Dark Magic Duo: Clayface and Wildwood, reviewed

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Rhys Harries in Clayface; Prue in Wildwood

I won’t pretend that Clayface and Wildwood are similar movies. One is a dark, despairing odyssey about a man plagued by demons, external and internal; the other is a vibrant animated children’s tale that venerates both individual pluck and collective camaraderie. Still, the release calendar provides its little serendipities, and despite their tonal polarity, both films traffic in a kind of sorcery, be it couched in the language of comic books or fairy tales. Also, I wanted to write about both.

Directed by James Watkins from a screenplay by Mike Flanagan and Hossein Amini, Clayface represents the third installment in James Gunn’s reconstituted DC Universe, though it’s fair to wonder what percentage of its audience knows this. Sure, much of the movie takes place in Batman’s hometown of Gotham City, but there are no references to Superman or Supergirl, nor any of the fretful fan service or mid-credits stingers that are the hallmarks of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (DC’s ostensible rival). And while the film centers on a famous actor, Clayface himself isn’t exactly an A-lister in comic-book circles. (My lone knowledge of him derives from HBO’s animated Harley Quinn series, where he’s voiced with operatic foolishness by Alan Tudyk.) For a piece of synergized corporate entertainment, it feels less like a spinoff than a footnote. Read More

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You Can See Everything review: Keep Your Friends Theranos

Jeremy BeckReviews
Elizabeth Holmes in You Can See Everything

Elizabeth Holmes is a fraud. Nathan Fielder is a freak. Those may sound like vicious accusations, but in Holmes’ case, the charge has been substantiated by a federal jury, which found her guilty in 2022 of swindling investors. As for Fielder, you need only watch a few minutes of any episode of his television work to learn that he’s painfully, pathologically awkward. They would seem to make strange bedfellows. But one of the insights of You Can See Everything, the brain-scrambling documentary that Fielder has made with Lance Oppenheim, is that people can be difficult to pin down, and can surprise you if you make an effort to understand them. Sometimes that effort involves questioning your own assumptions. And sometimes it means following them around with cameras for a solid month.

I’m being more literal than you might think. As a matter of nuts-and-bolts production, You Can See Everything is notable for the startling degree of access that Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, have granted to the filmmakers. The brunt of the movie takes place in their Del Mar beach house, chronicling the 34 days preceding Holmes’ scheduled surrender at a federal prison in Texas. The couple’s ostensible rationale—which reflects either brazen confidence or breathtaking naïveté—is that an unvarnished depiction of their home life will combat the media’s prevailing narrative of Holmes as a conniving huckster: the reckless woman who duped credulous financiers into believing that she and her healthcare company, Theranos, had invented a nigh magical device which could screen for countless diseases from a single drop of blood. Despite the guilty verdict, she maintains her innocence, and the film practically dares you to ask whether she’s telling the truth. The questions only pile up from there. Read More

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The Social Reckoning review: The Oldest Prick in the Facebook

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jeremy Allen White and Mikey Madison in The Social Reckoning

Aaron Sorkin’s characters talk so fast, you invariably miss nuggets of their verbiage, but The Social Reckoning features one particular exchange that warrants special attention. Mark Zuckerberg, played by a zombified Jeremy Strong, is arguing a point of philosophy with a former friend and colleague (Bill Burr). This in itself is unusual—richer than Scrooge McDuck, Facebook’s CEO has surrounded himself with docile yes-men, so he isn’t accustomed to being challenged—but Zuckerberg still isn’t giving any ground in this verbal jousting session. “I’m a free speech absolutist,” he says, “except where—” at which point his combatant cuts him off and lands a body blow: “You can’t say ‘absolutist’ and ‘except’ in the same sentence.”

This is typical Sorkin dialogue: sharp, snappy, quietly erudite. It is also a vivid encapsulation of the fraught political environment that the movie regards with justifiable suspicion. As with most Sorkin vehicles, The Social Reckoning is a film about smart, principled individuals doing battle against a mighty institutional machine. This means that, depending on your perspective, it’s either a righteous expression of anger or a shameless display of sanctimony. There’s room for both, but even if Sorkin’s rhetoric is as old-fashioned as his references—this is surely the first picture about technological titans that contains a digression about Frank Capra—he nonetheless centers important issues plaguing contemporary America. He may be stuck in the mud, but his message still powers through. Read More

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Digger review: There Will Be Floods

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Cruise in Digger

The cat seems unwell. Fluffy white felines have long had a place in cinema—it’s been over six decades since Ernst Stavro Blofeld sinisterly stroked the coat of his pet kitty while threatening James Bond—but this little furball isn’t bright-eyed or cuddly. It’s a wheezing, whimpering creature, skin stretched over its bones, incapable of moving or eating on its own. Its strongest display of activity is the yowl it emits when a thermometer enters its anus, but otherwise it lacks the energy to even mewl. Weak and exhausted, it’s waiting for a benevolent executioner to put it out of its misery. The longer Digger goes on, the more likely you are to yearn for a similar act of mercy.

Or maybe not. Digger, the latest misbegotten epic from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, isn’t an especially appealing movie. It’s long, overdetermined, and—as with all of its maker’s films—self-indulgent. But it is also monumentally ambitious, and it unfolds with a level of stylistic bravado that tunes some of its more discordant notes back into harmony. (Speaking of music, the jittery, often insufferable score is by Cosmo Sheldrake.) If it’s a debacle, at least it’s one for the ages. Read More

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Primetime review: This Guy Gives Me the Sweeps

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson in Primetime

Remember 2006? Reality television was in vogue, LeBron James was in the Rust Belt, and a Republican president had embroiled the country in a senseless war in the Middle East. In other words, not much has changed. But Primetime, Lance Oppenheim’s gripping and unsettling depiction of the ickiness surrounding Chris Hansen’s To Catch a Predator series, feels unnervingly rooted in a particular moment in history, even as it plainly speaks to the media of today. It recalls a time when premium cable was ascendant and networks were grasping to evolve in order to retain their supremacy. Not all of the ideas they latched onto were good ones.

The first time we see Hansen (Robert Pattinson) in Primetime, he’s murmuring sweet nothings to himself (“I will undress you, and you will undress me”), like an actor running lines. But it’s his second appearance, swishing through a makeshift curtain on a balcony, when he really introduces himself—both to us, and to the unwitting target of Predator’s latest sting. “Big night planned?” he purrs in a honeyed rumble, his face sporting the self-satisfied smirk of a cat who enjoys taunting mice. “Take a seat,” he continues to the mystified man standing beneath him (Tony Revolori) who’d arrived with the hope of bedding a pubescent girl, and who soon realizes, with dawning horror, that he’s inadvertently achieved the dream of so many American strivers: He’s on TV. Read More

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