Us, The Dead Don't Die, The Irishman

One long death rattle: The Irishman

Jordan Peele's Us is an overly mechanical successor to Get Out. In Get Out, the subtext of racism often threatened to overwhelm the narrative, but Peele provided enough characterization for his supporting cast to distract the audience from his machinations. Here only Lupita Nyong'o emerges with a rounded character or two. Once our heroine's family is confronted by sinister dopplegangers, the action descends into Whack-a-mole.

Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die suffers from a similarly rote feel. However, Jarmusch's deadpan style is better suited to his material than Peele's clenched hysteria. Jarmusch's sense of locale is also better. The film is marginal, but does not suffer from pretension despite its attempts at topicality.

Martin Scorsese's The Irishman is leagues above such ephemera. A meditation on toxic American masculinity and its decline, the film is among Scorsese's most nihilistic works. America's facade of democratic civility is shown to mask a murderer's row. Light resides only in infinite darkness.