Crime Pays in the Indie Thrillers Tuner and Carolina Caroline

Jeremy BeckReviews
Leo Woodall in Tuner; Kyle Gallner and Samara Weaving in Carolina Caroline

One of the pleasures of moviegoing is vicarious excitement—the thrill of experiencing something you can’t possibly attain in real life. I am not a professional athlete, an ingenious detective, or a vampire slayer, but cinema brings me closer to such larger-than-life heroes, even if it can also shade them with relatable humanity.

This is particularly true when it comes to crime—especially theft. As a rule-abiding office drone who hesitates before lifting extra paperclips from the supply closet, I’m personally unacquainted with chases and shootouts and scores, so I have a weakness for movies about robbers scheming to pull a heist. The past few weeks saw two independent pictures featuring blue-collar characters who discover a latent aptitude for stealing, a talent that brings them both prosperity and danger. If neither made a peep at the box office, well, maybe that’s because they’re still eluding society’s dragnet. Read More

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Backrooms review: If These Walls Could Stalk

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chiwetel Ejiofor in Backrooms

It’s been a rough few decades for the retail furniture business. First came the internet. Then the housing market crashed. And now arrives Backrooms, a head-tripping horror picture that conceives of a big-box emporium whose basement contains a secret gateway to hell. It’s a work of fiction, but it still might give homeowners pause before they go browsing through the aisles looking for their next loveseat.

Backrooms is the brainchild of Kane Parsons, and the story behind the story—why is this thing such a hit? Just what exactly is a YouTuber? Wait, this guy is twenty?—threatens to overwhelm the movie proper. So it’s important to acknowledge that Backrooms, while far from perfect, is an accomplished and distinctive feature debut. It suggests the work of an artist with his own unique vision, even if that vision isn’t yet fully formed. Read More

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Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu review: A Blaster and an Apprentice

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from The Mandalorian and Grogu, featuring both title characters

A long time ago, in a galaxy not far away, there was a swashbuckling sci-fi/Western TV series whose snappy writing and charismatic actors eventually inspired a bona fide big-screen adventure. But enough about Firefly. Here we have The Mandalorian and Grogu, the latest product in the Disney empire’s content-generation machine. It’s been seven years since the last Star Wars movie (the unduly maligned Rise of Skywalker), during which time the Mouse House has glutted your streaming queue with all manner of Sithian spin-offs. These offshoots varied in quality—Andor was quite good, The Book of Boba Fett was pretty bad, I forget everything that happened in Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka—but they all fulfilled their mission of sating fans’ appetites for intergalactic mayhem and Force-laden profundity. The Mandalorian was the first of these, and also the most successful according to certain commercial metrics, so it’s been plucked from the outer rim of television and holo-projected into the multiplex, where Disney hopes that the universe’s deadliest bounty hunter and his loveable little green friend will restore the franchise to its prior cinematic glory.

It’s a dubious bet. But when I tell you that The Mandalorian and Grogu is my least favorite Star Wars film to date, it’s both an expression of my disappointment and an acknowledgement of my advancing age. This world that once filled me with excitement and joy—the blue-tinted rushes through hyperspace, the exotic lightsaber duels, the premonitions that someone has a bad feeling about this—now seems chilly and mercenary. Did I grow up, or did the movies bog down? Read More

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Obsession review: Hunger and Cursed

Jeremy BeckReviews
Inde Navarrette in Obsession

You’ve met dudes like Bear before, especially at the movies. He’s a lovelorn sad sack—a sweet, sensitive guy nursing a crush on a beautiful, unattainable girl. The first time we see him, he appears to be finally confessing his true feelings, delivering the kind of anecdote-laden speech that tends to produce everlasting happiness (think the end of When Harry Met Sally). This proves to be a feint—he’s in fact rehearsing his declaration of love—but it nonetheless cements Bear as an earnest, sympathetic protagonist. We’re all rooting for him.

Given this setup, you might think that Obsession, the second feature from multi-hyphenate Curry Barker, is a romantic comedy. It isn’t. It’s a horror movie, one that traffics in supernatural phenomena, jolting suspense, and sporadic bursts of blood and gore. It’s consistently unsettling, and not just for the way it interrogates how cinema exalts nobly suffering men at the expense of idealized, objectified women. Read More

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Depression Double Feature: Omaha and Blue Heron

Jeremy BeckReviews
Eylul Guven in Blue Heron; John Magaro in Omaha

Movies aren’t better just because they’re sad. Sure, the Oscars tend to favor dramas over comedies, but making people feel bad isn’t an inherent artistic good. As with any other subgenre, the success of depressing pictures hinges on qualities beyond their deflating subject matter: the specificity of the characters, the nuance of the performances, the skill of the filmmaking.

This past weekend saw the expanded release of two small, family-centric movies whose tone can hardly be called cheerful. Both execute their assignment of shaking you up, though only one breaks new cinematic ground in the process. Read More

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