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TV: Legion – A. From the showrunner of TV’s excellent Fargo, an X-Men origin story with shades of Wes Anderson. I’ll review it when I’ve finished the first season.

Movie: Get Out – A

Book: Mothering Sunday by Graham Swift – A.

On Mothering Sunday (the religious precursor of the commercial Mother’s Day) in the English countryside in 1924, 22-year-old housemaid Jane has an assignation with Paul, the son of the owners of the neighboring estate. They’ve been having an affair for seven years. He is getting married in two weeks to the daughter of the owners of another estate. This is the last time they will ever see each other again.

It sounds heart-rending, and it is heart-rending, but that’s just the beginning. Graham Swift’s short, exquisite novel is about the English class system, sex, and loss (Jane never knew her parents; her employer’s sons died in WWI and so did Paul’s two brothers). It’s about the stories we invent about ourselves, the stories we find ourselves in, and how stories can be true even when the pieces are made up. It’s about becoming a writer.

(I especially recommend this novel to readers who love Atonement.)

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They really should’ve thought of a more intriguing title because Life could mean anything. In this context it refers to the discovery of the first extraterrestrial biological entity, and its needs are more basic than phoning home. I just realized another admirable thing about E.T.—the filmmakers weren’t interested in turning it into a franchise. Life can’t be turned into a franchise because one already exists. It’s called Alien by Ridley Scott, and its next iteration opens this year.

Faster and less queasy-claustrophobic than Alien, and minus a ginger cat named Jonesy, Life stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson and Ryan Reynolds as three of six crew on the International Space Station. You know the ISS—it’s the one that was destroyed in a meteor shower in Gravity, stranding Sandra Bullock in space. The players are all stock characters, with the exception of Jake’s Dr. Jordan (Green Lantern joke?), who doesn’t want to go back to earth, which makes us curious about his history. The most interesting thing about the monster is its name, Calvin. Ryan Reynolds makes wiseass comments (the script is by the Deadpool guys). There are grisly deaths and foiled plans.

We’ve all seen this stuff before, and director Daniel Espinosa knows we’ve all seen it before so he doesn’t pummel the audience into submission. We get 100 minutes of entirely predictable but still effective thrills, just enough to make us wonder what might’ve happened if the filmmakers had more ambition. It does bring up an interesting question: What are the NASA protocols for this scenario? I hope they have protocols, because if they’re as unprepared as the crew in the movie, our species is screwed.

If you have 100 minutes to kill and you want to get out of the blistering heat, watch it.

Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams (Marnie from Girls) star in Jordan Peele’s Get Out

You need to see this movie. It’s genuinely scary and funny AND it tackles oppression without once mentioning oppression. It’s consciousness-raising without the lecture. People who fancy themselves broad-minded think that because they voted for Obama, idolize black athletes and have black friends, they can’t possibly be racist, but benign racism is particularly insidious. (And the movie is produced by the studio that made Insidious.) Some of the horror comes from the shock of recognition.

Director Jordan Peele takes your expectations and turns them on their heads. Unrelentingly clever and expertly orchestrated, Get Out is required viewing for the year 2017. Bravo.

It’s heartwarming, discovering that clever people whose work we admire can be just as stupid about money as we are.

Richard Linklater, the director of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight and many other movies we love, explains why he’s glad he got downsized.

Anthony Bourdain seems to have all the answers, but when he was 44 he had never had a savings account, hadn’t filed taxes in 10 years, and was AWOL on his AmEx bill.

Movie: Kong: Skull Island

Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ reboot of King Kong is not bad—it’s an entertaining way to pass two hours plus, and the monsters are properly monstrous. Samuel Jackson is just parodying himself now—I guess he’ll only bring it for Quentin Tarantino—but the extended hommage to Apocalypse Now is amusing, down to the name of the ex-SAS tracker played by Tom Hiddleston (Conrad). The Marlon Brando-Kurtz character is divided between Jackson who does menacing bonkers and John C. Reilly, who lives with the locals and does benign bonkers. All fine actors, as is Oscar-winning Brie Larson, but the best actor in the movie is Kong, motion capture work by Toby Kebbell. He wins the macho power pose-off paws down. (Kebbell, a memorable Koba in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, is the heir apparent to Andy Serkis’s mocap throne.)

