Reviews

Things Heard & Seen: The Ghostest with the Mostest

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amanda Seyfried in Things Heard & Seen

Every horror movie is a metaphor. Things don’t just go bump in the night for no reason; they carry messages and meaning, whether about racial injustice or domestic abuse or romantic incompatibility. The genre is an amplifier, designed to imbue figurative predicaments with literal and physical force. Things Heard & Seen, the new horror-lite picture from Netflix, proffers any number of tribulations for allegorical fodder: the peril of being trapped in a loveless marriage; the trauma of suffering from an eating disorder; the fear of being dislocated from the city to the country; the questionable wisdom of hiring a hunky, piano-playing townie to do your yardwork.

As that scattered litany of problems indicates, Things Heard & Seen is not an especially trenchant or provocative work. But it’s hardly terrible, seeing as it probes its central relationship with honesty and sobriety. Still, it’s easy to wish that this vague, slippery movie were a bit scarier, and that it cared more about its leading lady. Read More

Read more

Stowaway: Unauthorized Admission to Mars

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anna Kendrick in Stowaway

The minimalist space movie seems like a contradiction, but it’s actually an elegant solution to a familiar problem. The cosmos is so incomprehensibly vast, it’s impossible for cinema to convey its full breadth on screen; that’s doubly true for films released by Netflix, where said screen is attached to a television rather than a multiplex auditorium. And so Stowaway, the streaming giant’s new sci-fi feature, conceives of interstellar travel not as the launching pad for an epic adventure, but as the vehicle for a taut and constrained thriller. It’s a horror movie without a boogeyman; the inky enormity of outer space is plenty scary enough.

This particular vintage of stargazing picture has experienced a relative boom of late; recent examples include Geore Clooney’s The Midnight Sky, Claire Denis’ High Life, and Morten Tyldum’s unduly maligned Passengers. In terms of scale, Stowaway is smaller than all of those; it only features four characters, and its unnamed vessel is unremarkable, except maybe for being so cramped (the better to underline the setting’s claustrophobia). And while its final act includes its share of perilous derring-do in zero gravity, its main preoccupations are moral and philosophical rather than dynamic or kinetic. Read More

Read more

I Care a Lot: Lies of the Guardians

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rosamund Pike in I Care a Lot

Even before you see her blond bob, you know instantly that Rosamund Pike’s newest star vehicle will find her working in the same vein of coolly ruthless savagery that she mined so brilliantly in Gone Girl. That much is clear from her opening voiceover, which finds the crisply talented actor once again ditching her British lilt for a capable American accent, and which concludes with her declaring, “I am a fucking lioness.” It’s an accurate if unnecessary introduction; one glare from her cold-blue eyes or one puff from her vape pen, and it’s plain that Pike’s Marla Grayson is a lethal predator. She plays for keeps, even when the game is other people’s lives.

This description might sounds like the template for a dark and provocative study of sociopathy, but I Care a Lot isn’t especially interested in digging into the pathologies of its protagonist. It isn’t interested in much of anything, really, beyond treating viewers to a rollicking good time with bad people. And this, it mostly does. Written and directed with slick snap by J. Blakeson, it coasts amiably on the gifts of its cast and the jolts of its pulp, untroubled by its own vacuity. Small wonder Marla is its hero. Read More

Read more

Nomadland: Movin’ On Out, Again and Again

Jeremy BeckReviews
Frances McDormand in Chloé Zhao's Nomadland

An ambitious cinematic tone poem that seeks to stand as tall as the stately redwoods it rapturously depicts, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland pays homage to a number of distinctly American wonders: the crashing waves of the Pacific; the rocky palaces of the Badlands; Frances McDormand’s face. With soft-blue ice chips for eyes and hard lines creasing the corners of her mouth, the two-time Oscar winner has the chiseled look of an artifact excavated from one of the film’s historical preserves. But there’s nothing antiquated about McDormand’s performance, which is clipped and unsentimental, but also open and brimming with feeling. She’s the main attraction of this mostly lovely, occasionally frustrating movie, which doesn’t so much tell a story as communicate an experience.

That was more or less true of Zhao’s prior film, The Rider, which deployed non-professional actors to refract the gauzy mythology of the cowboy through the cold prism of modernity. I was somewhat immune to The Rider’s low-key charms; it often felt more like a vibe than a movie. Nomadland operates in a similar vein, but Zhao’s filmmaking has grown more expressive. Soundtracked by gentle compositions from the pianist Ludovico Einaudi, her camera greedily contemplates the vastness of the American frontier, discovering landscapes both beautiful and desolate. The country captured in this picture looks like a gorgeous place to visit and a hard place to live. Read More

Read more

New Streamers: Judas and the Black Messiah, Saint Maud, and The Little Things

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jared Leto in The Little Things; Morfydd Clark in Saint Maud; Daniel Kaluuya in Judas and the Black Messiah

Ordinarily, early February is a cinematic dumping ground. But among the million other things that the COVID-19 pandemic affected, it caused the Oscars to expand their eligibility window by two months, meaning that some high-profile titles just landed on your favorite streaming services. Let’s take a quick run through this past weekend’s newest releases.

Judas and the Black Messiah (HBO Max). The second feature from Shaka King, Judas and the Black Messiah is a contemporary political text that’s also a classical spy thriller. It tells the story of Bill O’Neal (a very fine Lakeith Stanfield), the small-time car thief who became a big-league FBI informant in the late ’60s and infiltrated the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, led by Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya). It isn’t subtle about its allegiance; you don’t need a degree in Christian theology to discern which character corresponds to which half of the title. Read More

Read more