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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From the Vault: Seabiscuit, 20 Years Later

Jeremy BeckReviews
Seabiscuit

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

There is an epic majesty about Seabiscuit, and I don’t just mean the horse. This is a throwback motion picture, one that is redolent of a distant era of cinema in which filmmakers suffused their creations with spirit and passion. It is by no means a flawless film – it is too long, too sentimental, and too reverential – but it carries itself with an elegant grace and nobility, and it has unanticipated moments of considerable power. For all its faults, Seabiscuit is a complete film, both uncommonly thoughtful and undeniably exhilarating, all the way to the finish line. Read More

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Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning, Part One: Choose to Exceptional

Jeremy BeckReviews
Hayley Atwell and Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible, Dead Reckoning, Part One

The Mission: Impossible franchise doesn’t change so much as grow. It’s a creature of controlled entropy; it keeps getting bigger—longer runtimes, more elaborate plotting, increasingly crazed stunts—but it always subjects its maniacal absurdity to meticulous quality control. Two movies ago, in the spectacular Rogue Nation, a bureaucrat memorably described Ethan Hunt—the indefatigable superspy played by Tom Cruise as a cross between James Bond and the Road Runner—as “the living manifestation of destiny.” This time around, in Dead Reckoning, Part One, a beleaguered company man (Shea Whigham) calls him “a mind-reading, shape-shifting incarnation of chaos.” You get the idea: This dude is committed, and he ain’t slowing down.

You might say the same thing about Cruise, though the one enemy that Hollywood’s most fanatical star seems unlikely to vanquish is Father Time. Yet one of the pleasures of Dead Reckoning is how it probes the tension between its 61-year-old lead’s eternal charm and the inexorable fact of his own mortality. I’m not suggesting that Cruise shows his age here; he remains extraordinarily fit and good-looking, and he performs feats of derring-do that would make actors of any generation blanch. But the man who leapt into multiplexes for Brian De Palma in the summer of 1996, hovering inches above the floor as a bead of sweat slid perilously across his brow, has gradually lost some of his invincibility. When this Ethan runs, you feel his muscles ache. Read More

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Joy Ride: Girls Quip

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sabria Wu, Ashley Park, Sherry Cola, and Stephanie Hsu in Joy Ride

During one of the more outlandish moments in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Stephanie Hsu watches in horror as an adversary attempts to plug a curiously shaped office plaque into his anus. Now in Joy Ride, the new road-trip comedy from Adele Lim, Hsu has transitioned from observer to participant; at one point, circumstances conspire such that she must shove eight plastic baggies filled with cocaine up her own ass.

The sight of a newly minted Oscar nominee frantically thrusting narcotics inside her asshole operates both as its own joke and as the setup for a subsequent, cleverly delayed punch line. (Remember, whenever a character says that the occurrence of a certain event makes her horny, you can be damn sure that event will take place—and in the most compromising scenario possible.) It also encapsulates the movie’s maximalist approach to comedy. Every orifice gets its own moment in Joy Ride, as do K-pop enthusiasts, martial-arts soap operas, Cardi B, projectile vomit, vaginal tattoos, and former NBA All-Star Baron Davis. It’s a lot, and it isn’t ashamed of its own muchness. Read More

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