But as those of us who dutifully sat through the end credits were reminded, Kong: Skull Island is the beginning of yet another franchise—I gather Mothra and King Ghidorah are in our moviegoing future. This upteenth reboot was not necessary, it’s just business. The 1933 original by Cooper and Schoedsack is still the essential version, though I have a special fondness for the King Kong remake of my childhood starring Jessica Lange and Jeff Bridges. Lange was so fabulous, as my friend Raul puts it: “Sana ako na lang ang kinidnap ng unggoy.”

Book: Autumn by Ali Smith

A very old man wakes up, thinks he is in the afterlife, finds his body is young again. A woman tries to get her passport renewed, is told her head in the photo is the wrong size. When she was a child she was great friends with the old man, who lived next door and collected “arty art”. Now he lives in a hospice, where he is expected to die, and she visits him regularly and reads to him. The Brexit vote has just happened, and a pall has descended over the land.

These are some of the elements of Ali Smith’s latest novel, part of a series on the seasons. It’s been called the first great Brexit novel, and it captures the queasy aftermath of that event but is so much more. Like her previous novel How To Be Both, Autumn is about time itself. It’s astounding. Every other page there’s a paragraph, a turn of phrase that seems to open up a portal to another place, another era. It’s time travel disguised as a novel. I love it. I would work for free as Ali Smith’s typist, just to read her work before everyone else does.

Natalie Portman in Jackie

Movies I’ve seen in the past month

Logan – A (See review)

American Pastoral – D. For his directorial debut Ewan McGregor had the nerve to adapt a Philip Roth novel, but not the grasp of Roth’s fury or the chops to do the material justice. Devoid of Roth-ness, American Pastoral is a family melodrama that could’ve happened anywhere at anytime. The usually luminous Jennifer Connelly and Dakota Fanning come off as shrill, and Ewan is his charming self, but empty.

Denial – C. The real-life case of an American historian (Rachel Weisz) who takes on a Holocaust denier (Timothy Spall, who can go from repulsive to almost sympathetic in a snap) is rendered as an earnest TV movie of the week, and by TV I mean pre-21st century television, before TV took over from movies as the primary medium of the visual storyteller. Tom Wilkinson and Andrew Scott are the lawyers who counsel the historian not to speak at her own trial as it would legitimize the denier’s lies. Or as they are called today by the White House, alternative facts.

Loving – B. Another factual case: In the 1960s the interracial Mr and Mrs Loving (Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga) break the state of Virginia’s law against mixed marriages and their case goes all the way to the Supreme Court. Like Hidden Figures, Loving reminds us of how recently the civil rights movement happened, and how quickly its gains might be undone by a lunatic on Twitter.

Ruth Negga and Joel Edgerton in Loving.

Jackie – A-. When Natalie Portman opens her mouth and that breathy baby voice with the strange enunciation comes out it’s unnerving, but a quick trip to YouTube will show that that is exactly how Jackie Kennedy spoke. Driven by Portman’s awesome technical achievement, Pablo Larrain’s Jackie is the story of a woman underestimated by everyone, who at the worst time of her life demonstrates that she understands better than anyone how history is made.

Book: Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Like her more experimental previous novel NW, Zadie Smith’s Swing Time follows kids who grow up on a council estate in London and make their way in the world. This time the kids are two girls who meet in dance class. One can really dance and makes it to the chorus line; the other becomes a personal assistant to a hysterically famous pop diva who decides to use her money and influence to do good in Africa. Swing Time is a riveting, insightful and often moving study of female friendship through the lenses of race, education and money. It hits all the hot topics of the moment: feminism, cultural appropriation, pop stars trying to change the world, and makes them intimate and personal. If literature’s job is to explain us to ourselves, Smith does it beautifully.

This week’s reading: Autumn by Ali Smith