Amsterdam: Dutch Ado About Nothing

Jeremy BeckReviews
Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington in Amsterdam

Throughout Amsterdam, things break: an ugly teapot, a bird’s egg, a man’s optic nerve, a loveless marriage. Yet because it’s the work of David O. Russell, the movie views such destruction not with sadness but with opportunity. A grinning carny barker whose attractions are warped and trampled human feelings, Russell savors goofy misfits, with their thwarted dreams and foiled scams. He likes to break things—and people—apart so that he can put them back together.

He doesn’t always succeed. Russell’s career is wildly uneven, not to mention polarizing; survey critics, and you’re unlikely to find consensus on his three best films. (For the record, they are Three Kings, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle.) Amsterdam, Russell’s first feature in seven years, showcases the director at his best and worst; it’s full of vibrant verve and stylish flair and ragged writing and quite a bit of nonsense. (His last picture, Joy, was similarly bumpy, suggesting that he’s grown consistently inconsistent.) In fact, the main characters here repeatedly improvise what they call “a nonsense song,” coming together to warble an off-key melody accompanied by incomprehensible lyrics, and it works handily as metaphor for the movie itself: meandering and patchy, yet oddly charming and full of life. Read More

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Convention Center: Bros, Blonde, and Smile

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Billy Eichner in Bros, Sosie Bacon in Smile, Ana de Armas in Blonde

Not every movie needs to be revolutionary. Genres are durable in part because filmmakers have gradually honed reliable formulae, the passage of time sanding down eons of cinematic experimentation into sturdy templates. Predictability can be dispiriting, but the successful execution of a familiar blueprint can also be satisfying. This past weekend saw three different movies tackle three very different genres, and though none can be mistaken for each other, they all operate with a certain degree of conventionality. Not coincidentally, they’re all watchable while also struggling to break free from the shackles of expectations.

Few movies are more visibly conscious of their place within an established genre than Bros. How conscious? It’s a romantic comedy co-written by Billy Eichner that opens with a character played by Billy Eichner recounting a pitch session in which a studio mogul urges him to write a romantic comedy. The hook, the suit explains, will be that the film will center on gay men but will otherwise follow the standard rom-com playbook, thereby perpetuating the message that “love is love.” Eichner’s character, Bobby, isn’t having it. “Love is not love,” he insists. Gay people are different; you can’t just magically flip the characters’ sexual orientation and expect everything else to cleanly lock into place. Read More

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Don’t Worry Darling: Fall of the Wilde

Jeremy BeckReviews
Florence Pugh and Harry Styles in Don't Worry Darling

As the glamorous host of the glamorous party saunters down from his lofty perch on the glamorous balcony to grace the awestruck guests with his glamorous presence, he asks a rhetorical question: “What is the enemy of progress?” A member of the audience immediately replies, with Pavlovian instinct, “Chaos.” This may be accurate in certain industries—our host nods in approval—but when it comes to movies, it’s rarely the case. The true enemy of artistic progress is order, or at least pernicious forms of it—safety, predictability, complacency. Chaos, by contrast, is often the harbinger of innovation. It’s difficult to produce great art without first making a mess.

And Don’t Worry Darling, the second film directed by Olivia Wilde (from a script by Katie Silberman), is undoubtedly a mess. Its tone is overheated, its themes are muddled, and its plotting is ridiculous. But it nonetheless exhibits a brazen level of ambition—a visual and narrative boldness which vacillates between audacity and inanity—that’s commendable despite its gaps in logic. It may be chaotic, but at least it’s memorable. Read More

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Violent Femmes: The Woman King, Pearl, and God’s Country

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Viola Davis in The Woman King, Mia Goth in Pearl, and Thandiwe Newton in God's Country

Women are fighting back. Well, at least at the movies. Women aren’t a monolith on screen or off, but this past weekend’s new theatrical releases were striking for how they centralized female characters, and how they placed them in varying postures of defiance. At the cinema, the fairer sex is through with unfairness.

The most ambitious of these movies, The Woman King, is also the most conventional. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from a script by Dana Stevens, it’s an old-fashioned historical epic, in the vein of Spartacus or (for a more recent vintage) Gladiator. And when it comes to women fighting, its depiction is quite literal: It tells the story of the Agojie, a troop of female soldiers for the Dahomey kingdom in nineteenth-century West Africa. Led by the fearsome Nanisca (a reliable Viola Davis), they wage war against a rival empire—not out of territorial bloodlust, but out of desire to prevent their citizens from being conscripted into slavery. Read More

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Barbarian: Scare-bnb

Jeremy BeckReviews
Georgina Campbell in Barbarian

He’s a really nice guy. That’s what you need to understand, and what serves as the human foundation for the hellish nightmare that follows. When Tess (Georgina Campbell), an attractive young documentarian interviewing for a job in Detroit, arrives at her Airbnb in the dead of night only to find it already occupied by a well-built man named Keith, you might think that she should dive back into her SUV and burn rubber. She contemplates that very course of action herself; she isn’t stupid, and the last thing she wants to do is star in a horror movie. But Keith is—and I can’t stress this enough—a really nice guy, and so Tess swallows hard and crosses the threshold from the porch into the house, and the terrible events that follow are set in relentless motion.

Written and directed by Zach Cregger, Barbarian is one of those twisty pictures where virtually any plot detail arguably qualifies as a spoiler. But the title alone, which appears on screen in a creepy elongated typeface as cockroaches skitter across its letters, at the least confirms that it isn’t a romantic comedy. That might be news to Tess and Keith, whose flung-together-by circumstance pairing—turns out the incompetent property-management company double-booked the rental—could qualify, in a different cinematic universe, as a meet-cute. In addition to possessing broad shoulders and a square jaw, Keith is uncommonly courteous and perceptive. He offers Tess the lone bedroom without hesitation, throwing in a self-deprecating crack about his square upbringing. When she doesn’t drink the tea he makes for her, he recognizes her suspicions and volunteers to open a bottle of wine in front of her, negating the possibility that he’s doing anything indecent. He’s even familiar with the little-seen jazz documentary that Tess finds formative. He’s Prince fucking Charming. Read More

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