Popeye the Sailor (1933)

The Lego Movie achieves great humor and story with a combination of childish comedy, adult references, irony, and by subverting popular movie tropes.

This short film was an overall creative success.

White audiences saw Peola’s mixed-race passing as a Black woman’s struggle to be white. Black audiences saw it as the rebellion of a Black woman trying to gain privileges only given to white people.

These confines won’t really encourage you to read the film as a metaphor for the nerve-inducing experience we’ve all been through over the last year, however — and in the interest of maintaining your dignity, you probably shouldn’t. While the sociopolitical commentary may have worked for the similarly-themed Buried (2010), in which we find Ryan Reynolds on his own buried alive in the Middle East, but this futuristic take on the premise is best left as a piece of distracting entertainment. Nevertheless, the atmosphere is no less suffocating, literally and dramatically.

During the third act, the momentum stalls, largely due to the film’s obsession with Kubrick’s visual design. But all in all, Doctor Sleep is a cinematic success, defined by rich characters and high powered emotion.

Its predictability shouldn’t distract from the enjoyment that the pure cinematic imagination behind the camera elicits. It is a movie of crises both moral and mortal, oozing with CGI, and thoroughly enjoyable.