Reviews

The Invisible Man: Touch Me, Not So Easy to Leave Me

Jeremy BeckReviews
Elisabeth Moss in "The Invisible Man"

There’s virtually no dialogue in the first five minutes of The Invisible Man, but that doesn’t stop the director Leigh Whannell from telling you everything you need to know. We open in the dead of night, on a woman lying awake in bed, her partner’s arm slung across her waist like a fleshy chain. Her eyes wide with anxiety, she silently extricates herself from his grasp, then tiptoes through their opulent beachside home, packing a bag and disabling the alarm. She also deactivates the house’s many security cameras, except for one: the feed from the bedroom, which she routes to her phone and keeps glancing at in panic, worried that her jailer might have risen. As she quietly maneuvers toward the exit and her freedom, the tension mounts, with various obstacles—a dog’s dish, a car’s sensor, a looming enclosure—conspiring to impede her escape.

It’s the first of many gripping sequences in the movie, an expertly orchestrated medley of image, sound, and music. Yet beyond highlighting Whannell’s considerable craft, the opening is meaningful for the way it telegraphs the film’s metaphorical intentions. The Invisible Man is, quite simply, a picture about domestic abuse. It examines how powerful men feel entitled to possess beautiful women, resulting in violence that’s both physical and emotional. And it contemplates how such subjugation corrodes victims’ health and self-worth, how it can be toxic and dehumanizing. Also, there’s an invisible man. Read More

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The Assistant: Working for the Man, and the Whole Rotten System

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julia Garner in "The Assistant")

Pronouns work overtime in The Assistant. Characters are constantly discussing the whims and whereabouts of their imperious boss, but they never refer to him by name. “He’s in a meeting.” “I don’t have him right now.” “He wants you on the flight to LA.” They may as well be talking about God. You might know him better as Harvey Weinstein.

But let’s not get too cute. The genius of this sobering movie, which was written and directed by Kitty Green, is that despite its painstaking detail, it isn’t about any particular person. It is instead a searing indictment of an entire ecosystem, a culture of domination, silence, and complicity. Rather than narrow its scope to the exploits and exploitations of a specific individual, The Assistant seeks to shine a harsh light on a prejudiced and predatory industry. The paradox of the film—the contradiction that Green deploys so thrillingly and, at times, frustratingly—is that, while its ambitions are undeniably dramatic, it unfolds with an absolute minimum of actual drama. Read More

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Birds of Prey: Harley’s Angels

Jeremy BeckReviews
Margot Robbie and friends in "Birds of Prey"

She just wants breakfast. In an era where noble superheroes and dastardly villains are constantly preoccupied with saving the world or burning it down, all that initially matters to Harley Quinn—the brilliant but unstable psychiatrist, and the former squeeze of a certain lunatic called The Joker—is that she be able to chow down on a bacon-egg-and-cheese sandwich in peace. Naturally, Birds of Prey, the hectic and uneven and largely diverting new addition to the dreary DC Extended Universe, strews plenty of obstacles in her path, continuously delaying her date with culinary bliss. But while Harley’s mania for locally sourced McMuffins (“Maybe it’s the Armenian arm hair,” she muses) is just one of countless random flourishes in the film, it’s also symbolic of the movie’s playful tone and plucky spirit. If you want tedious footage of solemn warriors grappling with the crushing existential weight of their powers, go watch Endgame. Birds of Prey is all about fun.

The DCEU has tried this before, most recently with Shazam!, a lightweight yarn whose cheerful silliness functioned as a welcome corrective to the relentless turgidity of leaden adventures like Batman v Superman. Shazam! was pleasant enough, and it featured a wonderfully limber comic performance from Zachary Levi, but it was also decidedly unmemorable, with flat humor and tiresome fight scenes. Birds of Prey, which was directed by Cathy Yan from a screenplay by Christina Hodson (Bumblebee), is a significant improvement on both fronts. It channels its flamboyant irreverence in ways that periodically resemble actual wit. It also happens to be a surprisingly good action movie. Read More

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1917: Hold the Line. Hold the Shot.

Jeremy BeckReviews
George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman in Sam Mendes' "1917"

Two years ago, after 13 nominations without a victory, Roger Deakins—one of the greatest cinematographers who’s ever lived—won his first Oscar, for his magnificent work on Blade Runner 2049. I mention this not because I care about the Academy Awards (I don’t… except when I do), but because 1917, Sam Mendes’ bold and brawny and periodically breathtaking new film, seems to have been engineered specifically to secure Deakins an Oscar. Its technical premise—it purports to capture its grueling events in a single take—is not wholly novel; a recent example includes Birdman (which won Emmanuel Lubezki the second of his three straight trophies), while the conceit stretches back to Hitchcock and beyond. But in marrying the single-shot concept (or gimmick, depending on your disposition) to the epic gravity of the war picture, 1917 practically screams to be recognized for its grandeur. Some movies envelop you with the invisible pull of their craft; this one pulverizes you with the sheer force of its technique.

The single-take maneuver, though undeniably impressive, is not without its hazards. The risk of wielding the camera with such fluid dynamism is that it will distract viewers. It’s a danger of distancing; the more conscious you are of the stylistic prowess on display, the farther away from the screen you tend to feel, which in turn prevents you from melting into the immaculately constructed environments. But while my brain never quite stopped registering the presence of Deakins’ camera in 1917, that subconscious awareness did little to sabotage my appreciation of his work. There’s an elegance to his lensing, a grace that somehow magnetizes you, forcing you to grapple with the lovely brutality of his images. That distinctly cinematic paradox—the tension between horror and wonder, between ghastliness and gorgeousness, between death and life—is what animates 1917, and what makes it such a fascinating sit. Like most war movies, it traffics heavily in blood, viscera, terror, and despair. And it depicts this ugliness with what can only be called beauty. Read More

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Uncut Gems: Doubling Down, on Distress and Excess

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adam Sandler in the Safdie Brothers' "Uncut Gems"

Of course Uncut Gems opens with an extreme close-up of a colonoscopy. After all, this nasty, edgy, oddly exhilarating movie is the work of Josh and Benny Safdie, those sibling purveyors of stomach-churning New York City sleaze. Their prior film, Good Time, steeped itself in grimy brutality, featuring all manner of crimes, deaths, and maulings. Their new picture, as its initial footage of a man’s digestive tract suggests, in no way eases up on the throttle; it’s another portrait of a desperate man, and it’s uncompromising in its vulgarity and intensity. Yet there’s something strange about Uncut Gems, something shiny buried within its crusty shell of unfiltered savagery and heedless aggression. It is—and I can’t believe I’m writing this, given that the Safdies’ filmmaking ethos seems to involve making the viewing experience as nauseating as possible—fun to watch.

Whether it’s pleasant to look at is another matter. With each new feature—before Good Time, they made the low-budget addiction drama Heaven Knows What, starring mostly non-professional actors—the Safdies grow increasingly accomplished in refining their distinctive style. It is not an aesthetic I particularly care for. The camera is wobbly, the music (again by Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never) is invasive, and the lighting is, well, not very light; many scenes play out in dim interiors, with unflattering illumination that makes the actors look wan. Occasionally, they subvert their grungy approach in productive ways, such as when a musician activates a black light at a nightclub, suddenly brightening the screen with bolts of neon. The veteran cinematographer, Darius Khondji, has worked with David Fincher, Bong Joon-ho, and Michael Haneke, and he helps modulate the Safdies’ signature freneticism with a measure of discipline. Still, for the most part, this movie looks gritty, sickly, and ugly. Read More

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