Reviews

Wuthering Heights review: Promising Stung Woman

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in Wuthering Heights

In the opening scene of Emily, Charlotte Brontë disparages Wuthering Heights as “an ugly book, base and ugly.” Emerald Fennell must have missed that memo. To be sure, this umpteenth screen adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel is suffused with crude, primal emotions: lust, hatred, anguish, cruelty, more lust. But because Fennell fancies herself one of modern cinema’s most flamboyant stylists, her version clothes this vulgarity in beauty and extravagance. This is not your literature professor’s Wuthering Heights; this is more of the music-video edition.

Does that make it sacrilegious or sensible? Maybe a bit of both. I am not sure we needed another update of Brontë’s classic, much less one so high-strung and turgid. At the same time, if you are going to reimagine an article of the literary canon, you may as well do so with some flair. Fennell’s first two movies, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, were original conceits, (arguably) teeming with provocative ideas and piercing insights into contemporary class and gender. Now pivoting from the freedoms of invention to the constraints of adaptation, she has redirected her inflammatory instincts away from theme and toward feverish form. The results may not be great, but at least they’re distinctive. Read More

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Send Help review: Triangle of Madness

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien in Send Help

Rachel McAdams is a babe. It’s been over two decades since she broke out with the one-two summer punch of Mean Girls (where she played a scholastic queen bee) and The Notebook (where she portrayed the object of Ryan Gosling’s eternal devotion), and her wholesome sex appeal hasn’t waned a bit. Even when she tamps down her natural vivacity—as a dogged spy in A Most Wanted Man, as a subjugated housewife in Disobedience—her spark of glamour remains irrepressible. So it’s both a stretch and a joke that Send Help finds McAdams playing Linda Liddle, a socially maladroit office drone with stringy hair, a prominent pimple on her chin, and an even larger mole on her cheek. As her onomatopoetic surname suggests, Linda is meek, weak, and mousy. If Regina George didn’t terrorize her in high school, it’s only because Linda was too small to be noticed.

Less total loser than thankless nobody, Linda works in the accounting strategy and planning department of a generic firm, where her rigorous calculations get co-opted by her dismissive male superiors. (The screenplay, by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, intentionally keeps her job’s details vague.) She may know numbers, but her personality is radioactive; when she tries to invite herself to a planned karaoke outing, her coworkers stare at her like she’s speaking an alien language. Linda’s fumbling is especially unfortunate given that she’s desperate to impress her new boss, a preening hotshot named Bradley (Dylan O’Brien) with custom loafers, a private putting machine, and a lifelong membership in the boys’ club. He seems approachable enough (“Open door policy!”), but he’s an oily prick who wants nothing to do with her; when she traps him by her cubicle, his face goes through several stages of agony as he gradually resolves to wipe a smudge of tuna fish off her lip. There’s no possible scenario where Bradley would truly value Linda. Is there? Read More

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Primate review: When It Comes to Blows, Chimping Ain’t Easy

Jeremy BeckReviews
A shot of the ape in Primate

So much for species equality on screen. Over the past decade-plus, in movies like the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise or the Robbie Williams vehicle Better Man, the computer-generated chimpanzee has been a symbol of evolution and humanity—sad, intelligent, soulful. (Though featuring a different genus, the new blockbusters involving King Kong similarly depict the gorilla as a nice guy.) Yet here comes Primate to lay waste to these fantasies of human-animal harmony. The monkey here may be smart, but he sure isn’t friendly; he’s a fearsome killing machine who uses his mighty strength to facilitate his appetite for brutal, bloody violence. I’m surprised PETA hasn’t called for a boycott.

Not that Ben, the titular beast who is played (sort of) by Miguel Torres Umba, initially seems like a bad boy. He instead presents as the happy and docile pet of Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), a university student returning to her gorgeous home in Hawaii, where life seems pretty good. Lucy’s late mother was an expert linguist who taught Ben to communicate by punching buttons on a vocalizing tablet, allowing him and others to mash together noun-adjective combinations like “Ben happy” and “Lucy sorry.” Her half-absent father (Troy Kotsur) is the author of a lucrative mystery series with unfortunate titles like “A Silent Scream,” and its popularity has afforded him a swanky beachfront estate that would make the tech bros from Mountainhead jealous. Her younger sister (Gia Hunter) is resentful toward her—apparently for the sin of, I dunno, going to college?—but they quickly patch things up, and Lucy anticipates luxuriating with family, friends, and her favorite furball. Read More

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Indie New Year: No Other Choice, We Bury the Dead, The Plague

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lee Byung-hun in No Other Choice; Daisy Ridley in We Bury the Dead; Everett Blunck in The Plague

Christmas tends to be a big holiday for new movies, but New Year’s Day, not so much. Major studios rarely drop new films in the chill of early January, so the flip of the calendar instead becomes an opportunity for limited releases to expand slowly (sometimes glacially—looking at you, The Testament of Ann Lee). Today, we’re catching up with three independent pictures gradually making their way around the country, though viewers in some markets may be forced to wait until they hit streaming. This is why I support a national law requiring all movies to play in all theaters at all times.

No Other Choice. Capitalism is murder. You work and you work, pouring your blood and sweat into a numbing career that drains the life from you, in service of unfeeling bosses who can sack you whenever they want. (Note to any of my superiors who happen to be reading this piece: I love you and I love my job, please don’t fire me.) If you’re a CEO, they send you packing with a golden parachute. If you’re a line worker, they give you an eel. Read More

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Marty Supreme review: Nights of the Downed Table Tennis

Jeremy BeckReviews
Timothee Chalamet in Marty Supreme

There’s a moment in Marty Supreme when someone tells the title character to stay calm. I generally don’t like spoiling things, but given that the movie was directed by Josh Safdie—and given that Marty (surname Mauser) is played as a bundle of raw nerves and febrile energy by Timothée Chalamet—I feel comfortable in informing you that this advice proves unsuccessful. Asking Marty Mauser not to get agitated is like asking the earth not to rotate on its axis. It’s a plea in defiance of natural order.

The cinema of the Safdie Brothers, which includes grubby scraps like Good Time and Heaven Knows What, places a premium on speed and shock while also championing aesthetic ugliness in the name of visceral authenticity. They found the right calibration on Uncut Gems, their 2019 tour de force of addictive anxiety, before venturing out on their own. Benny recently made The Smashing Machine, a solid enough picture that was largely forgettable outside of Dwayne Johnson’s committed performance. Marty Supreme is hardly a perfect movie, but it sure is a memorable one. It’s got sex and violence and mad dogs and crooked cops and Chalamet’s bare ass and Gwyneth Paltrow in mink-wrapped lingerie. Josh Safdie may have gone solo, but he hasn’t gone acoustic; he remains committed to pulverizing viewers with volume and intensity, resulting in an experience that straddles the line between exhilarating and exhausting. Read More

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