MaXXXine: Body Trouble, But Dressed to Thrill

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Goth in MaXXXine

A sweaty and methodical build-up followed by a burst of spurting fluids—am I describing a horror movie, or a porno? The two genres collide in MaXXXine, though without the satisfactory release you might hope for. Sure, there is a bit of bare flesh on display and a good deal of blood, but surprisingly little in the way of tension or excitement. Sexploitation homages shouldn’t feel this neutered.

MaXXXine supplies enough visual style to make it watchable, but it’s still a disappointment, especially when you consider its genealogy. It’s the third consecutive collaboration between writer-director Ti West and actor Mia Goth, who two years ago gave us X, a snappy slasher that subtly interrogated the puritanical attitudes of the skin-flick ’70s while also delivering some humdinger set pieces. They followed that with Pearl, a cheeky prequel which excavated the origins of X’s geriatric villainess and provided Goth (who co-wrote it) with the monologue of a lifetime. MaXXXine flashes forward to the more recent past, bringing back Goth’s now-titular character from X along with a few tedious plot points. Set in 1985, the action has shifted from the clammy farmland of rural Texas to the glitzy neon of the Hollywood Hills, but the thematic preoccupations are similar to those of X. Once again, West is examining retrograde gender norms surrounding sex and cinema, imagining a lurid universe that blurs the line between on-screen indecency and real-world brutality. Read More

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Kinds of Kindness: Thrice, Guys Finish Last

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emma Stone in Kinds of Kindness

The excellence of Poor Things wasn’t a surprise, but the crowd-pleasing nature of it was, given that Yorgos Lanthimos had spent most of his career crafting bizarre, angular pictures which proved alienating to any mainstream audiences who stumbled upon them. (No movie I’ve recommended has induced more aggrieved “Why did you make me see that?!” responses than The Lobster.) If you hoped or feared that the one-two Oscar-nominated punch of The Favourite and Poor Things heralded a populist shift in Lanthimos’ trajectory, Kinds of Kindness has arrived to either disappoint or reassure you. Regardless of your take on Lanthimos—and in this critic’s view, he is one of the most inventive and skillful directors working today—you cannot deny that his latest movie represents a return (reversion?) to his typical, twisted form.

This isn’t to say that he’s repeating himself. Sure, the usual indicia of a Lanthimos production are on display: an absurdist tone, staccato dialogue, spasmodic violence, choose-your-own-adventure metaphors. Instead, the chief departure here is structural. Kinds of Kindness is an anthology picture, telling three separate stories which, at least in dramatic terms, are wholly distinct from one another. But because the segments all feature the same central cast—a who’s-who of talented American actors comprising (deep breath) Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, and Mamoudou Athie—and because their titles all mention the same acronymic figure (a bearded fellow called R.M.F., played wordlessly by Yorgos Stefanakos), they naturally invite speculation as to their thematic commonalities. Read More

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Janet Planet: Smothering Instinct

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler in Janet Planet

Lacy is bored. Eleven years old and marooned in her woodland home in western Massachusetts, she has no friends, no hobbies (compulsory piano lessons don’t count), and no apparent reason to live. “If you don’t come get me, I’m gonna kill myself,” she declares on the phone in a prayer for deliverance from sleepaway camp. It’s an empty threat because nothing in Lacy’s life is all that bad—her fellow camp kids and counselors seem perfectly nice—but such mediocrity is just another affront. If things were terrible, at least she’d have something to rail against. Having nothing to complain about is somehow worse.

Janet Planet, the directorial debut of Annie Baker, is an eerily persuasive piece of storytelling that understands Lacy’s circumstances almost too well. It transpires over a few sleepy summer months in 1991, and it evokes her predicament—the specific sensation of flailing against the aimlessness of youth—with a clarity that verges on lethargy. In so convincingly depicting tedium, it risks succumbing to it. Read More

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A Quiet Place, Day One: The City That Never Speaks

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joseph Quinn and Lupita Nyong'o in A Quiet Place: Day One

The special thing about the first Quiet Place movie was that it didn’t do anything special. Sure, John Krasinski’s horror hit was cinematically imaginative, but it worked because it stayed small, applying its merciless technique to the fate of one family enduring the crucible of a sonically fraught apocalypse. In retrospect, it’s somewhat miraculous that A Quiet Place Part II fared as well as it did, given that its mild expansion (new people, new locations) inevitably diluted some of its tension. This nascent franchise will continue churning out additional installments so long as they keep making money, but the commercial imperatives of sequel-building—bigger thrills, grander mythology, general moreness—seem incompatible with the original’s white-knuckle intimacy.

A Quiet Place: Day One, from the writer-director Michael Sarnoski (Krasinski receives a story credit), seems to succumb to this contradiction before improbably evading it. In terms of pure suspense, it is the least successful Quiet Place picture thus far. It is also the most humane. Read More

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The Bikeriders: Mad Packs, Fury Rode

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Hardy and Austin Butler in The Bikeriders

Early in his career, the writer-director Jeff Nichols developed a reputation for making movies that felt unlike the work of anyone else. The paranoid thriller Take Shelter, the noirish coming-of-age story Mud, the science-fiction parable Midnight Special—none of these was exceptional, but they all toyed with genre expectations in a manner that made them feel gratifyingly unusual. That changed with Loving, a well-intentioned docudrama that was tender, intelligent, and disappointingly ordinary. Nichols’ latest picture, The Bikeriders, continues this regression toward normalcy in a peculiar way, less by occupying a familiar template than by imitating a specific filmmaker—namely, Martin Scorsese. This movie could easily have been called “Goodfellas: Easy Rider edition.”

There are worse touchstones to copy. Cinematically speaking, The Bikeriders may not venture too far off road, but it at least zooms forward with confidence and texture. It also acquires a sense of melancholy—an elegiac wistfulness—that is both genuinely touching and somewhat dubious. Read More

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