Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: Fail to the King

Jeremy BeckReviews
Angela Bassett in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Can a Marvel movie be an underdog? Certainly not commercially; even before it smashed the November box office record with $181 million last weekend, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was guaranteed to make an enormous amount of money. But artistically, Ryan Coogler’s sequel faces a set of challenges that are atypical to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its rigorous quality control and absurd phases and general regimentation. To begin with, his follow-up bears the weight of considerable expectations; in addition to banking $700 million—the third-highest of any film to that date (though it’s since been surpassed by Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Top Gun: Maverick)—the original Black Panther earned rave reviews and a rare sheen of prestige, racking up seven Oscar nominations (including Best Picture!) and taking home three statuettes. But beyond that, Coogler is faced with an even graver dilemma: that of making a Black Panther movie without the Black Panther.

Chadwick Boseman’s death two years ago was tragic for many reasons, most of which have nothing to do with corporate profits or franchise continuity. But viewing it purely (and perhaps distastefully) in the context of the MCU, it placed Coogler in a no-win situation: He could either recast the role of King T’Challa, thereby inviting unsavory comparisons and risking the wrath of countless fans, or he could kill off a beloved character and bake his demise into the sequel’s plot. (The prospect of simply not making a follow-up at all is too ludicrous to contemplate.) He chose the latter approach, and in case you were somehow oblivious to Marvel’s marketing machine, he announces his decision straightaway; the cold open of Wakanda Forever finds T’Challa’s younger sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright), frantically trying to wield her technological expertise to cure an unspecified illness, to no avail. Coogler stages this brisk prologue, which concludes with a mournful funeral procession, with the appropriate degree of sobriety—the shot of T’Challa’s coffin mystically ascending to an airborne vessel is heartrending, while the replacement of the standard Marvel logo (which typically affords glimpses of various MCU heroes) with exclusive footage of Boseman is a lovely touch—even as it shrouds the ensuing film in death. Read More

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Getting Personal: The Banshees of Inisherin, Armageddon Time, and Aftersun

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin, Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal in Aftersun, Banks Repeta and Anthony Hopkins in Armageddon Time

Today marks the long-awaited arrival of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, an enormous blockbuster that will make gobs of money, thereby rescuing the box office from its “post-summer slump.” But just because recent releases haven’t been financially successful doesn’t mean they haven’t been interesting. This past weekend featured modest expansions of three small-scale movies that collectively scraped together less than $3 million, which is less than Wakanda Forever will earn in an hour. There’s nothing inherently venerable about independent films, but these three pictures have more in common than modest budgets; they’re also all notably personal in their storytelling, with original screenplays written by their director. If Black Panther is the antidote for Hollywood’s commercial doldrums, these movies provide a valuable reminder that contemporary cinema consists of more than franchises and superheroes.

It doesn’t get much more personal than Armageddon Time, James Gray’s autobiographical depiction of his childhood in Queens in 1980. (In this, Gray gets a jump on Steven Spielberg, whose Arizona-set self-reflection, The Fabelmans, hits select cities today and will go nationwide the day before Thanksgiving.) Gray casts the fresh-faced, soft-featured Banks Repeta (recently in The Devil All the Time and The Black Phone) in the role of young James Gray Paul Graff, an aspiring artist whose idle classroom drawings exhibit greater skill than your typical 12-year-old doodle. Maybe someday he’ll grow up to be a talented filmmaker. Who can say? Read More

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Decision to Leave: Should He Stray or Should She Go?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tang Wei and Park Hae-il in Decision to Leave

He’s a good cop: smart, confident, decisive. He’s looking down at a fresh corpse on a coroner’s table, asking the right questions, making the proper deductions. But when the woman enters the room, he glances up from the body, and for a split second his breath catches in his throat, and his typically impassive countenance is replaced with astonishment. He recovers his poise quickly enough—after all, he’s a professional—but that single skipped beat of his heart foreshadows a future of desire and ruin. He isn’t in control anymore; she is.

