periods in the complicated case of the disappearance of two children, a brother and sister. He and his partner (Stephen Dorff) follow clues, draw conclusions, chase red herrings, arrest, release, rethink and revisit, while the bodies of those surrounding the case pile up. This is a particularly challenging part because Ali's character must maintain the same fiercely individualistic core while being shaped by family, co-workers and criminals against a backdrop of personality politics, class and race. His most impressive work is as the aged detective, battling dementia while trying to answer lingering questions: primarily, what was done, by whom and why.

The Boys

Amazon Prime's The Boys' rattling cynicism about the human propensity for greed and deception (especially when those humans are "special") is balanced by the series' crackling humor and cockeyed proposition that "normal," clear-eyed folks who give a damn can indeed save the world.

Fast amd Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw

Director David Leitch's marauding Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs and Shaw plows through a messy tale of biological re-engineering and tattered family ties without a hint of self-consciousness. It's all roaring engines, snapping alpha dogs and crushing close quarters combat. Fun.