Judge, Juror #2, and Executioner

A little ragamuffin – strong willed, feisty and wily, finds himself waking up on a bench at a train station with his older brother nowhere in sight. With his mother at home, he shouts for his missing brother, but nothing comes of it. He searches an abandoned train, only to fall asleep sometime in the night. When he wakes, the still empty train is moving. When it finally stops, he finds himself in Calcutta, nearly two thousand miles away from his hometown, not knowing the Bengali language or having anywhere to turn. It is this bizarre and unfortunate circumstance that is the genesis and heart of the story Lion, first time filmmaker Garth Davis’ moving drama. The young boy is Saroo (Sunny Pawar), his fatherly older brother is Guddu (Abhishek Bharate), and his caring impoverished mother is Kamla (Priyanka Bose). Though theirs is a tough life in a rural Indian town, filled with hardship and many struggles, love permeates their family.

Utilizing the same name as the quaint village in which it is set, Manchester by the Sea depicts the lives of a family struggling with the recent death of a father and brother. The story follows Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a man wallowing in a morass of pain, sorrow and apathy. The quiet, introverted gent works as a handyman in Quincy, Massachusetts, though soon gets a call that his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) is in the hospital. Rushing to Manchester, with its clapboard houses and brisk, windy, wintery weather, he is too late. Having the unenviable task of tracking down his nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges) to tell him the dispiriting news (he finds him at hockey practice), he soon discovers that his brother has left him in charge of raising the sixteen year old. While in the picturesque locale, people point, stare, whisper and snarl at the former resident (a mystery that will, in its own fine time, be revealed).

Based upon a stage play, Denzel Washington utilizes August Wilson’s adaptation of his own drama Fences to tell an engrossing story of an African American family growing up in the 1950s. Both literal and figurative, Troy Maxson (Washington) is building a fence in his backyard, though it is also a symbolic barrier placed up to guard against his own projections of the impending Grim Reaper (fighting off a serious case of pneumonia, aka. Death, at a young age, he is constantly vigilant for his return – though not afraid in the least). He enjoys the chess match that they play over time. It is also a powerful allegory for the walls he builds between himself and different members of his family. On the opposite spectrum, it is also a way for his wife Rose (Viola Davis) to put up something that will protect her family, keeping them safe on the inside, while keeping unwanted dangers at bay.

Born out of the horrors of World War II, famed British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger released A Matter of Life or Death one year after the conclusion of the hostilities. Cleverly evoking the complexities of the era, the writer/director team fuse together multiple themes that, in some way, make sense of love, life, death, Heaven and the wounds that soldiers suffered during the traumatic affair. Beginning on a grand celestial scale, we are brought forth to an intimate, heartbreaking moment when British Royal Air Force Squadron Leader Peter Carter (David Niven), after ordering his crew to bail out (letting them know that he will soon follow), reveals to an American radio operator, June (Kim Hunter), that his plane is crashing and he has no parachute. His smooth vocals, grievous situation and stiff upper lip attitude leave the woman distraught, and the two fall in love by way of the irregular circumstance. Leaving his dead friend Bob (Robert Coote) on the plane, Carter leaps into the pea soup thick fog just off the English coastline.

Moonlight, one of the most lauded films of the year 2016, depicts a world that feels near inescapable. Set in an impoverished neighbourhood in Miami, our protagonist, a confused, introverted, gay African American boy named Chiron, is trapped in a world where his mother is a crack addict, his role model is the one selling the drugs to her, and he is brutally bullied for not fitting the mould. The film is broken up into three parts, ‘Little’, ‘Chiron’ and ‘Black’, each a name and iteration of the main character’s life. ‘Little’ (Alex Hibbert) is a shy young boy, introverted and different from those energetic, bombastic kids around him. His mother, Paula (Naomie Harris), is a verbally abusive single mother (though she has moments of maternal caring), stuck in an endless cycle of drug abuse. With no father at home, Little gravitates toward Juan (Mahershala Ali), as well as his girlfriend Teresa (Janelle Monáe). Juan is a drug dealer in charge of those selling on the street corners of the ghetto. A complex figure, he sees that the boy is different and truly wants to give him a hand up, yet is a huge part of the problem. Quiet moments of mentorship and advice abound, like when Little says he hates his mother. Juan, simply states "I bet you do. I hated my mom too. Miss her like hell now, though."