A to Z Challenge 2020 - G

Gifted (2017)
Director: Marc Webb
Starring: Chris Evans, Mckenna Grace, Octavia Spencer
Brief Thoughts: Some of you might know that I spent a fair bit of the last few years helping raise my niece. The process of that ending was (and remains) difficult for me to process. Gifted, although depicting different circumstances, has helped me cope with it. Good spotlight for Chris Evans, too.

Gone Baby Gone (2007)
Director: Ben Affleck
Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Monaghan, Morgan Freeman, Ed Harris
Brief Thoughts: Ben Affleck, as a director, became far better known for The Town and Argo, but I think I’ll always prefer this, in part because, along with one of my all-time favorite movies, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, it helped establish Casey Affleck as a movie star. Casey and Michelle Monaghan play private investigators from a series of books by Dennis Lehane, who at the turn of the millennium was Hollywood’s favorite author. Being from New England, I also like movies set in Boston (so that’s another reason I really love The Departed). Plus there’s a huge twist involving Morgan Freeman, which is nice to see, as far as Freeman stretching himself a little goes...

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Director: Wes Anderson
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, millions of others
Brief Thoughts: A couple years ago I fell instantly and emphatically in love with Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, not because I’ve always been a huge fan of Anderson but because I’ve been an admirer watching the products of his vivid imagination unfold over the years. He’s one of the truly consummate filmmaking artists working today. Grand Budapest Hotel itself is breathtaking, and perhaps if I’d watched it sooner would have been the tipping point. Plus, Anderson is a wizard of casting. He can get the most interesting actors in the smallest of roles. You can watch this one for that alone. It’s astonishing, basically on nearly every level.

Gringo (2018)
Director: Nash Edgerton
Starring: David Oyelowo, Joel Edgerton, Charlize Theron, Thandie Newton, Sharlto Copley, Amanda Seyfried
Brief Thoughts: A lot of people, who bothered to note that Gringo happened at all, dismissed it as bafflingly racist. But the point of a farce is absurdity, and there has been no recent film example of farce as comically absurd as Gringo. Where we most often complain loudly and lamely about the things we don’t like in society, this is the kind of film that reflects in hilarious terms how loud and lame society is, and perhaps by extension, lampoons the very people who were never going to understand it.