Thoughtful Heist Movie Widows Is The Very Best Kind of Expansive Cinema

Widows is so jam-packed with so many plotlines, themes, and social commentary that it feels like it shouldn't work at all, this should be the quintessential case of an overstuffed movie that people refer to as something that should have been an HBO miniseries instead.  A heist thriller with so much going on at once really does sound like it should be the kind of ambitious project that exceeds an artists grasp. Instead, Widows is more than just "not overstuffed", it's phenomenal cinema from top-to-bottom, an immensely impressive achievement that, like an expert magician pulling a tablecloth off a table without disrupting any items actually on the table, manages to do the seemingly impossible so effortlessly.

Gone Girl Review

My procedure for movies based on books is to not give the literature that inspired the feature a read prior to seeing the film. It's not that I'm against books in general, it's just that I want to treat the film as a separate entity as much as possible. Gone Girl adds an interesting facet to this tactic though by having Gillian Flynn, the woman who wrote the book that this movie is based on, write the films screenplay. If her books are anything like this films writing in terms of quality, I'll be sure to check out any and all of her work ASAP.