Monsters and Men Is a Timely Look at the Quiet Courage Needed to Confront Systemic Racism

CW: References to police brutality ahead 

Monsters and Men is a 2018 feature from writer/director Reinaldo Marcus Green that was intended to be inspired by the death of Eric Garner. Though we don't technically see the death of the Eric Garner stand-in at any point in Monsters and Men, pieces of dialogue (particularly mention of the now-deceased person being murdered by police for selling cigarettes) make it clear who this story is about. Of course, Eric Garner is not the first Black person to die at the hands of the police. Acts of violence on the parts of police officers motivated by racism have been going on since basically the police were invented. They've also certainly been rampant in the six years since Garner's death.

The Old Man & The Gun Is The Newest Exceptional Directorial Effort From David Lowery

This is the third straight year that director David Lowery has delivered a new film and they're all quite different creatures. 2016 saw him enter the world of family movie filmmaking with the excellent Pete's Dragon, in 2017 he did an avant-garde exploration of life & death with A Ghost Story and now in 2018 he's delivered The Old Man & The Gun, which covers some common thematic ground with A Ghost Story. Specifically, both are wistful tales of how our own lives can impact others even after we're gone, though his newest directorial effort covers this material in a more light-hearted dialogue-heavy manner compared to the stripped-down nature of A Ghost Story.

Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman Is A Triumphant Examination Of Past & Present Racism

Far too many American movies dealing with racism in America's past do so, usually with a Caucasian white savior protagonist in tow, with the purpose of reassuring white moviegoers that "Everything is fine now, look how much better things are now compared to the past!" Horrors of the past and the lives of the disenfranchised who had to endure the brunt of such horrors are reduced to being simply a way to reassure privileged members of present-day society that everything related to race in the modern world is cool, everything is fine. That's certainly not the case with Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, which is all about using a story about a black cop infiltrating a KKK charter to explore how racist horrors of the past still heavily influence a modern-day world where bigotry runs rampant.