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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Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul: The Sour of Prayer

Jeremy BeckReviews
Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown in Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul

In one of his incisive bits about religion, George Carlin observed that God “always needs money.” The implication is that the deity’s clerics are also in permanent want of funds, but the main characters of Honk for Jesus, Save Your Soul—Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown), a captivating Southern Baptist preacher, and Trinitie (Regina Hall), his publicly steadfast wife—aren’t hurting for cash. They live in a luxurious mansion outside of Atlanta, they drive a Cadillac Escalade, and their closets are filled with Prada. (Lee-Curtis’ gold watch gleams so brightly, you half-expect him to tell someone that it “cost more than your car.”) No, what this power couple really craves—what they desire beyond favorable clippings in the press or dollar bills in the collection plate—is an audience.

They used to have one; with Trinitie seated at his side in a gold-enameled throne, Lee-Curtis would routinely preach to upwards of 5,000 disciples at Wander to Greater Paths, their so-called “megachurch.” But then something happened—something initially alluded to only as “misconduct”—and now they bustle about in their Georgia Xanadu, breathlessly plotting their reemergence. Honk for Jesus, which is the feature debut of writer-director Adamma Ebo (based on her short film), chronicles the Childses’ painstaking attempt to reacquire their congregation (and their relevance), even as it also gradually unveils the scandal that led to their downfall. Read More

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Why Didn’t You Go to the Movies Last Weekend?

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Nathalie Emmanuel in The Invitation, John Boyega in Breaking, Idris Elba in Three Thousand Years of Longing

Immediately prior to my showing of Three Thousands Years of Longing, the director George Miller delivered a pretaped message, thanking viewers for spending the time and money to see his latest epic on the big screen. It was meant to infuse a commercial transaction—I was, after all, paying a corporation for its product—with a personal touch, and it worked, though not in the way Miller intended. Watching him natter amiably about the importance of cinema, I got the sense that he was speaking directly to me—not because his words were especially powerful, but because despite sitting in a gigantic auditorium, I was one of maybe 10 people in the theater.

This does not appear to have been a unique experience. According to Box Office Mojo, Three Thousand Years of Longing—Miller’s long-awaited (or apparently not) follow-up to Mad Max: Fury Road—earned a pitiful $2.9 million last weekend, despite playing in over 2,400 theaters and sporting a hefty $60 million budget. When it came to new releases doing meager business, it wasn’t alone. Breaking, a fact-based thriller about a bank robbery starring John Boyega, couldn’t even scrape up a million bucks in 900 theaters; it was outgrossed by the random re-release of Rogue One, a Star Wars spin-off playing on barely one-quarter as many screens. Even the weekend’s most nominally successful new arrival, the low-budget horror movie The Invitation, premiered in the top spot with a dubious asterisk attached: Ignoring the COVID-19 pandemic, its $6.8 million tally marked the lowest figure for a first-place debut in nearly 20 years. Read More

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Bodies Bodies Bodies: Youngs Full of Air

Jeremy BeckReviews
The cast of Bodies Bodies Bodies: Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Chase Sui Wonders, and Rachel Sennott

The murder mystery gets a modern makeover in Bodies Bodies Bodies, the slick, enjoyable, somewhat obnoxious thriller from Halina Reijn. As the title suggests, corpses slowly stack up over the course of the movie, though the bloodshed is less a sign of inhuman evil than a natural consequence of characters lacking access to wifi. After all, when you can’t check your Instagram account, what else is there to do but kill people? Adapting a witty, smirky screenplay by Sarah DeLappe, Reijn has crafted a confident and provocative picture in which new-age brashness nestles up against cinematic classicism. It’s Agatha Christie on TikTok.

The setting, quite delectably, is a dark and stormy night. Seven attractive young people pile into a mansion in upstate New York, not that far from where Clue took place. This privileged septet has assembled, in advance of the landfall of a hurricane, for an evening of revelry—a bawdy, corrosive cocktail spiked with sex and drugs and jealousy. Before long, one of them is dead, resulting in a hectic, bloody night full of paranoia, finger-pointing, and violence. Whaddya need, a GPS-powered roadmap? Read More

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