Reviews

Thunderbolts: Avengers, Resembled

Jeremy BeckReviews
Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan, and Hannah John-Kamen in Thunderbolts

Yelena Belova is bored. She’s just elegantly parachuted into a secret laboratory in Kuala Lumpur, swiftly dispatching a crew of anonymous guards before overpowering a hapless scientist so that she can bypass the facility’s facial-recognition security and retrieve… forget it, it doesn’t matter. The point is that she’s done this sort of thing before. To a layman, such strenuous effort may sound exciting, but for Yelena, it’s just another day at the superhero-adjacent office. She needs something fulfilling, something inspiring, something new.

Thunderbolts is the 36th(!) installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the key to its moderate success is its understanding of Yelena’s self-described ennui. The MCU is no longer the global box-office behemoth it once was, in part because there are only so many times self-important men in metallic suits and spandex can save the world from imminent catastrophe. Thunderbolts, directed by Jake Schreier from a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, is not a great movie; it remains overly reliant on franchise mythology, and its storytelling is a little choppy. But it’s an appealing sit—not just for its welcome lightness of tone, but for its willingness to shift away from standard-issue heroes and toward more colorful, esoteric characters. Specifically, it’s about a bunch of losers. Read More

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The Accountant 2: In Autism’s Life, No Second Tax

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jon Bernthal and Ben Affleck in The Accountant 2

The Accountant 2 could’ve been a pretty good movie, if it weren’t a sequel to The Accountant. It’s best suited as a hangout picture, sporting playful dialogue, a light comic touch, and a pair of appealing performances. Yet because this emergent franchise made its bones as a hot-blooded crime yarn, it subjugates its mild-mannered strengths in favor byzantine plotting and stale gunplay. It’s guilty of genre evasion.

Yet the Hollywood IP machine cranks on, and there are worse figures to resuscitate than Christian Wolff, the autistic genius and assassin who first appeared on screen nine years ago in the hunky, bespectacled form of Ben Affleck. The decade away hasn’t improved Christian’s social skills: When we first catch up with him, he’s the eye of a speed-dating hurricane, only we learn that single ladies are throwing themselves at him because he hacked the app’s algorithm; once he opens his mouth and starts rambling about appreciating assets, their excitement quickly curdles into dismay. Read More

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Sinners: (Don’t) Let the White One In

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan, times two, in Sinners

We always say we want more original movies, but how many movies are truly original? Sinners, the latest feature from Ryan Coogler, is in some ways a work of pastiche, incorporating strains of gangster cinema, music videos, and horror lore. But despite embracing its influences (which is not, in itself, a bad thing), it manages to feel new—both for the urgency of its ideas and the vibrancy of its filmmaking.

That description also applied, with partial force, to two of Coogler’s earlier efforts, Creed and Black Panther. In those pictures, the director managed to imprint his personality onto the material while still operating within the brand-managed confines of the cinematic franchise. (His attempt to repeat the feat with Black Panther’s sequel, Wakanda Forever, was markedly less successful, if partly for tragic reasons beyond his control.) Sinners, for all its boisterous entertainment value, shackles him with no such commercial chains. No longer is Coogler reinterpreting and revitalizing a cherished piece of intellectual property. He’s reimagining the world. Read More

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Drop, Warfare, and Putting Viewers in the Shit

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Meghann Fahy in Drop

Roger Ebert famously said that the movies are a machine that generates empathy, but that same machine can also manufacture terror. Cinema is an art of forced perspective—we adopt the point of view of a film’s main characters, figuratively if rarely literally—and directors often use the medium to churn our stomachs, to make us experience anxiety and fear. Two of last weekend’s new releases, while occupying different genres and deploying different styles, share the goal of distressing their audience by thrusting you inside their heroes’ nerve-racking headspace. They may ask you to empathize, but they really want you to sweat and shudder.

Of the two, Drop is both the more conventional and the more outrageous. Directed by Christopher Landon from a script by Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach, it belongs to an emerging breed of subgenre: the technophobic thriller. Cells phones were supposed to ruin horror movies—why would the final girl cower in fright when she could just call 911?—but filmmakers have adapted, turning tools of salvation into instruments of torment. We spend an increasing percentage of our time interacting with screens; turns out, in addition to distracting us with cute memes, those displays can besiege us with images of our worst nightmares. Read More

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The White Lotus S3 Finale: Mystery Loves Company

Jeremy BeckReviews
Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood in The White Lotus

The White Lotus isn’t a murder mystery. There is no brilliant detective piecing together clues, no array of suspects telling conflicting stories, no grand reveal that exposes dark motivations or cunning conspiracies. There is, however, a dead body, the discovery of which bookends each season. The effect of this gambit, which writer-director Mike White has maintained for each of the series’ three runs, is to freight the proceedings with a suspenseful question—who’s going to die?—while still allowing him to structure the show as a rangy, acidic comedy rather than a conventional crime yarn.

This approach worked splendidly for the first two seasons of The White Lotus (both of which made my top, er, 11 in their respective years), but it yields diminishing returns for Season 3—not because White’s methodology has grown stale, but because he’s failed to properly calibrate it. For its first six (deeply enjoyable) episodes, this season operates as a dyspeptic and incisive class satire that also features tendrils of anxiety and anticipation. But in its final two installments, it squanders some of its shaggy charm, replacing it with clumsy attempts to goose tension and invite speculation. Read More

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