Nope: Intelligent Equine

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daniel Kaluuya in Nope

Throughout Nope, the eye-popping and brain-tingling third feature from Jordan Peele, title cards bearing the name of an animal interrupt the proceedings, as if to divide the movie into discrete, enigmatic chapters. The headings typically refer to various horses (Lucky, Ghost, etc.) who are owned and trained by the main characters, while the final section opens with a nickname assigned to the mysterious, malevolent force that looms in the sky above their house. At the rough midpoint, however, the elaborate scheming and the interplanetary hijinks are put on pause, and the film rewinds several decades to the set of a multi-camera sitcom, where the titular attraction is a chimpanzee called Gordy.

What follows is one of the most spellbinding set pieces I’ve seen on screen in quite some time. Combining sturdy cinematic building blocks—witty production design, precise framing, a painstakingly purposeful harmony of image and sound—Peele concocts a sequence that accumulates furious momentum yet is also achingly, exquisitely still. We glimpse the events, a ghastly display of chaos and carnage, from the perspective of a small boy named Jupe (Jacob Kim), who we already know will age into the commercially savvy proprietor of a Western-style theme park, where he will be played with sly confidence by Steven Yeun. Yet in the moment, that foreknowledge provides little comfort, and as the young Jupe hides under a table, paralyzed with fright, you are less likely to sympathize with him than embody him—frozen in horror, yet helpless to look away. Read More

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Where the Crawdads Sing: Swamp Fling

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daisy Edgar-Jones in Where the Crawdads Sing

No beating around the bush (or trudging through the marsh): Where, exactly, do the crawdads sing? The answer is both literal and metaphysical, obvious and unknowable. In Olivia Newman’s strained, soulful adaptation of Delia Owens’ best-selling novel, characters speak the title aloud twice: first as a breathless suggestion of childhood sanctuary (it’s a place where kids can hide), second as a lofty notion of spiritual permanence (it’s a realm where essences can linger). Quoting your title in dialogue isn’t a crime, but it can nonetheless signal a certain awkwardness—a fumbling attempt to convey meaning through words rather than images. As a piece of dramatic storytelling, Where the Crawdads Sing is clumsy, sticking moments of raw power into the gummy machinery of the pulp thriller and the courtroom drama. But it is at least sincerely clumsy. What it lacks in clarity and persuasion, it makes up for with earnestness and gumption.

One of the many pure-hearted lessons that the film teaches (or perhaps preaches) is that people often contain more than they appear. The same might be said of movies, though the reverse can also be true; some pictures attempt to distract you with the sheer bustle of stuff—plot twists, hectic action, nonlinear structure—to conceal the fundamental emptiness at their center. Where the Crawdads Sing somehow embodies both sides of this dual principle. Despite cramming itself with incidents and swinging wildly between genres, its story is not especially interesting. Yet its tonal capriciousness—its willingness to shift and swerve while nonetheless rooting itself in its distinct milieu—lends it a certain integrity. Read More

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Thor: Love and Thunder: Another Fray in Paradise

Jeremy BeckReviews
Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth in Thor: Love and Thunder

In opening narration that’s akin to the “Previously on” recap of a TV show, the blue rock-being Korg reminds viewers of Thor: Love and Thunder that Loki, the titular god’s brother, is dead; in fact, Thor has witnessed him die repeatedly. Death tends to be temporary in the Marvel Cinematic Universe—Loki’s own demise became the springboard for an ongoing streaming series—and as you watch this latest comic-book extravaganza from Taika Waititi, you may find yourself hoping for a miraculous resurrection, if only so the sly actor Tom Hiddleston might enliven the mechanized hullabaloo. You don’t get one, but the impish wit that was the god of mischief’s trademark still sometimes manages to shine through, penetrating the fog of stale plotting and monotonous fighting. Even if we’re collectively suffering from superhero fatigue (this represents the MCU’s 29th theatrical release), not everything here is old hat; for example, this is the first Marvel picture to feature a love triangle between a viking, a hammer, and an axe.

The axe, called Stormbreaker (“These weirdos all gotta have a name now”), is the jealous type; when it spies Thor (Chris Hemsworth, obviously) looking longingly at Mjölnir (the hammer, less obviously), it glides disapprovingly into frame, like a suspicious housewife who caught her husband peeking at his ex’s Instagram. Love and Thunder’s persistent insouciance can feel phony at times—a runner about the heroine workshopping a catchphrase is practically yanked from last year’s Free Guy (where Waititi had a small role)—but its smirking charm at least bears the stamp of genuine authorship. It is neither as funny nor as dynamic as its predecessor, the broadly appealing Ragnarok, but it nonetheless harnesses the same spirit of cheerful frivolity. Read More

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The Black Phone: No Answer, Try His Hell

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ethan Hawke in The Black Phone

Listen up, kids, here are some dos and don’ts courtesy of The Black Phone, the grimy new horror movie from Scott Derrickson: Do stand up to bullies by hitting them in the head with rocks. Don’t beat your children with a belt, even if you’re really just a sad dad on the inside. Do pay careful attention to your dreams, which may or may not be premonitions. Don’t invite the cops inside your home while lines of cocaine are visible on your coffee table. And if a dude in clown makeup driving a black van branded “Abracadabra” approaches you on a vacant sidewalk, do immediately walk the other way; don’t—seriously, do not—ask if you can see a magic trick.

That last nugget comes courtesy of The Grabber, a serial killer terrorizing a morose Denver neighborhood in 1978. With lank hair and dark eyes that peek out from behind a two-piece mask—the upper part topped with devilish horns, the lower forming a demented smile—he’s played by Ethan Hawke, continuing the actor’s not-unwelcome veer into villainy following his small-screen turn on Marvel’s Moon Knight. There are moments of real menace in Hawke’s performance here; when he smothers a child’s cries and threatens to gut him like a pig before strangling him with his own intestines, you know he means it. For the most part, though, he keeps things in second gear, gesturing toward evil rather than embodying it. Read More

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Elvis: All the King’s Remorses

Jeremy BeckReviews
Austin Butler in Elvis

Can a movie be exhilarating and tedious at the same time? Elvis, the biopic about an American icon (Elvis Presley) from an Australian director (Baz Luhrmann), is a vigorous and exhausting work, 159 minutes of bright lights and raucous noise and extravagant camera moves. It is also oddly boring, struggling to derail itself from the rigid train tracks that most pictures of its ilk travel upon. It has become fashionable, and a bit too cute, for critics to deride docudramas of musical genius as unwittingly earnest reproductions of Walk Hard, the 2007 parody that skewered the genre with John C. Reilly singing ditties like “You Got to Love Your Negro Man.” Elvis is too vibrant and enthusiastic and just plain expensive-looking to be dismissed as repetitive boilerplate. Yet its story—of greatness discovered, burnished, troubled, and exploited—is too typical to be memorable.

Its narrative trajectory may be tiresome, but visually speaking, Elvis is not dull. Never one for restraint, Luhrmann hurtles through his material with aggressive, often excessive verve, stitching together cacophonous sequences with music-video impatience. There are times, especially during the opening act—which finds the louche Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) narrating the film’s events in flashback as he lies in a hospital bed and imagines himself wandering through garish casinos with a drip in his arm—when this hyperactivity can feel overwhelming, like a Broadway production by way of Michael Bay. Still, the movie’s style is consonant with its subject, creating a feedback loop of restless energy. It’s fitting, if perhaps predictable, that Elvis feels most alive whenever Elvis is on stage feeling lively. Read More

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