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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Spider-Man: Brand New Day review: Parker? I Don’t Even Know Her!

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Holland in Spider-Man: Brand New Day

They say you can’t go home again, but Spider-Man sure did try. The subtitles of the superhero’s most recent big-screen trilogy—Homecoming, Far from Home, and No Way Home—all concerned his proximity to sanctuary, reflecting a longing to return to safe and familiar territory. But the franchise’s latest adventure, again starring Tom Holland as the Queens-based red-and-blue webslinger, is styled Brand New Day, a restorative title that promises novelty and opportunity. As you may remember (or not!), following a whole lot of magical hullabaloo, No Way Home culminated with the wizard Doctor Strange casting an obliviate-like spell, wiping the world’s collective memory of Spidey’s alter ego, Peter Parker, a sweet-natured boy with a big brain, a broad smile, and a slim bank account. This marked a significant sacrifice for Peter—most notably, he forfeited his cherished relationships with his girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya), and his best friend, Ned (Jacob Batalon)—but in storytelling terms, it created the tantalizing prospect of a cinematic reset button.

At its best, Brand New Day capitalizes on this artistic freedom, probing unexplored territory and tackling interesting themes. It’s a spry and appealing blockbuster with a sincere human center. But for all its liveliness and charm, it rarely feels genuinely new, instead repeatedly evoking prior, better Spider-Man movies. Read More

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Let’s Get Experimental: Her Private Hell and Motor City

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophie Thatcher in Her Private Hell; Alan Ritchson in Motor City

Fifteen years ago, Nicolas Winding Refn improbably delighted audiences with Drive, a glittering, electronica-tinged jewel of a thriller about a wheelman mired in gangland savagery. Since then, the Danish provocateur has made three features, two TV shows, a handful of shorts, and few new fans. I haven’t seen all of Refn’s post-Drive output, but what I have watched—the films Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, plus the Netflix miniseries Copenhagen Cowboy—suggests the work of a postmodern imp concocting some sort of experiment in anti-entertainment. With perverse pleasure, Refn assembles the raw materials of putatively interesting pictures—vivid colors, gorgeous actors, shocking violence—and then scrambles them into final products that are dreary and charmless. He seems to fancy himself the cinematic prince of darkness, but his movies are less devilish than simply dull.

Her Private Hell, Refn’s latest piece of feature-length trolling, isn’t without its surface diversions. As befits the studio that distributed it, it supplies a good deal of neon—bright bursts of pink and blue slashing through its literal and metaphoric fog. The production design is, if not exactly legible, at least striking, with jagged plinths and infinite spires. The costumes are eye-catching, in particular a seductive red leather coat that seems intended to inspire fetishism. The movie might be appealing if it weren’t so insufferable. Read More

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The Odyssey review: The Call Is Coming from Inside the Horse

Jeremy BeckReviews
Matt Damon in The Odyssey

Nobody else could have done this. I’m not suggesting that no other contemporary filmmaker could have adapted The Odyssey, which seems to get remade in some fashion every few years, officially or otherwise. But only Christopher Nolan possesses the requisite combination of vision and hubris to remold Homer’s classic poem into a movie so tailored to his thematic, aesthetic, and moral concerns. For a quarter-century, Nolan has built a distinctive brand of scrambled timelines, breathtaking innovation, and cornball romanticism; he’s cultivated his own mythology. Now he has the chutzpah to bring his singular artistry to bear on the granddaddy of all myths.

The results of his herculean labor (sorry) are both expected and surprising. In terms of scale, The Odyssey is a monumental achievement—a huge, exhilarating work of relentless energy and unimpeachable technique. Such an accomplishment shouldn’t be taken for granted, but it was virtually axiomatic the instant the projected was announced. What proves more striking is the movie’s gritty humanity. It’s an epic yarn of pillaging and seafaring, of gods and monsters, but its grandeur is engraved with punchy writing and credible emotions. Read More

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