This is an early scene from Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, but it’s also the latest descendant in a long lineage of Meaningful Looks; it’s Fred MacMurray eyeing Barbara Stanwyck’s bare shoulders in Double Indemnity, and Jimmy Stewart staring across a restaurant at Kim Novak in Vertigo, and Russell Crowe watching Kim Basinger stroll into a liquor store in L.A. Confidential. It firmly plants the movie in the heightened universe of film noir, with its hot-blooded gumshoes and coolly captivating femme fatales, its furtive schemes and dastardly crimes. Yet because Park is an uncommonly gifted stylist, nothing about his thrilling new picture feels imitative or traditional. Noirs were always sexy, but they’ve never been quite this voluptuous. Read More

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Tár: Bittersweet Infamy

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cate Blanchett in Tár

Cate Blanchett is a titan. Whether playing a British monarch or an American actress or an elven queen, she emanates an unimpeachable authority, an innate rightness. Yet in some of her nerviest performances—as an abusive teacher in Notes on a Scandal, as a fallen socialite in Blue Jasmine, as a yearning lover in Carol—she chips away at this invincibility, hinting at desire and pain without showing any visible cracks or weakness. So Blanchett’s casting as the titular anti-heroine of Tár, the gripping new drama from Todd Field, is almost too perfect. She—by which I mean both Blanchett and Lydia, the character whose surname gives the film its title—is an avatar of supremacy, and the movie begins as a chronicle of her dominance before it gradually turns into… something else. Field reportedly wrote the script specifically for Blanchett, and he’s been rewarded. It’s not that you can’t imagine anyone else playing Lydia (Nicole Kidman? Rebecca Hall?); it’s that if you dared to suggest a different actor, Lydia would eat you for lunch.

That fluid lethality—the combination of cultured intelligence and formidable omnipotence—might not seem obvious from Lydia’s profession, though perhaps that gives short shrift to the cutthroat modern world of classical music. We first meet her at a festival interview conducted by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, a conversation that Field presents in multiple ways. Initially, as Gopnik’s voiceover informs us of Lydia’s estimable accomplishments—among other things, she’s won the EGOT, and she runs a fellowship that has nurtured numerous female composers (including Hildur Guðnadóttir, who provides the actual score here)—the screen provides a brisk montage, with a blizzard of crisp images (such as the precise tailoring of a suit) that evoke the specter of careerism. Field then brings us inside the auditorium and spends several minutes simply observing Lydia and Gopnik’s discussion, a curious choice that later proves to be a sly bit of misdirection. Read More

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Triangle of Sadness: The Big Seasick

Jeremy BeckReviews
Charlbi Dean and Harris Dickinson in Triangle of Sadness

The opening scenes of Triangle of Sadness, the latest sharply etched provocation from writer-director Ruben Östlund, suggests that the Swedish filmmaker has once again shifted his satirical sights. After splintering the nuclear family in Force Majeure and skewering the pomposity of the art world (sometimes brilliantly, sometimes tediously) with The Square, Östlund opens his newest effort at yet another swanky location: a modeling agency. Strolling amid the male performers—there are enough six-packs on display to fill the soda aisle at Wal-Mart—a preening media personality (Thobias Thorwid) remarks on the industry’s inverse relationship between prestige and temperament; the fancier the brand, the grumpier the models tend to appear. This pithy observation is followed by a faintly humiliating audition scene in which the gorgeous Carl (Harris Dickinson) is instructed on how to walk the runway with a semblance of rhythm, then a catwalk sequence where eager onlookers are unceremoniously shunted aside to make room for more exalted clientele.

This playful, reproachful introduction insinuates that Triangle of Sadness will proceed as a systematic dismantling of the bizarre rituals and entrenched smugness of the land of high fashion. But Östlund’s aim isn’t so small. No, it turns out instead that his target is no less than all of western civilization. This movie, with its beaming smiles and gleaming surfaces and gauche desires and festering underbellies, seeks to rip up the social contract and expose humanity’s rotted core. Superficially speaking, it’s attacking the shamelessness of the ultra-wealthy, but that’s only half the game. Sure, Östlund wants to eat the rich, but if he inadvertently devours some poor people in the process, more’s the better. Read More

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