Passengers: Boy Meets Girl, Stranded Amid the Stars

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt in "Passengers"

It is an unwritten rule that every movie set in space must feature a scene where a character suddenly begins to run out of oxygen. Passengers, the diverting, flawed, occasionally fantastic romantic thriller from Morten Tyldum, is no exception. But the scene in question, which is both exciting and exasperating, arms critics with an all-too-apt metaphor to describe the broader film. Here is a movie that begins with enormous promise, sustains that promise for well over an hour, and then slowly, steadily runs out of air. It gasps for breath, its limbs flail helplessly, and its brain, deprived of precious nutrients like logic and plausibility, shuts down.

But if I’m writing less of a review than an obituary, allow me to express the hope that Passengers—which has been unjustly savaged by critics—may rest in peace. Its ultimate demise should not invalidate the genuine delight and intrigue it provided while it was still alive. By which I mean, for its first two acts, Passengers is a whole lot of fun. Visually, it’s sleek, sharp, and sexy, with a slick, antiseptic production design, fetching costumes, and a pleasing color palette. And narratively, it tells an engaging story fraught with genuine moral conflict. A high-concept sci-fi think-piece, it will undoubtedly draw unflattering comparisons to 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it’s inspired less by Kubrick than Kieslowski, and if its answers to its philosophical quandaries are less than satisfactory, it at least has the courage to pose such dilemmas in the first place. Read More

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La La Land: Sing Me a Song of an Era Bygone

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in Damien Chazelle's magnificent "La La Land"

The movie musical didn’t need to be resurrected, because it never died. It has become fashionable for misty-eyed critics to pine for the glory days—of Busby Berkeley and Bing Crosby, of Rogers & Astaire and Rodgers & Hammerstein—but the twenty-first century has featured more than its share of quality musicals, from Chicago to The Last Five Years to Moulin Rouge. Yet the continued vitality of the musical shouldn’t diminish the staggering triumph that is La La Land, the astonishing tour de force of song, dance, and joy from Damien Chazelle. To declare that this sweeping, soaring film has salvaged the musical from obscurity would be both inaccurate and reductive; La La Land is far too vibrant and versatile to be trivialized as the savior of a particular genre. All the same, it may well serve a broader critical function—simply uttering its title can now operate as a reflexive retort whenever anyone dares to bemoan the quality of modern movies. The musical may not be dead, but La La Land reaffirms that cinema itself is very much alive.

Of course, anyone doubting the medium’s endurance probably hasn’t seen Chazelle’s prior film, Whiplash. That brilliant drama chronicled the corrosive relationship between a virtuoso drummer and his ferocious conductor, a fascinating dynamic that revealed the dark underbelly of the pursuit of greatness. With La La Land, Chazelle has retained Whiplash‘s relentless energy, but he has swapped out its obsessive fury in favor of a grand romanticism. The director is undeniably enraptured with the musicals of yesteryear, in particular Jacques Demy’s classic The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, but his filmmaking is too vigorous and inspiring to be motivated purely by nostalgia. Instead, he has harnessed his considerable formal powers to tell a story of piercing emotional clarity, if one that also happens to pay heartfelt homage to Tinseltown’s rich history. His abiding love of old movies has allowed him to make a spectacular new one. Read More

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Rogue One: A Star Wars Story: Still Rebelling, Now with a Cost

Jeremy BeckReviews
Diego Luna, Felicity Jones, and Alan Tudyk in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"

Of the infinite memes that sprang out of the original Star Wars trilogy, one of the most random derives from a moment of startling quiet in The Return of the Jedi, when a rebel leader is delivering an expository info-dump. As she’s rambling about battle stations and deflector shields, she suddenly pauses, then drops her voice and solemnly murmurs, “Many Bothans died to bring us this information.” There are no Bothans in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but there is quite a bit of death, and not just involving hundreds of haphazardly slaughtered stormtroopers. This counts as a surprise. The Star Wars franchise isn’t devoid of darkness, but it has generally prioritized fun and escapism; while Rogue One largely stays on brand, it isn’t especially concerned with joy. Instead, the predominant theme of this interesting and frustrating film—which was directed by Gareth Edwards from a script by Chris Weitz and Tony Gilroy—is sacrifice. It’s a genuine war movie, one about the soldiers who wade through the mud, risking their lives so that the rest of us may glimpse a better tomorrow.

