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.

Inspired by true events – or, as an opening title card explains, “based upon some fo' real, fo' real sh*t – BlacKkKlansman is a police procedural, a thriller, a comedy, a celebration of black identity, an indictment of white nationalism, and a rallying cry against more than a century's worth of media and public complacency, misrepresentation, and offense. Being a Spike Lee joint, the movie's stunning success on these and additional levels isn't necessary a surprise.