Reviews

Sully: He’s Not a Hero. Just Ask the Government.

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Hanks is a haunted hero in Clint Eastwood's "Sully"

In the dreadful 2012 flop Trouble with the Curve, Clint Eastwood plays a grizzled baseball scout who has grown disgusted with the sport’s increasing reliance on analytics and technology. “Anybody who uses computers doesn’t know a damn thing about this game,” he growls at one point. His irascible critique encapsulates the film’s worldview, namely, that the classicist’s wisdom of observational experience will always vanquish the modernist’s reliance on statistical data. That broad thesis is now the animating force behind Sully, Eastwood’s brisk, hackneyed, intermittently diverting reenactment of an American tragedy that wasn’t. It’s the kind of movie where the officious villains blindly trust computer simulations, only to be taken aback when they’re informed that they’ve failed to account for that most vexing of variables: humanity.

The majority of the humanity in Sully derives from Tom Hanks, an actor who, luckily for Eastwood, could imbue a paperclip with an aura of moral and professional authority. Here he provides the necessary blunt-force gravitas as Capt. Chesley Sullenberger, the pilot better known as, well, you know. The film opens with anonymous voices screaming Sully’s name as an airplane glides above the streets of Queens before crashing into a skyscraper. It’s a nightmarish image, which makes sense, given that it is born from Sully’s nightmares. In actuality, as you will no doubt remember, things went quite differently: On January 15, 2009, after U.S. Airways Flight 1549 suffered power failure in both engines due to bird strikes, Sully successfully landed the plane on the Hudson River, saving the lives of all 155 souls on board. The incident was swiftly dubbed “the Miracle on the Hudson”, with Sully as its chief architect. Roll credits. Read More

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Kubo and the Two Strings: In a Land of Magic, a Storyteller on the Run

Jeremy BeckReviews
In "Kubo and the Two Strings", three strange heroes on a quest

The opening voiceover of Kubo and the Two Strings admonishes viewers not to blink. Closing our eyes, we are told, will result in the death of the film’s hero. It’s a bold gambit that could potentially induce groans from the audience, were it not accompanied by a ravishing image: a woman and her baby in a tiny canoe, surging forward against a giant wave, as rain lashes down and the moon shines ominously. It’s an enthralling sight, one that renders the narrator’s warning superfluous—who could possibly look away from such a scene? But that narration, beyond establishing the life-or-death stakes, speaks to the movie’s larger purpose. Kubo and the Two Strings isn’t just a story about an artist. It’s about how artists tell stories.

The artist-in-chief of Kubo is Travis Knight, the CEO of Laika, a studio that occupies a unique space in the American cinematic landscape. Eschewing the digital wizardry of Pixar and DreamWorks, Laika instead makes movies via stop-motion animation, that laborious method of physically manipulating individual objects for illusive effect. (This playful scene illustrates just how mind-bogglingly arduous the technique is.) Its first three films—Coraline, ParaNorman, and The Boxtrolls—married this painstaking approach to an off-kilter weirdness, resulting in distinctly original pictures that were always interesting, if not quite astonishing. But Kubo and the Two Strings, which is Knight’s directorial debut, is the studio’s best movie yet, combining the doting meticulousness of its prior works with a sweeping, stirring narrative and richly drawn characters. The style may be new-fangled, but the storytelling is old-fashioned in the best ways. Read More

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Don’t Breathe: He’s Just a Blind Guy. How Scary Can He Be?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dylan Minnette and Jane Levy are in over their head in the thriller "Don't Breathe"

At one point in Jurassic Park, Sam Neill attempts to evade a T-rex by hiding in plain sight. His theory—supported by years of paleontologic research—is that the dinosaur’s visual acuity is based on movement, so it won’t detect him if he stands stock still. It’s a riveting scene (most scenes in Jurassic Park are), forgoing the kineticism of the typical chase (“must go faster”) in favor of terrifying immobility. Don’t Breathe, the taut and accomplished new chiller from Fede Alvarez, essentially extends this concept to feature-length. It’s a horror movie that bottles the genre’s rushing adrenaline and redirects it inward; here, rather than running away, the only way the characters can escape the monster is by being very, very quiet.

