Reviews

Bugonia review: Alien vs. Redditor

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emma Stone in Bugonia

Have you noticed that the world is falling apart? That corporations wield enormous power? That the mega-rich are infiltrating the government to advance their own agenda at the expense of the working poor? Teddy has noticed. More than that, he’s determined that our ongoing societal collapse stems from a particular form of unchecked immigration—one that has nothing to do with national borders. That’s right, according to Teddy there’s a more insidious invading force at work: aliens.

Bugonia is the latest whatsit from Yorgos Lanthimos, the fiendishly inventive filmmaker of such marvels as Poor Things, The Lobster, and The Favourite. It isn’t as great as those movies, lacking their conceptual ambition and their ravishing craftsmanship. But it is nonetheless a potent and arresting work—an intimate, suspenseful thriller that also tackles modern discontent with satirical ingenuity and sobering clarity. Read More

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After the Hunt review: Sexual Behavior in the Human Yale

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield in After the Hunt

Like everyone else, the title is hiding something. The prepositional phrase “after the hunt” implies an event followed by an aftermath: cause and effect. Yet one of the purported insights of this intriguing, frustrating movie is that contemporary life is a pinwheel of controversy and catastrophe—a perpetual cycle of predation, victimization, and antagonism. After this hunt is over, another one is sure to follow. And eventually, they’ll come for you.

Who are “they,” exactly? After the Hunt, which was directed by Luca Guadagnino from a script by Nora Garrett, supplies no shortage of potential bogeymen. The woke mob. Coastal elites. Old white men encrusted with privilege. Young Black women exploiting affirmative action. Out-of-touch shrinks who don’t know the difference between The Doors and The Smiths. Bearded professors. Protesting students. Queer people. (Seriously, at one point somebody snarls at a non-binary character, “Beat it, they!”) Read More

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Tron: Ares review: Jet with the Program

Jeremy BeckReviews
Greta Lee, Jared Leto, and Arturo Castro in Tron: Ares

There has never been a good Tron movie. But Ares, the third installment in this baffling techno-obsessed franchise, is probably the least bad of the bunch. It retains the series’ sleek, color-coded aesthetic while also taking steps to minimize its mythological inanity. Calling it smart would be a stretch, but it reflects enough considered thought to qualify as sensible debugging.

Not that the storytelling in Ares is especially persuasive, or even interesting. In an accidental flirtation with topicality, its screenplay (by Jesse Wigutow) contemplates the rewards and costs of artificial intelligence. Corporate warfare has broken out over the search for “the permanence code,” an electronic MacGuffin that will allow digitized creations to attain lasting physical form. On one side of this commercial conflict is Eve (Greta Lee), an environmentally conscious entrepreneur who longs to continue the work of her deceased sister, envisioning the code as a vehicle for medical and scientific breakthroughs. On the other is Dillinger (Evan Peters), an industrial scion who dreams of commodifying and militarizing the technology; when we first meet him, he’s demoing its capabilities to a brigade of generals who salivate at the notion of a powerful and indefatigable soldier who executes all commands without question. Eve, in contrast, wants to make an orange grove whose trees always bear fruit. You earn no points for guessing which character is the movie’s chief villain. Read More

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The Smashing Machine: Do You Smell What the Schlock is Cooking?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dwayne Johnson in The Smashing Machine

Over the past 18 years, Dwayne Johnson has appeared in several dozen films but has been credited as “The Rock” only once (in the wrestling drama Fighting with My Family, where he played a lightly fictionalized version of himself). That he was able to drop his famous WWE moniker and still become one of the world’s most bankable movie stars—headlining a number of original hits (San Andreas, Central Intelligence), supercharging the Fast & Furious franchise, turning Jumanji into a global brand—is a testament to the impressiveness of his career transition; he’s come a long way since the brute who awkwardly lumbered across the screen in The Scorpion King. Yet while Johnson has proved his talents as an action hero and self-deprecating comedian (the latter quality best displayed in his vocal part in Moana, if maybe not its forgettable sequel), he’s rarely found work as a dramatic actor, possibly because his hulking size and booming voice prevented filmmakers from envisioning him as a regular person.

The Smashing Machine, the new biopic from Benny Safdie, represents an effort to change that. Not that Mark Kerr, Johnson’s role here, could fairly be dubbed a normal guy; he’s a muscle-bound giant, the kind of incredible hulk whose sheer mass draws stares in waiting rooms. But he isn’t a spy or a thief or superhero. He’s just an athlete, and his (relative) ordinariness seems designed to reshape Johnson’s image, and to lend his rippling physique a sheen of prestige credibility—the kind of artist who earns Oscars as well as dollars. Read More

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One Battle After Another: Inherent ICE

Jeremy BeckReviews
Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another

Did Paul Thomas Anderson just make an action movie? Yes and no. Certainly, One Battle After Another is a robust and muscular production, replete with car chases, kidnappings, and explosions. Yet its most exhilarating sequence—the one that best encapsulates its singular combination of tumultuous suspense and whip-smart comedy—is just a guy talking on the phone.

It helps, of course, that said guy is Leonardo DiCaprio, one of our last true movie stars. He plays Bob Ferguson, a lapsed revolutionary whose stormy past as an ideological militant has long since subsided into a cloud of bong smoke and disorientation. With his scraggly facial hair and his fried brain cells, Bob seems an unlikely hero of a decades-spanning epic from the acclaimed director of Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. But One Battle After Another, which Anderson adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, has no interest in being bound by expectation or convention. It is a wildly ambitious picture that takes as its subject no less than the precarity of the American experiment, yet it is also an intimate family melodrama—a poignant tale of darkened souls clawing their way back toward the light. Read More

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