Knives Out (Johnson, 2019)

Rating: 7/10 (2 March 2020)

"The guy practically lives inside a Clue board."
2019 was truly the year of "Gordon Lightfoot's 'Sundown' playing in movies" and "people singing Sondheim at random in movies."
Fun movie! Probably could have been truly brilliant if it didn't feel the constant need to superficially Address the Current Moment™ (look, this character is an Instagram influencer! And this one's an alt-right troll! This one likes Trump, even though we're not explicitly using his name! Isn't this politically salient and timely?!) Especially since that stuff never actually figures into the plot in any way and it amounts to just an onslaught of familiar sociocultural references we can all back-pat ourselves for recognizing. "Clue for the modern era" sounds great on paper, but I feel like it could've been done with a tad more panache than this.
Still really good, though! Craig doing Rust Cohle-by-way-of-Foghorn Leghorn was easily the highlight for me-though Chris Evans has a few all-timer line deliveries and can rock a wool sweater like nobody's business. M. Emmet Walsh and Frank Oz get almost nothing to do but it was nice to see them show up anyway.