Reviews

First Man: Making History, One Small Step at a Time

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Gosling shoots for the moon in "First Man".

Just how crazy did you have to be to become an astronaut? These guys clearly must have had a screw loose, because so did their spaceships. At one point in Damien Chazelle’s First Man, as intrepid explorers are piling into a bucket of bolts that’s designed to blast them into the stratosphere, the crew struggles to fasten somebody’s seat belt. The solution: “Anybody got a Swiss Army knife?” That’s right, these are multi-million-dollar missions spearheaded by the country’s greatest minds, yet somehow they’re repairing their vehicles with trinkets from your 10-year-old’s tool kit.

That scene is a blackly comic moment, but it also illuminates the forces that drive First Man’s characters, and its maker. Chazelle’s Whiplash was a bracing portrait of single-minded obsession in the pursuit of perfection; his follow-up, La La Land, was simply perfect, but it also involved artists who dreamed of glory and self-fulfillment. Yet where those movies were taut and intimate, First Man operates on a grand scale, seeking to compress nine years of scientific exploration into two-plus hours of white-knuckle adventure. It’s a monumental undertaking, and for the first time, you can see Chazelle strain, laboring to deliver the epic goods. But he remains a prodigiously gifted filmmaker, and even if First Man lacks the effortless fluidity of his prior works, it also routinely serves up sequences and images that are, literally and figuratively, out of this world. Read More

Read more

A Star Is Born: The Song Remains the Same, But with New Music

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper in "A Star Is Born"

As meta monologues go, it’s hard to imagine one more openly symbolic than the speech that Bobby (Sam Elliott) gives in A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper’s sweet and soulful love story. Music, Bobby drawls, is just 12 notes between any octave. “It’s the same story, told over and over, forever; all the artist can offer the world is how they see those 12 notes.” Bobby is speaking about the constraining nature of music—a medium whose potential for variety is virtually limitless, but never mind—but it’s impossible not to read his remarks in the context of this movie, which is a remake of a remake of a remake. The cinematic notes underlying A Star Is Born have already been played. What matters now isn’t their sequence, but their presentation.

And measured against that yardstick, the film is a success. Its story is obviously familiar, but Cooper’s execution of it is spirited and stirring. It rather seamlessly transports the hoary themes of the 1937 original—a classic tale of fame, persistence, and possession—into the complexities of the present day, managing to feel timeless and contemporary at once. And perhaps most importantly, it features high-quality music, including a handful of truly triumphant scenes that help transform its leading lady from a pop phenomenon into a movie star. Read More

Read more

Colette: Carnal Explorations, with a Parisian Gloss

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keira Knightley in "Colette"

Early in Colette, the entrepreneur Henry Gauthier-Villars—better known as Willy, his nom de plume—lays out his plan to publish a wildly popular novel. He conceives of an epic work that’s both refined and ribald, literate enough to appeal to highbrows but sufficiently tawdry to intrigue “the unwashed masses”. Then he pauses, musing, “Maybe it’s the other way around.”

He might be onto something. The issue endemic to many period pieces—this one opens in 1892 and spans roughly 15 years—is a surfeit of gentility, and a corresponding lack of vulgarity, like a catered dinner party with no spice and no impudent conversation. Colette plainly has the handsomeness part of the equation down pat, sporting a luxuriant score, ravishing costumes, and fluid camerawork. What surprises and enchants about this movie, which was directed by Wash Westmoreland from a script he wrote with Richard Glatzer (his late husband) and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is how breezily entertaining it is. Colette is elegant, yes, but it is also funny, sexy, angry, and even a little bit naughty. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko: Gauche is good. Read More

Read more

The Predator: They Don’t Come in Peace. Neither Do the Aliens.

Jeremy BeckReviews
Olivia Munn and Boyd Holbrook in "The Predator"

The eponymous monster of The Predator is very good at one thing, and it’s killing people. Shane Black, the director and co-writer of The Predator, is also very good at one thing, and it’s writing smart, quippy dialogue. But where the Predator is single-minded in its focus—it kills with precision and without mercy—Black is less committed to channeling his energies into his strengths. He’s great with words, but he also loves mayhem, and after appearing as an actor in the original Predator in 1987, he’s clearly overjoyed at the opportunity to take ownership of this franchise as it continues to slice limbs and spill blood. It’s hard to blame him for following his heart, but his ambition can’t match his execution, because as gifted as Black is with masculine banter, he is not an especially skilled director of action.

This is a problem, because The Predator, for all its verbal wit, is an action movie. It is constructed as a series of explosive set pieces, with periodic interruptions for bouts of exposition and exchanges of vulgar, good-natured ribbing. It’s a reliable formula that Black helped create—he penned a number of big-budget screenplays in the ’80s and ’90s, including Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight—though where his earlier scripts tended to be complex to the point of indecipherability, this one (co-written by his old collaborator Fred Dekker) is blunt and purposeful. There’s a murderous alien on the loose in suburbia. A cadre of shady bureaucrats want to capture it, a band of hardy soldiers want to kill it, and a few hapless innocents—embodied by an exasperated biologist (Olivia Munn) and a 10-year-old autistic boy (Jacob Tremblay)—find themselves caught in the crossfire. Read More

Read more

A Simple Favor: Sipping Martinis with a Twist. Lots of Twists.

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively in "A Simple Favor"

Anna Kendrick looks nice. I don’t mean that she’s attractive (though of course she is); I mean that, with her soft-blue eyes and small build and delicate features, she presents as a decent, wholesome person. That innate tenderness has served her well in films like 50/50, End of Watch, and The Accountant, where she’s quietly elevated the material around her with unassuming grace. A Simple Favor, the gleefully absurd, indecently entertaining new comedy-mystery from Paul Feig, efficiently exploits Kendrick’s inherent geniality while also cannily subverting it. Her character, a single mom and moderately popular suburban vlogger named Stephanie, is sugary-sweet and aggressively eager—she’s always volunteering for multiple PTA assignments (her surname is literally Smothers)—but her helping hand has an iron grip. Her dainty exterior camouflages a mettle of steel, arousing your suspicion that she has something to hide.

But really, who doesn’t? One of the many pleasures of A Simple Favor, which is as much an amateur detective yarn as a pointed comedy of manners, lies in teasing us with misdirection and insinuation, encouraging us to anticipate its inevitable twists and turns. It’s being marketed as coming from Feig’s “darker side”, which is misleading on a few counts. To begin with, the former Freaks and Geeks showrunner is no stranger to troubling themes; even his more straightforward comedies, like Bridesmaids and Spy, carry undercurrents of sadness and pain. But more centrally, labeling this movie dark is false advertising. A Simple Favor may traffic in deception, seduction, and murder, but none of that changes the fact that, at its core, it’s a total fucking hoot. Read More

Read more