That monster—the film’s tyrannosaur, if you will—is Stephen Lang, the grizzled television actor who briefly lit up the big screen in 2009, with colorful parts in Public Enemies, The Men Who Stare at Goats, and (most memorably) Avatar. In the latter, he played a bloodthirsty warmonger named Miles Quaritch; his heavy in Don’t Breathe makes Quaritch seem positively pacifistic. Here, he portrays an unnamed, solitary Iraq war veteran who owns a modest two-story home, a surly rottweiler, and an even surlier disposition. As soon as you see him in the cold open dragging a bloody body down a deserted street—an ill-advised flash-forward that dilutes the movie’s considerable tension—you can see the darkness in his soul. Read More

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Hell or High Water: Paying Off That Mortgage, No Matter the Cost

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ben Foster and Chris Pine in "Hell or High Water"

The dusty Texas landscape of Hell or High Water is dotted with brightly colored billboards, each promising salvation to those in need. The path of this purported deliverance is not spiritual but financial; neatly lettered signs like “Fast Cash” and “Debt Relief” court blue-collar laborers who are behind on their mortgages or their bills. The striking visual contrast—between the glossy print of the highway advertisements and the dilapidated cars and trucks that drive past them—hints that these assurances are illusory, a cruel commercial ploy to exploit the perpetual suffering of the working class. It’s an accurate impression, as the movie is, in part, a damning indictment of corporate avarice, one that recalls the impotent rage of The Big Short, only with the gleaming skyscrapers of the Big Apple replaced with the vast and desolate ranches of the heartland. Hell or High Water is in many ways a classic heist picture, but the true thieves depicted here are the banks.

That may sound a tad polemical, and it’s fair to criticize Hell or High Water for tarring and feathering an avatar of exaggerated evil that has already been burned in cinematic effigy. (Recent examples include 99 Homes and Money Monster, though the closest comparator here is Killing Them Softly, Andrew Dominik’s seamy underworld yarn that embellished its pulpy narrative with persistent commentary on the government’s post-Katrina nonfeasance.) But this smart, soulful movie is too nuanced—and too compassionate—to be reduced to its talking points. Its message may be broad, but its details are thrillingly specific. Read More

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Sausage Party: Imagine All the Foods, Losing Their Religion

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kristen Wiig, Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and David Krumholtz as foods in "Sausage Party"

The community at the center of Sausage Party is a vibrant melting pot, a diverse cross-section of ethnic backgrounds and religious faiths. But this neighborhood is also unified in its theism—although it hosts a number of different sects, most of its residents believe in some higher power. Some sing hymns together, while others pass down oral histories of their divinities; virtually all of them contemplate the existence of life after death and hope one day to ascend to a spiritual plane. In essence, this bustling hub of worship exhibits the kind of cultural variety that you might find in any American metropolis, where people regularly attend churches, synagogues, or mosques. There’s just one small difference that distinguishes the characters of this movie: They’re all foods.

The premise of Sausage Party, which was co-written by longtime best buds Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, sounds like an idea that they cooked up while getting stoned on the set of This Is the End, their woozy apocalyptic hangout comedy. (Virtually the entire voice cast of Sausage Party appeared in that film, while Kyle Hunter and Ariel Shaffir, who both executive-produced it, also receive screenwriting credits here.) That movie used the Rapture as scaffolding for a thoughtful investigation of male friendship and insecurity, and Sausage Party features an even crazier concept that masks an even more provocative study of human behavior. Curiously, it’s the latter that leaves a mark. A self-professed work of “adult animation”, Sausage Party is frequently funny and persistently filthy, but its commitment to excess suffers from diminishing returns. It’s the skewering of organized religion that really stings. Read More

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