Landscape with Invisible Hand: Grave New World

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kylie Rogers and Asante Blackk in Landscape with Invisible Hand

Cory Finley won’t repeat himself. You couldn’t have blamed him, following his electrifying debut of Thoroughbreds, if he’d chosen to keep making razor-sharp thrillers his whole career. Instead he pivoted to docudrama with Bad Education, telling the fact-based story of a different sort of sociopath who preyed on people not with poison and knives but with smiles and scams. His new movie, Landscape with Invisible Hand, is also partially set in the classroom, but the malfeasance it chronicles is far stranger than garden-variety embezzlement. Early on, an English teacher informs his students that his “microscopic salary” has nevertheless been deemed too onerous for the new administration. He then strolls into the courtyard and, with minimal fanfare, puts a gun in his mouth and splatters his brains all over the concrete. Bad education, indeed.

It’s a jolting introduction, one which signals that the ensuing picture won’t conform to the sanitized standards of the young-adult playbook. But the oddness of Landscape with Invisible Hand is apparent even earlier. Its very first scene finds a young aspiring painter named Adam Campbell (Asante Blackk, from This Is Us) sketching a vista of the bright blue sky, only for his view to become clouded when a gigantic flying saucer rolls overhead. That might seem alarming, but Adam reacts with resigned annoyance—“Find someplace else to park!”—and we immediately realize that we’re watching a piece of dystopian fiction. But where many alien-invasion films traffic in terror and violence, this one is characterized by drudgery and disenchantment. Read More

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Passages: Weird Sex But OK

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adèle Exarchopoulos and Franz Rogowski in Passages

It takes less than a minute before we learn that Tomas, the antihero at the center of Ira Sachs’ Passages, is an asshole. He’s directing a movie (also called Passages), and he’s unhappy with how his lead actor is walking down a flight of stairs. Frustrated that the performer keeps swinging his arms, Tomas offers up a piece of criticism that is less than constructive: “Why do you keep fucking up?”

He might be better served asking that question of himself. But then, self-reflection is a foreign practice to the modern narcissist (even if narcissism’s classical etymology is rooted in literal self-reflection). An absorbing portrait of a consummate jerk, Passages is a whirlwind journey of desire and destruction. It has already received notoriety for its sex scenes, which are vigorous and persuasive if not quite pornographic. But it is even more shocking—more raw—as a study of gluttonous appetite and thoughtless cruelty. The callous behavior it displays is recognizably human and also utterly monstrous. Read More

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Blue Beetle: Say No to Bugs

Jeremy BeckReviews
Xolo Maridueña in Blue Beetle

It feels reductive to label Blue Beetle “the Latinx superhero movie.” But reduction is now the superhero industrial complex’s specialty. Marvel and DC are technically competitors, but their shared universes have operated in tandem, systematically shrinking the field of blockbuster cinema into a carefully cultivated, self-sustaining formula. The studios haven’t wholly eradicated visual imagination or provocative storytelling—search for a well-made comic-book production, and you need only flip the calendar back three months—but those qualities are now secondary, subservient to the commercial imperatives of franchise continuity and fan service. Artistic personality is no longer a goal, just a potential bonus.

So yes, Blue Beetle is the Latinx superhero movie. And it’s not awful! Contrary to DC’s corporate blueprint, its main attraction isn’t its athletic showmanship, its flashy special effects, or its obligatory world-building. (Superman and the Flash, along with their fictional cities of residence, are notably name-checked, as though the script is contractually preserving the right to let its characters play with the big boys in a future sequel.) It is instead the Reyes family, a tight-knit clan of Mexican-Americans who live in a boisterous Texas enclave within the (similarly fictional) Palmera City. Bustling with activity and affection, the Reyeses are rich in love and poor in everything else. When prodigal son Jaime (Xolo Maridueña), a recent college graduate (“How do I look?” “Like you’re six figures in debt”), returns home in ostensible triumph, he encounters a parade of terrible happenings: He’s at risk of losing his ancestral house (“The landlord tripled the rent”), his father’s long-running body shop is defunct, and his now-unemployed dad (Damián Alcázar) recently suffered a small heart attack. Read More

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Gran Turismo: What’s in a Game?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Archie Madekwe and David Harbour in Gran Turismo

The subtitle “based on a true story” tends to be a vapid marketing ploy—a phony assertion of honesty in a medium grounded in trickery—but in the case of Gran Turismo, you can understand the appellation. The narrative arc of this movie—about a videogame wiz who transformed his joystick-tugging prowess into professional success as a bona fide race-car driver—is so improbable, audiences would deride it as ludicrous if they weren’t assured it actually happened. The screenplay, by Jason Hall (American Sniper) and Zach Baylin (King Richard), has taken considerable liberties with the factual record, but its overall thrust remains accurate: In 2011, a 19-year-old PlayStation guru named Jann Mardenborough pivoted from console to racetrack, winning an academy competition and earning a “drive” on Nissan’s motorsports team.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp, Gran Turismo follows the sports-picture playbook with sturdy competence and comforting predictability. This, naturally, places it in ironic tension with its own central theme: that Jann’s true story is an anti-establishment triumph in which raw talent and radical innovation combine to defeat the mighty powers of orthodoxy and tradition. It’s a racing movie where the number of RPMs is topped only by the volume of cinematic clichés. Read More

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Theater Camp: The Woe Must Go On

Jeremy BeckReviews
Molly Gordon and Ben Platt in Theater Camp

We always mock theater kids, but what about theater grown-ups? Surely these hopeless children—these dorks who walk around quoting Rent and hogging spotlights and mystifying everyone outside their own tragic clique—weren’t born as social misfits. Someone made them this way.

Theater Camp, the spry and winning new comedy directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, gently considers the guileless monsters responsible for our ongoing national nightmare of dramaturgical enthusiasm. It posits, with persuasive clarity and disturbing specificity, that passion for the performing arts is an inherited phenomenon—a disease passed down not through genetic material but via seasonal exhortations from the similarly afflicted. You know the saying: Those who can’t get into Juilliard teach how to obsess about getting into Juilliard. Read More

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