If that sounds turgid, don’t worry—this is still a Star Wars movie, with all of the excitement and mythology that such an undertaking entails. Yet Rogue One occupies a curious place within Disney’s newest and most profitable cinematic universe. Whereas the official episodic saga resumed last year, after a decade-long layoff, with The Force Awakens, Rogue One is the first of the studio’s “anthology” series, films that both take place within the canonical realm and simultaneously stand apart from it. (Continuing this pattern, 2018 will see the release of a Han Solo movie, starring Hail, Caesar‘s Alden Ehrenreich, while a rumored Boba Fett film is tentatively slated for 2020.) In theory, this concept will allow filmmakers to expand the Star Wars mythos into uncharted space, using the series’ existing, minutely detailed template to tell bold and innovative stories. But because the franchise’s fan base is so entrenched and protective of its collective property—and because directors must satisfy their corporate overlord’s commercial imperative to please those fans—veering too far off course is a dicey proposition. Read More

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Nocturnal Animals: Brutality Is Skin Deep

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amy Adams is a wreck in Tom Ford's "Nocturnal Animals"

Title sequences can do more than just convey rudimentary information about a film’s cast and crew—they can set the mood, introduce a plot, establish a theme. So what to make of the opening credits of Nocturnal Animals, which impassively present a parade of naked, obese women dancing in slow-motion as firecrackers explode around them? Is this garish display meant to be revolting? Titillating? Provocative? Profound? Forced to guess, one might argue that the director, Tom Ford, is attempting to draw a line between happiness and despair, remarking that beauty and brutality are often intertwined. (To do so, one would first need to ignore the accusations of body-shaming that have dogged Ford regarding the sequence.) But that isn’t quite right, because the dirty joke of this dirty movie is that, much like its jarring opening credits, it means absolutely nothing.

Which is not to say that Nocturnal Animals is unsightly. Far from it. A famous fashion designer making his second foray into cinema (following the well-received, overwrought A Single Man), Ford fails to weave the gorgeous with the grotesque as meaningfully as he’d like, but he nevertheless supplies ample quantities of both. For the former, he casts Amy Adams (always a good start), dresses her in ravishing clothes, and plops her in the middle of an austere, pristinely manicured Malibu mansion. Adams plays Susan, a paragon of first-world materialism; she owns an art gallery, attends fancy parties, and is married to a handsome husband (Armie Hammer) who regularly jets off to New York to close deals and screw mistresses. Despite her wealth and creature comforts, Susan is plainly disenchanted with her life—she needs a jolt of excitement to jostle her out of her ennui. Read More

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Loving: Found Guilty for Finding Love

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as a real-life couple in "Loving"

Loving is a very pleasant American movie about a very unpleasant time in American history. It tells a story of adversity, perseverance, and ultimate triumph, and it proceeds in a rigorous straight line, with minimal eccentricity or embellishment. This is perhaps to be expected, given that Loving belongs to a specific subgenre: the earnest and well-meaning docudrama. But it is also something of a surprise, given that its writer and director is Jeff Nichols, whose previous films (Take Shelter, Mud, Midnight Special) were largely off-kilter and opaque. Nichols tends to focus on odd protagonists—a delusional laborer, a wandering gangster, an alien boy—but even more central to his filmmaking are his disdain for convention and his gift for unpredictability. Yet anyone with access to Wikipedia could comfortably predict how Loving will play out.

This does not make it bad. On the contrary, it can be satisfying to watch a familiar story unfold on screen, particularly when it is well-told and well-acted. And of course, the movie’s theme—that stoic decency can defeat senseless bigotry—is a worthy one, equally relevant now as when the events of the film took place. Still, the challenge for Nichols is to make Loving stimulating as a piece of cinema as well as a lesson in history. Given his meat-and-potatoes approach to this material, it’s a marvel that he even half-succeeds. Read More

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