Black Panther: With Great Power Comes Great Villainy

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lupita Nyong'o, Chadwick Boseman, and Danai Gurira in "Black Panther"

Early in Black Panther, Ryan Coogler’s bold and thorny new film that is the eighteenth entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the titular hero asks his young sister, Shuri, why she’s bothering to upgrade an already elegant technological system. Shuri—played by an impish, scene-stealing Letitia Wright—responds with huffy wisdom: “Just because something works doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.” The MCU has its faults—low-stakes storytelling, visual sameness, an exponentially swelling character base—but as mega-franchises go, it’s pretty good, churning out suitably entertaining products that are typically funny, professionally made, and well-acted. What’s gratifying about Black Panther is the way it operates within the MCU’s preestablished confines (the groaning Stan Lee cameo, the post-credits scenes) while simultaneously seeking to push beyond them. In raw terms, it isn’t the MCU’s best movie—its hero is too bland, its story too busy—but it may be its most interesting. And in an era where carefully packaged formula rules the cinematic roost, an interesting superhero movie is something to savor.

It also helps dispel the myth that personal filmmaking and corporate oversight are somehow incompatible. With Black Panther, Coogler continues to tackle the themes of racial strife, familial loyalty, and youthful conflict that animated his previous features, the heartfelt docudrama Fruitvale Station and the boisterous boxing picture Creed. But he has also made—and I mean this sincerely rather than pejoratively—a comic-book movie, complete with bright colors, complex mythology, and CGI-inflected rumbles. His estimable achievement is to weave these elements into a cohesive vision. Black Panther is packed with excitement and ideas, but it never feels choppy or overstuffed. Read More

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Ranking Every Movie of 2017 (all 108 of them)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Daniel Kaluuya and Allison Williams in "Get Out"

Yesterday, we posted our list of the 10 best movies of 2017. Today, per annual tradition, I’m ranking every single theatrical release of the year (well, except for all the ones I didn’t see). To be clear, this is a stupid and arbitrary exercise; if I made the same list from scratch tomorrow, I’m sure it would look dramatically different, especially the bottom half. But I like doing it because it serves as a recordkeeping function, and it encourages people to yell at me about my taste.

Housekeeping: For each movie that I formally reviewed, the hyperlink will take you to that review. I’m also including the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores for each film, just to show whether I conform to or diverge from the so-called critical consensus. And because I’m first and foremost a public servant, if a movie is currently streaming on a popular service, I’ll note that, just in case that nudges you into watching something from the comfort of your couch. Read More

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The 10 Best Movies of 2017

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists
Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps in "Phantom Thread"

As the world burns, the movies remain unfazed. Or maybe they remain properly fazed; many filmmakers, recognizing the eternal topicality of their art form, have cannily shifted their priorities to speak to today’s troubled times. That cinema can serve as a sounding board for social anxiety is nothing new, but in 2017, the reflective surface that is the movie screen bounced back particularly acute images of our reality, even if it also functioned as a temporary escape from it. Yet as I survey my favorite films of the past year, what strikes me is not consistency but variety. Movies can exist in a thrilling multiplicity of forms, and this year’s best—epic war films, slender family dramas, chilling domestic horror, a whopping three sequels—demonstrated the enduring versatility of the medium. As every day seems to bring with it new horrors, it’s no minor comfort to remember that artists will continue to tell their stories on the big screen, wielding their imagination and technique to create a sort of compass, a celestial roadmap that lights the way to our better selves.

Here are my 10 favorite movies of 2017:

(Honorable mention: Get Out; The Girl with All the Gifts; I, Tonya; It Comes at Night; Logan; Princess Cyd; Star Wars: Episode VIII—The Last Jedi; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; The Villainess.) Read More

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The 10 Best TV Shows of 2017

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists, TV Rankings
Elisabeth Moss in "The Handmaid's Tale"

We’ve been counting down every TV show we watched in 2017, and we’ve finally arrived at the top 10. If you’ve missed our prior posts, you can access them at the following links:
#s 108-81
#s 80-51
#s 50-31
#s 30-11

10. The Leftovers (HBO, Season 3; 2015 rank: 6 of 62). You can pick nits with The Leftovers’ third and final season. Reduced to an eight-episode order, it largely shunted aside the Murphy family whose dynamic was so richly complex in Season 2; it arguably returned to the (literal?) well one too many times with its “international assassin” gambit; and some of its metaphysical journeys this season—in particular Scott Glenn’s helpless wanderings through the Australian outback—never quite acquired the fearsome power they desired. But these imperfections seem trivial when compared with the show’s staggering greatness, the way it meditates on questions of love, family, and faith in such strange and stimulating ways. Perhaps recognizing that she was the standout of the first two years, the show pivots ever-so-slightly to focus on Carrie Coon’s Nora, and some of this season’s most memorable sequences—the Wu-Tang trampoline; the “Take on Me” smoke detector; the pigeons carrying words of hope—explore her explosive grief. But this has always been a humane and democratic show, and it still makes room for its uniformly devastated (and devastating) ensemble. It says something that I’d never especially warmed to Amy Brenneman’s Laurie, and yet Season 3’s most wrenching episode for me was “Certified”, a heartbreaking hour that examined her newfound place in the world with clarity and empathy. I might not have thought that was possible, but over three remarkable seasons, The Leftovers continuously redefined our collective notion of belief. Read More

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