Review: Jordan Peele's "Us" Is a Colossal Cinematic Achievement

The success of Jordan Peele's 2017 film, "Get Out," bought him time, he said, in a recent interview with Le Monde--for his new film, "Us," he had twice as many shoot days. The expanded time frame allowed him to produce a work of expanded ambition: "Us" bounces back and forth between 1986 and the present day, and its action, compared to "Get Out," has a vast range--geographical, dramatic, and intellectual. The movie's imaginative spectrum is enormous, four-dimensionally so: it delves deep into a literal underground world that lends the hallucinatory concept of the "sunken place" from "Get Out" a physical embodiment. And it captures the transformative, radical power of a political conscience, of an idea long held in secret, as it ripens and develops over decades' worth of time. "Us" is nothing short of a colossal achievement.