Mother Mary review: Bless This Dress

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway in Mother Mary

The tagline for David Lowery’s Mother Mary reads, “This is not a ghost story.” For certain cinephiles, this seems less like an ominous pronouncement than a bizarre statement of the obvious. Of course this isn’t A Ghost Story; that was Lowery’s 2017 experimental drama, which found Casey Affleck standing under a sheet and Rooney Mara stuffing pie in her face. It was challenging and slow, but it rewarded patience, with a remarkable third act that posed provocative questions about love, marriage, societal evolution, and the whole damn human condition.

Mother Mary is similarly ambitious and not nearly as good. But it has its moments, with impressive individual scenes and striking images. It wields its beauty in service of a thin and listless narrative, but taglines and titles aside, “story” has never been Lowery’s department. Read More

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Lee Cronin’s The Mummy review: Gloomy Sarcophagus

Jeremy BeckReviews
Natalie Grace in Lee Cronin's The Mummy

In Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Kate Capshaw describes archaeologists as “funny little men searching for their mommies.” “Mummies,” Harrison Ford corrects her. What’s the difference? Even the scariest monsters have parents, and Lee Cronin’s The Mummy—more on that vexing title in a bit—is a horror movie about the agonies of child-rearing. We all want our kids to grow up safe and smart and responsible, but life tends to present challenges: disease, academic hardship, financial and spiritual ruin. Every family has its demons. Some are more demonic than others.

To describe The Mummy as a metaphor of tortured parenthood is to give it more credit than it deserves, and more depth than it courts. This ain’t Hereditary. It is instead a maximalist, blunt-force nightmare whose primary goal is to provoke terror through relentless, assaultive chaos. Keep your silly quips and your classical adventurism for Brendan Fraser. This supernatural being is out for blood. Read More

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Stop Whining About Spoilers. Also, Stop Spoiling Things.

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Robert Pattinson in The Drama; Michael B. Jordan in Sinners; Sophie Thatcher in Companion

The Drama is so called on account of its in-universe angst and chaos, but out in the real world its title acquired a meta meaning. In the days leading up to the film’s release, it became the center of a swirling social-media discussion—not about its quality or its themes, but about how to discuss it at all. Were critics allowed to mention its twist? Was “twist” even the right word for a narrative turn that occurs during its first reel? How do you write about a movie when you can’t write about what the movie is about? Is Film Twitter now a police state—a spoiler police?

That all of this dialogue was taking place before The Drama even opened would seem to do its viewers few favors. But the latest iteration of this discourse, spurred in part by A24’s unusually oblique trailer, reignited a familiar firestorm about spoiler culture, a topic that inspires no shortage of vitriol. So let me make my position plain: Readers have no business dictating the work of film critics, who should have absolute freedom to say whatever the hell they want in their reviews. For the most part, spoilerphobes are whiny, entitled, and misguided. Also, they kind of have a point. Read More

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The Drama review: To Have and to Scold

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama

It’s a classic meet-cute. He spies her in a coffee shop reading a book. He has to talk to her, so he quickly googles the novel and approaches her with some canned, cheesy material about how much it spoke to him. He keeps stumbling over his words, panicking when she refuses to engage, only for her to startle and remove an unseen AirPod from her left ear. “I’m deaf in this one,” she explains, and he starts to melt, realizing she didn’t hear a damn thing he said, but then she throws him an unexpected lifeline: “Do you want to start again?”

This is the delightful opening scene of The Drama, a bewitching and provocative movie that initially unfolds as a storybook romantic comedy. Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are the perfect couple: smart, attractive, blessed with verbal and physical chemistry. Their courtship checks all of the boxes, in particular a magical first kiss that would be the envy of Jane Austen. It’s now the week of their wedding, and we learn the details of their fairy-tale engagement as Charlie runs a draft of his speech past his best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), who’s so moved he starts crying. Everything is so light and sweet and charming, you wonder if Kristoffer Borgli, the film’s writer and director, somehow got the title wrong. He didn’t. Read More

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Alpha review: The Girl with the Nag and Tattoo

Jeremy BeckReviews
Golshifteh Farahani and Mélissa Boros in Alpha

She’s only made three movies, but Julia Ducournau has already built her own cinematic festival of female suffering and endurance, focusing on women plagued by peculiar conditions. In Raw, the heroine seemed perfectly normal until she was overcome with a genetic craving that compelled her to eat her sister’s severed finger. Her challenges were trivial compared to the lead in Titane, a murderess whose automotive copulations slowly transformed her internal fluids into motor oil. Next to her, the tribulations of Alpha, the 13-year-old girl at the center of Ducournau’s eponymous new whatsit, are relatively prosaic; she just got a tattoo via a dirty needle and may have become infected with a strange virus. This quickly proves to be the least of her problems.

Having seen all of Ducournau’s features, I’m not sure that I’ve properly understood any of them. This is, mostly, a compliment. Aesthetically speaking, the French provocateur is a gifted and fearless stylist, using robust techniques and bold aural and visual flourishes. Intellectually, her works tend to be ambitious and enigmatic, probing thorny ideas but refusing to neatly spell out their themes. This can be vexing, but the inherent tension—the collision between muscular filmmaking and knotty storytelling—is also enveloping. You enjoy getting lost in the labyrinth. Read More

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