Labor Day roundup: Onslaught, Fall 2: Deadpoint, The Sun Never Sets, and Finding Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adria Arjona in Onslaught; Harriet Slater in Fall 2: Deadpoint; Dakota Fanning in The Sun Never Sets; Angourie Rice in Finding Emily

Hollywood generally dismisses Labor Day Weekend as a dead zone—a dumping ground for thinly marketed fare that studios forgot to release in January. In its history, the holiday has hosted exactly one smash hit (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), while only two other films (The Equalizer 3 and Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake) have ever topped $20M for the Friday-Sunday window. This year was no different—the highest-grossing new release was By Any Means, which pulled in just $7.5M, and which I skipped on account of it starring Mark Wahlberg—but the September slate nonetheless provided a range of odd and diverse pictures. Only one is, y’know, good, but two others are at least worth seeing, and all four are conceptually worthwhile.

Onslaught. The only thing worse than the screenplay in Onslaught is the hairstyling. Adria Arjona, one of the most desirable women in the world, is afflicted with a tangled mane, suggesting that her survivalist heroine devoted all of her budget turning her mobile home into a roving armory and thus can’t afford a comb. Drew Starkey, the handsome actor who has recently engaged in steamy on-screen romances with both Daniel Craig (in Queer) and Anya Taylor-Joy (on TV’s Lucky), sports a blond mohawk that he appears to have trimmed with a cleaver. And Dan Stevens, who embodied aesthetic male perfection in I’m Your Man, is fitted with a frightening bald cap framed by tufts of white follicles. The movie places a handful of ordinary citizens in a nightmarish situation, desperate for deliverance, but what they truly need is less a savior than a barber. Read More

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The Dog Stars review: His Bark Is Worse Than His Blight

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jacob Elordi and his Belgian Malinois in The Dog Stars

It’s been five years since Ridley Scott made a good movie (The Last Duel), but that hasn’t stopped him from trying. Undaunted by age, the 88-year-old Briton keeps cranking out handsome, nobly ambitious period pieces: a biopic of a fashion designer (House of Gucci), a military epic about a tyrant (Napoleon), a long-awaited return to the Colosseum (Gladiator II). (IMDb currently assigns Scott to eight upcoming titles in varying stages of development.) Now he’s back (to the future!) with The Dog Stars, a somber post-apocalyptic thriller that’s temporally different from his recent work, but qualitatively similar. It occasionally approximates an interesting movie, yet it’s ultimately forgettable.

To the extent The Dog Stars resonates at all, it does so metatextually. Based on novel by Peter Heller (the screenwriter is Mark L. Smith, whose uneven résumé includes Twisters and The Revenant; Christopher Wilkinson receives a “writer” credit), the film takes place in a depopulated landscape whose remnants of civilization—dilapidated buildings swarmed by vines, highways littered with rusty cars—will appear familiar to viewers of dystopian fiction. But while the movie is appropriately spare with backstory—a virus spread, and people died—its fanciful premise is nonetheless unsettling, given that here in reality, our nation’s top health official is a worm-infested eugenicist whose mission is to eradicate vaccines. Earlier in August, the “sex purge” concept of One Night Only seemed less ridiculous than it otherwise might have; three weeks later, Scott’s vision of a world ravaged by a pandemic plays eerily like prophecy. Imaginary futures feel less distant than they used to. Read More

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Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma review: Everything Reminds Me of Slasher

Jeremy BeckReviews
Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

You could spend an hour watching the first three minutes of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Jane Schoenbrun’s fascinating, frustrating new whatsit. After its brief and exaggeratedly bloody cold open—an actor receives facial touch-ups, then slaughters a few nitwits, producing geysers of red fluid—the movie revs into its title sequence, revealing the prior scene as in-universe footage from the titular low-budget horror flick. With speed and precision, Schoenbrun communicates a half-century of meta lore by way of a blizzard of media artifacts: piles of faded VHS tapes, dusty old newspaper appraisals, chintzy arcade games, screenshots of online verticals. It’s a blindingly fast montage that cleanly situates Camp Miasma as a fictional variant of durable franchises like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and other species of endlessly rebooted IP, one whose initial acclaim gradually gave way to hacky sequelized bloat. It’s an immersive introduction that also presents a thorny challenge: Can Schoenbrun say anything new about the slasher picture?

