The Killer: Shoot to Thrill

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael Fassbender in The Killer

Critics are invariably tempted to draw parallels between artists and their subjects, but with The Killer, David Fincher almost makes it too easy. Here is a movie about a man who practices his craft with fanatical exactitude, who exhibits unwavering patience, who abides by a ruthless set of codes and rituals. Remind you of anyone? The only apparent difference between Fincher and his titular character, an assassin for hire played with sleek magnetism by Michael Fassbender, is that the latter aims a gun instead of a camera.

OK, maybe not the only difference. To begin with, for all of his apparent experience and expertise, it’s unclear whether The Killer—who’s unnamed, so let’s call him TK—is especially good at his job. When we first meet him in Paris (after a brisk and absorbing title sequence, a Fincher specialty), he’s sitting in a vacant WeWork loft (WetWork?), calmly educating us—in the nonstop, blackly comic voiceover that will accompany the entire film—on the physical challenges of doing nothing. Even ignoring the picture’s title, TK’s accoutrements—a high-powered arsenal (including a sniper rifle), a spiffy set of binoculars, a wristwatch tracking his biometrics (pro tip: never pull the trigger unless your pulse is under 60)—convey that his vocation is murder. Yet despite his thorough surveillance and his ascetic mantras (e.g., forbid empathy), he botches the hit. It will not be the last mistake he makes, though it is the catalyzing one; the remainder of this fleet, exhilarating movie chronicles the fallout of TK’s error and the pileup of bodies it produces. Read More

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Priscilla: Can’t Help Bawling in Love

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla

It takes roughly 15 minutes before Priscilla announces itself as a Sofia Coppola movie. Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny), a meek 14-year-old American girl living on an army base in Germany, has just shared her first kiss with Elvis Presley (Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi), possibly the most popular musical artist on the planet. As she glides down her school hallway—oblivious to her surroundings, deep in the swoon of adolescent love—“Crimson and Clover” flares to life on the soundtrack. The year is 1959, nearly a decade before Tommy James yearned for a girl he hardly knew to come walking over, but Coppola has never let anachronisms get in the way of emotions. Priscilla is hopelessly smitten, and Priscilla represents Coppola’s attempt to capture both the purity of her rapture and the agony of its inevitable deflation.

Strangely, this blissful sequence is something of an outlier—a fleeting moment of canny cinematic imagination in a picture that is broadly functional and orthodox. It’s weird, because conceptually speaking, Priscilla’s pairing of artist and subject seems ideal. Even setting aside her filial connections to Hollywood royalty, Coppola has long been fascinated by celebrity, having considered it through the various lenses of middle-aged ennui (Lost in Translation), historical opulence (Marie Antoinette), and vicarious obsession (The Bling Ring). Yet where those movies all hummed with vivacious technique and energetic style, Priscilla is oddly conventional. Apart from some sharp music cues and a few arresting images (such as a woman walking down a corridor bathed in red light), it feels like anyone could have made it. Read More

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Anatomy of a Fall: Death Landing

Jeremy BeckReviews
Swann Arlaud and Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall

The first frame of Anatomy of a Fall, even before the traditional procession of vanity cards, is the text of a URL: didshedoit.com. The ensuing movie, a tense and absorbing courtroom drama directed by Justine Triet, doesn’t so much investigate the answer to that question as emphasize its unknowability. Like Rashomon before so, it posits that the quest for truth is a fool’s errand, and that past events are refracted through individual prisms of memory and perspective. Initially tasked with finding guilt or innocence, it instead grapples with the notion that those terms are illusory.

The “she” of that URL is Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), and the “it” is the death of her husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis). That both characters share a first name with the actor playing them is just one sign that Triet is attempting to collapse fact and fiction, though her screenplay, which she wrote with Arthur Harari, isn’t rooted in any specific true-crime episode. It instead methodically builds itself out from the film’s opening scene, when Sandra and Samuel’s 11-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), returns from a walk with his dog to find his father’s bloody body splayed out at the base of their ski chalet. This completes the URL’s question: Did Samuel jump, or did Sandra push him? Read More

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Killers of the Flower Moon: Fail the Conquering Hero

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon

Among the most insufferable criticisms lobbed toward Martin Scorsese—not the most insufferable; here will be the first and last time this review mentions the words “Marvel Cinematic Universe”—is that his only good movies are the ones about gangsters. Taste may be subjective, but aside from ignoring the vast majority of the director’s fertile filmography, this grievance neglects the organizational rot that runs through so many of his pictures. Sure, it’s obvious that the suits in The Wolf of Wall Street are just thugs with brokerage licenses, but even when Scorsese isn’t explicitly dealing with lawbreakers, he is routinely wandering halls of power and exploring systems of iniquity. The snobbish aristocrats of The Age of Innocence, the monopolistic bureaucrats of The Aviator, the dogmatic zealots of The Last Temptation of Christ—they are all veritable hoodlums, seeking to impose their chosen brand of moral order upon the world, intolerant of individual resistance.

Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese’s latest movie and one of his best, is even less tangential to the gangster genre than his films about musicians or comedians or pool sharks. It doesn’t nominally feature mobsters who say “fuggedaboutit,” but its tale of criminality and corruption occupies the same thematic territory as that of Mean Streets or Goodfellas. Yet where those classics exhibited joy in depicting the mechanics of their antiheroes’ frenzied avarice, Flower Moon finds Scorsese operating in a more mournful register. It isn’t that age has mellowed him—in some ways, this is among the angriest pictures he’s ever made—so much as it’s nudged his focal point. The methods of vice are no longer the primary attraction; what matters now are the consequences. Read More

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Fair Play: Investment Wank

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in Fair Play

The power couple at the center of Fair Play both work at a pressure-cooker investment bank, so it’s fitting that the movie opens with its own form of aggressive sales pitch. Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) are cavorting at a wedding, where they sneak into the bathroom for a quickie. Luke performs some moan-inducing cunnilingus, but Emily’s gasps turn from pleasure to shock when she realizes that her menstruation has bloodied both his face and her dress. Yet they recover their poise (“You look like you slaughtered a chicken,” he giggles), then sneak out a back door and race home to their swanky Manhattan apartment, where they enthusiastically finish what they’d started.

The purpose of this introduction is twofold. On a character level, it’s designed to establish Luke and Emily’s mutual passion—an ardor whose strength and durability will be tested as the film unspools. And in terms of style and imagery, it announces its provocative intent—not as a product of pornography (the simulated thrusting and the glimpses of nudity are more coy than explicit), but as a piece of proudly sexed-up entertainment. Here at last, writer-director Chloe Domont proclaims, is an adult movie for adult audiences. Read More

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