Reviews

Mickey 17: Live Esprit or Die Scarred

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17

Cinema is a medium of imagination, and science-fiction is a genre of possibility. So it’s understandable that movies about the future tend to be, if not optimistic, at least aspirational—conjuring a realm of flying cars and exotic planets and soulful cyborgs. Mickey 17, the latest whatsit from Bong Joon-ho, tacks in the opposite direction. It asks, with a mixture of whimsy and sincerity: What if the future sucks?

To be fair, this line of prospective apprehension has its own gloomy descendants. (Just last year, Alien: Romulus continued that franchise’s preoccupation with capitalistic drudgery, conceiving of a mining colony where indentured servants labored in permanent darkness.) But Bong’s vision here is distinctive for how it depicts galactic exploration as an error-riddled process that’s permanently, perpetually janky. Hardly anything works smoothly in Mickey 17; its characters are constantly beset by glitchy conveyor belts and ineffectual antidotes and crappy cooking, not to mention the usual human malice and venality. It feels a lot like the world of today, only with more spaceships and aliens. Read More

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The Monkey: Toy to the World, the Sword Is Come

Jeremy BeckReviews
Theo James in The Monkey

Longlegs may have cemented Osgood Perkins’ stature in the horror community, but his twisted sensibility has been fully formed ever since his debut feature, The Blackcoat’s Daughter. In both of those films, as well as the two that came in between (Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing Whose Title Is Too Long), Perkins flaunted his gifts as a skilled purveyor of heebie-jeebies, wielding slick camerawork and atonal rhythms to keep viewers on edge and off balance. You might think that venturing into the realm of Stephen King would only elevate the director’s midnight-madness credentials, but The Monkey, which Perkins has adapted from a King short story, is his least scary movie thus far. There is, however, a reason for its relative lack of terror. Quite simply: It’s a comedy.

Specifically, The Monkey deploys countless variations of a single joke. It posits, not without cause, that the spectacle of watching human beings die on screen can be funny as well as tragic. This is undeniably in poor taste, which is part of what makes it amusing. Perkins, channeling his bloodletting instincts in a direction that’s silly rather than spooky, commits to his premise with innovative gusto. People don’t just die in this movie; they are shot, stabbed, dismembered, decapitated, electrocuted, immolated, trampled by horses, and engulfed by a swarm of bees. It’s your worst nightmare, unless you’re a coroner who loves your work. Read More

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Companion: Beauty Is in the AI of the Beholder

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher in Companion

She’s the perfect girlfriend. She’s smart but not intimidating. She’s pretty but doesn’t draw too much attention to herself. She’s a good listener but doesn’t dominate the conversation. She’s good in bed but doesn’t demand her own gratification. She’s everything a man could want, and nothing he can’t handle.

The chief satirical insight of Companion, the slick and engaging new thriller from Drew Hancock, is that the preceding paragraph’s negative phrases—emphasizing a woman’s passivity, her lack of desire or independence—function as positive attributes. For the men in this movie, the platonic ideal of romantic partnership isn’t equality but compliance. They aren’t interested in being challenged or enriched; they just want to be admired and obeyed. Read More

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Presence: Phantom Dread

Jeremy BeckReviews
Callina Liang in Presence

As auteurs go, Steven Soderbergh is relatively humble. His closing credits never use the phrase “a film by,” and while he typically shoots and edits his movies himself—not since 2011’s Contagion has anyone else fulfilled either of those roles in one of his features—he also deploys pseudonyms (Peter Andrews for cinematography, Mary Ann Bernard for editing), as if to minimize the fastidious control he exerts over his own productions. That’s especially noteworthy in the case of Presence, given that its star is, well, Steven Soderbergh—or rather, his camera.

To be sure, there are actors in this movie, which centers on a white-collar nuclear family that’s just moved into an appealing new home in suburban New Jersey; Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan play the parents, respectively named Rebekah and Chris, while their disaffected teenage children are Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang). But the heart of Presence is its titular entity, an invisible being that roams about the house in a state of persistent curiosity, and whose field of vision doubles as the audience’s point of view. Read More

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The Brutalist: Nadirs of the Lost Architect

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adrien Brody in The Brutalist

The American dream gets flipped upside-down in The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s soaring, scathing portrait of post-war greed. Yet while it may be a troubling tale of moral decline, it opens with its hero going up, up, up, climbing toward the prospect of salvation. His name is László, and we first see him in the steerage of a ship docking at Ellis Island, his pallid skin and crooked nose long shielded from the light of day. As his mind recites a letter from his absent wife, he begins to ascend along with countless other sweaty hopefuls, the camera swooping and twisting like he’s navigating a labyrinth. When he finally bursts onto the deck, his face breaks into an ecstatic grin, the sunlight beaming down on him, the score’s trumpets booming in triumph. Never mind that our first view of Lady Liberty comes at an inverted angle, as though she’s about to plunge her torch—and its elusive promise of prosperity—into the harbor.

This knockout introduction instantly signals The Brutalist’s monumental ambition, both thematic and aesthetic. Much has been made of the film’s length (over three-and-a-half hours, including a 15-minute intermission), but its running time is just one of its many extravagances. Corbet, eschewing subtlety in favor of sheer grandeur, has delivered a truly maximalist production, a work of sweeping scope, vigorous style, and provocative rhetoric. The movie is, to borrow the tagline from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, an epic of epic epicness. Read More

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