Kind of. Schoenbrun is an obvious student of the subgenre, and their excavation of its history is peppered with winking touches and loving references, even as it spikes that affection with suspicion. Yet while Teenage Sex—the real 2026 film, as distinct from Camp Miasma, the diegetic 1980s one—is decidedly brainy and innovative, it is also occasionally self-satisfied and ultimately incoherent. But it is watchable, and it’s plainly the product of a thoughtful and idiosyncratic creative voice. It may not be a great movie, but it’s one hell of a Criterion booklet. Read More

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The End of Oak Street review: Where Goes the Neighborhood

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anne Hathaway, Christian Convery, Maisy Stella, and Jordan Alexa Davis in The End of Oak Street

On the surface, everything looks perfect: sunny skies, verdant lawns, beaming kids. “You’ve got a great family,” a man says to Greg Platt (Ewan McGregor) as his wife and two children frolic at a local barbecue. But while outside observers might perceive Greg and Denise (Anne Hathaway) as the joint head of an idyllic nuclear household, a few strained glances and terse words reveal otherwise. His extra shifts as a pizza deliveryman aren’t paying the bills, she’s secretly channeling her resentments into a novel, and they’re rarely on the same page, whether socially or financially. They certainly can’t afford Cornell’s tuition for their daughter (Maisy Stella, from My Old Ass), who’s discovering that quoting Carl Sagan doesn’t impress pretty girls. Their son (The Monkey’s Christian Convery), is “acting out” and seems more comfortable playing with their rambunctious blue heeler than with his peers. They seemed destined for a rupture—an earth-shaking event that will permanently puncture their veneer of domestic bliss. And that’s before the monsters show up.

Like Companion, The Drama, and others of their ilk, The End of Oak Street is a film whose very premise arguably qualifies as a spoiler, given that it withholds its cards for around 20 minutes. So before wading into revealing waters—seas that its trailer and marketing campaign had no compunction swimming in—let me just say that this movie is a rollicking piece of mainstream entertainment. The first feature in seven years from writer-director David Robert Mitchell, it’s both imaginatively conceived and confidently executed. If it isn’t a work of great depth, that’s because its characters are too busy scampering to fully develop. Slow down in this town, and you’re liable to get eaten by a dinosaur. Read More

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One Night Only review: Sex, Love, and Uncontrollable Purges

Jeremy BeckReviews
Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner in One Night Only

Earlier this summer, the Trump administration issued new grant criteria, stating that nonprofits seeking federal funding to help prevent teen pregnancy must counsel adolescents about “family stability” and “marriage prior to childbearing.” It then revoked the grant of an agency called Fact Forward, presumably for the sin of teaching teenagers about proper condom use. So the premise of One Night Only—which takes place in an alternate America where premarital sex has been outlawed, with the exception of a single evening per year—seems less preposterous than it might have a decade ago. The movie is set three years in the future, but it may as well take place in a realm of perpetual Project 2025.

You might perceive this scenario—the U.S. government wielding its power as a surveillance state to curtail the bodily autonomy of its citizens, in part by branding trackers onto people’s wrists—as the backbone of a harrowing piece of dystopian fiction. But Will Gluck, directing from a script by Travis Braun, has no interest in exploring the troubling sociopolitical ramifications of this conceit. Instead, he has molded the idea into a lighter, more frivolous creature (those trackers take the form of colored animal tattoos, how cute!), one whose shape is classically familiar but whose appearance on the big screen is vanishingly rare. He’s made a romantic comedy. Read More

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