“Was it all just a dream?” Those were the first words uttered by an off-screen Michael Moore in his 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore's incensed indictment of George W. Bush's first years in office (and, because it's Moore, a bunch of other things, too). Those same words, not at all coincidentally, open Moore's new Fahrenheit 11/9, the numerically swapped title a reference to the day in 2016 that Donald J. Trump was officially named our nation's president. The difference between those identically worded openers, though, lies in the timbre of Moore's voice. In 9/11, he was recognizably sardonic and faux ingenuous, following the question with snarky references to Ben Affleck and Robert De Niro. In 11/9, however, “Was it all just a dream?” sounds like the lament of a truly sad, incredulous man – one who can't believe that, 14 years later, he's forced to ask the same damned question again, and likely to ever-less-receptive ears.

Few likely remember it, but back in 1985, Susan Sarandon starred in a movie titled Compromising Positions, an utterly charming mystery-comedy in which a suburban homemaker becomes an amateur sleuth investigating the murder of her dentist. Director Frank Perry's film is a sharp, funny trifle with an astounding supporting cast of Broadway talents – Raul Julia, Judith Ivey, Joe Mantegna, Joan Allen, Edward Herrmann, Mary Beth Hurt – and totally worth a watch on YouTube. (It's easier to sit through if you can ignore the film's rather blatant mid-'80s misogyny.) But I hadn't thought about that movie in years, if not decades – not until director Paul Feig's irresistible mystery-comedy A Simple Favor kept bringing it to mind.

It's almost inconceivable, and a little perverse, that the same actor who was so convincing as a Jewish bookkeeper in Schindler's List, the heroine's father in Anne Frank, and freakin' Moses could also be wholly persuasive as Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect behind Hitler's Final Solution. But considering his additional screen roles have ranged from Mahatma Gandhi to gangster Meyer Lansky to film pioneer Georges Méliès, Ben Kingsley has always demonstrated a virtuosic talent for playing ethnically diverse real-life figures – a skill that's both the chief pleasure and biggest moral hazard in the engaging, slightly infuriating post-war thriller Operation Finale.

Much has been made in the press about how the romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians, based on Kevin Kwan's 2013 bestseller, is the first Hollywood movie since 1993's The Joy Luck Club to boast an almost universally Asian and Asian-American cast. To be sure, this is a milestone worth celebrating – if also lamenting. (Representation of this sort took another quarter-century why, exactly?) But getting lost in the conversation is the fact that in addition to being a charming entertainment, the weekend's top-grossing film at nationwide cineplexes is, I'm forced to admit, unbridled pornography. Granted, it's luxury porn, and sometimes food porn, but a deliberate turn-on nonetheless.