Reviews

Captain Marvel: Blasting Into the Past, with a Feminine Touch

Jeremy BeckReviews
Brie Larson travels back to the '90s in "Captain Marvel".

Trawling through the visualized memories of a warrior captive who’s suspended upside-down via electromagnets, the interrogator becomes baffled by the shapelessness of what he’s seeing. “Is anyone else confused?” asks Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), a member of a green-skinned, shape-shifting extraterrestrial species called the Skrulls. It’s a question that would ordinarily carry a meta charge; after all, this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe we’re talking about, that ginormous, globally branded franchise which has grown so sprawling, even those weaned on comics can barely navigate it without a map. Yet one of the satisfying things about Captain Marvel, the 21st and decidedly not-bad entry in the MCU proper, is that you don’t need to possess a doctorate in comic-book lore to appreciate its familiar origin-story rhythms. This isn’t to say that the movie skimps on fantastical elements or idiosyncratic detail; there are intergalactic wars, levitating soldiers, enigmatic androids, photon blasters, aptitude suppressors, and countless shots of characters manipulating or absorbing beams of glowing blue energy. But that’s all souped-up window dressing. At its core, Captain Marvel is about a hero grappling with her powers and struggling to claim her identity.

Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck from a script they wrote with Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Captain Marvel’s relative streamlining comes as something of a reprieve following the overstuffed Avengers: Infinity War. Where that bulky behemoth crammed countless characters and subplots into its 160-minute running time, this movie feels positively slender, with a refreshing clarity of focus. Sure, the obligatory mid-credits scene necessarily links what you just watched to the broader narrative of the MCU—a narrative that will theoretically conclude (ha!) next month with Avengers: Endgame—but otherwise, Boden and Fleck’s film features a welcome lack of duty-bound integration. Blessedly, Captain Marvel is about Captain Marvel. Read More

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Greta: Come for Dinner, Stay Forever

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chloë Grace Moretz and Isabelle Huppert in "Greta".

It would be unfair to accuse Greta of jumping the rails, because it’s never on the rails in the first place. Deeply silly and persistently entertaining, this campy thriller would be laughable if it were remotely interested in being taken seriously. Thankfully, the director Neil Jordan, working from a script he wrote with Ray Wright, seems to have recognized the material’s inherent kitsch; he abandons logic and nuance in favor of cheesy suspense. He wants to give you goose bumps, not dig under your skin.

It’s a smart decision, if not as smart as casting Isabelle Huppert in the title role. One of the most intuitive actors in the world, Huppert often flashes a steely sternness, a rigidity that she wields to mask her characters’ inner pain and longing. The logline of Greta—elderly immigrant widow befriends bereaved Manhattan twentysomething—feints at a sober exploration of maternal isolation and compassion, and if you enter the film with no knowledge of its premise, you might expect the title character to be another of Huppert’s keenly intelligent, emotionally fraught women. But while she may be quick-witted and determined, Greta is not especially humane. In fact, she isn’t even human, because she’s actually a vampire. Read More

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Velvet Buzzsaw: Killer Painting. What’s It Worth?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rene Russo and Jake Gyllenhaal in "Velvet Buzzsaw"

The emperor’s clothes get ripped to shreds in Velvet Buzzsaw, an asinine satire of the modern art scene that paints its targets and its characters in crude, bloody strokes. Written and directed by Dan Gilroy (and distributed by Netflix), it imagines a world full of rubes and sharks, a corrupt ecosystem in which artists, dealers, and critics conspire and compete in their feverish efforts to defraud you, the guileless consumer. It’s a tale of sickly glamour; most of the people we meet in this ugly little movie are extremely wealthy, though their morals are as bankrupt as Gilroy’s themes.

As a satire, Velvet Buzzsaw is profoundly idiotic, but as a halfway-intentional comedy, it is not without its diversions. Chief among those is Jake Gyllenhaal, who in Gilroy’s Nightcrawler delivered the performance of his career as a gaunt, wild-eyed videographer who crept from TV newsrooms into your nightmares. His work here is less unsettling but no less entertaining, full of rococo flourishes that underline his zany commitment. His mania holds your attention even as the film around him burns to the ground. Read More

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On the Basis of Sex: Fighting for Equality, Through the Law and Gritted Teeth

Jeremy BeckReviews
Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in "On the Basis of Sex".

Last year, the documentary RBG attempted to honor the extraordinary life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, charting her path from able young mind to Harvard Law student to U.S. Supreme Court Justice to feminist icon to internet meme. It was a well-intentioned effort that suffered from the usual pitfalls of cinematic hagiography, struggling to compress 85 years of the life of one of the most important legal figures in modern American history into a tidy 98 minutes. On the Basis of Sex, the new Ginsburg biopic from Mimi Leder, takes a narrower approach, homing in on two key periods in its subject’s life: her challenges as one of the few female students at Harvard, and her early labors as a litigator striving for women’s equality. Where RBG’s impact was glancing—to borrow from Supreme Court terminology, it felt more like a syllabus than a full opinion—Leder’s film lands a blow with something resembling force.

If the boxing metaphor seems peculiar, bear in mind that, despite trafficking in bookish disciplines and legal arcana, On the Basis of Sex is essentially a sports movie. Its heroine, played with poise and pluck by Felicity Jones, is the proverbial underdog, fighting to rise through the ranks and topple an entrenched dynasty. Its villains, most notably personified by Sam Waterston as Harvard’s dean of students, are pillars of the establishment, wielding their superior resources—money, power, connections—to extend their unbroken streak of competitive dominance. There are triumphs and setbacks, eager rookies and cagey veterans, strategic coaching maneuvers and breezy montages. There is even a Big Game, with a climactic moment designed to be as suspenseful as the final jump shot in Hoosiers. Read More

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Glass: The Supervillains Are Running the Asylum

Jeremy BeckReviews
Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy, and Bruce Willis in M. Night Shyamalan's "Glass".

One of the main characters of M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass suffers from dissociative identity disorder. That illness is not shared by its director. Shyamalan may have his flaws, but he wields his camera with a confidence, a sense of self, that’s unusual in the Hollywood studio system. Good thing, too, because when reduced to its building blocks, Glass is a ridiculous movie, a bizarrely plotted thriller that makes astonishingly little sense. Yet it also flaunts a genuine personality, along with an exhilarating degree of style, that elevate it comfortably above its stupidity. There’s a school of critics who insist that Shyamalan should stop penning his own screenplays, arguing that his shaky writing hampers his gifts as a director. Maybe that’s true, but consider the flip side: How many other filmmakers could have taken this script and turned it into something so effortlessly, indecently entertaining?

An ungainly, tantalizing hybrid of two superior genre movies, Glass positions itself as the climax of a suddenly uncovered cinematic universe. Way back in 2000, Unbreakable—still Shyamalan’s best film—followed the uneasy partnership between David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), with the latter insistently tugging at the former to accept his destiny as a real-life superhero. Separately, Split followed the murderous exploits of Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a Sybil-like serial killer who occasionally transformed into a savage, animal-like entity called The Beast. Shyamalan is often accused of repeating himself, but these two movies weren’t remotely alike in terms of either plot or tone; Unbreakable was a powerful study of obsession, confusion, and self-discovery, whereas Split was a hammy, razor-sharp, predator-versus-prey thriller. Yet the (admittedly delightful) stinger of Split revealed that it in fact occupied the same world as Unbreakable, and from those still-glowing ashes, Glass was born. Read More

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