What Oscar forgot: Finding Teyonah Parris' formation in Chi-raq

If anything, himself. 

First, Spike Lee’s Chi-raq (2015) is, especially upon one’s first viewing, an uneven, or at least unwieldly movie, and reactions to the film reveal it as such. After all, while the film garners only a 5.7 rating on IMDB, the film also topped Paste Magazine and The NewYorker’s best films of the year lists. The metamorphic girth of this satire makes it typical of Spike Lee’s artistic wheelhouse, which has less to do with George Lucas pastiche and Stephen Spielberg perfection than Woody Allen’s strolling rants. Even more, Spike Lee’s New York sensibility—his ranting away from traditional plot structures and streamlined coherence—places him in constellation with African-American satirists doubling as novelists.

Fourteen films I'll remember having watched in 2014

There's only so much time to work, play, or whatever in a year. I could pretend I saw all the best films or all the latest films in 2014, but I didn't. Still, the calendar makes us think about how we used our time working, playing, or whatevering. The following is a list of fourteen films that will stick with me (whether they were released in the last year or decades earlier):