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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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: The Tortoises and the Flair

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

The success of the Spider-Verse pictures has ushered in a new style of animation that doesn’t yet have a name. Where the computerized creations of Pixar and its ilk exhibit hyper-realistic detail and punctilious precision, this burgeoning technique is playfully imperfect and openly fantastical. Rather than attempting to mimic the look of live-action cinema, it leans into its artifice, emphasizing its cartoonish quality through blurred edges, exaggerated features, and chaotic motion. The goal is to approximate the childhood experience of reading a comic book—not so much the literal sense of integrating thought bubbles and splash panels, but the more youthful wonderment of entering a world of obvious invention and boundless possibility.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the latest entrant in this subgenre, and its aesthetic is successful insofar as it’s notable. The movie looks like… well, it looks like something. It’s nowhere near as cleverly designed or rapturously conceived as Across the Spider-Verse; its colors can be muddy, and its action sequences are generally incoherent. But it at least possesses a visual identity—a degree of pictorial flair—that distinguishes it from other animated productions aimed toward younger audiences. It has character. Read More

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Talk to Me: Balk to the Hand

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophie Wilde in Talk to Me

Cruising down a darkened roadway while belting out the lyrics to a Sia song, the teenaged Mia (Sophie Wilde) suddenly slams on the brakes to avoid running over a wounded kangaroo, which is lying helpless in the middle of the street. Her young companion, an eager 13-year-old boy named Riley (Joe Bird), urges her to put the poor animal out of its misery. Mia initially resolves to oblige, but—whether due to a surfeit of compassion or a lack of determination—she ultimately chooses to leave the pitiful creature be. This scene, which is never explicitly referenced again, has absolutely no figurative bearing on anything that comes after.

I’m kidding, of course. But one of the intriguing things about Talk to Me, the creepy and jagged new horror picture from Danny and Michael Philippou, is how it operates as a metaphorical Rorschach test. Is it a critique of the restlessness of the TikTok generation? A commentary on the fraying bonds of the modern nuclear family? A sobering portrait of the perils of drug addiction? Or is it just a really scary movie in which a few hapless kids make the mistake of messing with some very angry demons? Read More

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Barbie: Once in a Keneration

Jeremy BeckReviews
Simu Liu, Margot Robbie, and Ryan Gosling in Barbie

Greta Gerwig likes a challenge. After her smashing debut of Lady Bird, which revitalized the hoary coming-of-age picture (and which this critic deemed one of the best movies of the prior decade), she pivoted to Little Women, a story that’s been adapted so many times, it was hard to imagine anyone breathing new life into it. Yet by leveraging her own ingenuity and craft (not to mention Saoirse Ronan’s eyes), she succeeded, transforming a well-trod literary classic into an urgently modern depiction of female fraternity. Now she turns to Barbie, which presents an even greater adaptive difficulty. After all, here is a live-action summer blockbuster that is based—as its cheeky, 2001-referencing cold open freely acknowledges—on a fucking doll.

Barbie is my least favorite of Gerwig’s three features as a (solo) director to date. But to judge her latest effort purely against the magnificence of her prior accomplishments would be, to quote a blond icon from a different generation, way harsh. If she hasn’t maintained her own level of excellence, she has nevertheless demolished any reasonable set of expectations for what a Mattel-inspired movie could be. Barbie is a fleet and entertaining romp—a gorgeously designed film that buzzes with energy and wit, even as it also makes room for some genuine ideas. Read More

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Oppenheimer: The Bomb Before the Storm

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan doesn’t always make movies about the end of the world, but the worlds of his movies always feel like they’re about to end. Regardless of their focus—a memory-impaired man searching for meaning, a group of con artists invading the realm of dreams, a squad of soldiers marooned on a beach—their combustible tension creates the sense that their characters’ lives are on the perpetual verge of implosion. So it’s both fitting and perverse that Oppenheimer, Nolan’s study of the (mad?) scientist who developed the atomic bomb, is his least outwardly visceral picture in decades. The stakes here couldn’t possibly be higher—at various points, people discuss the possibility of “atmospheric ignition,” a chain reaction that would engulf the planet (the odds of this, we’re assured, are “near zero”)—yet they unfold in the context of a talky, intimate chamber drama. The apocalypse will be ushered in not by motorcycle chases or time paradoxes, but by stern looks and harsh words.

If you think that sounds gentle or staid, did I mention that this was a Chris Nolan movie? Unbound from his usual need to dazzle us with eye-popping set pieces and brain-scraping premises, cinema’s most enduring populist (OK, second-most) has channeled his commercial savvy into depicting a concept that’s disarmingly straightforward: men at work. Oppenheimer is a film of grave power and sweeping intensity, made all the more propulsive by Jennifer Lame’s exacting editing and Ludwig Göransson’s majestic score, but its energy is grounded in recognizable anxieties and human emotions. It’s the product of a science-fiction filmmaker pivoting to science-fact. Read More

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