Get Out (2017)
The most important thing that needs to be said about this film is that Armond White is an incredible dick. I was all set to make a joke about how of course the one critic to pan Get Out is named White and then I found out that he's an African-American man. That doesn't make his critical opinion of the film somehow more biting. It is not random that his review of Get Out appeared in the National Review, a conservative magazine, because his response to this is the role that people like Clarence Thomas, Allen West or Ben Carson have long played. He finds his niche giving comfort to the comfortable on issues of race. Indeed, in his conception, the villain here is Jordan Peele for daring to make white folk uncomfortable with accusations of racial bias.
Long before the film take a turn for the outright horror, it marinates us in the uneasy. It is a cold war of microaggressions that we fear, or fear on behalf of the protagonist, could erupt into a hot war at any moment. Because that is (we take, being white I cannot speak of experience) what it is like to be Black. It is a narrow line between that extra bit of scrutiny a professed woke white person might nevertheless offer and George Zimmerman feeling the need to play cop. Armond White critiques the film as shallow, but that's because he doesn't want to accept its depths and the way it not only contextualizes black paranoia but takes a curious twist on cultural appropriation. Race in America is a great point of tension, and Peele adapts it into the genre that is all about tension.
It feels patronizing to praise this as a great debut film, it is essentially flawless, and likely will remain one of best, if not the best, films of the year.