The Matrix Resurrections: One Skill Makes It Larger, Other Thrills Feel Small

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keanu Reeves in The Matrix Resurrections

The white rabbit keeps hopping along in The Matrix Resurrections, the trippy, stimulating, overcaffeinated sequel from Lana Wachowski. It’s a dizzying movie, coursing with energy and teeming with ideas. It’s also kind of a mess; it struggles to wrangle its colliding philosophies into a coherent narrative, and it lacks the spirited visual imagination of its predecessors. But even if it’s a mess, it is very much somebody’s mess. Much like with her prior feature, Jupiter Ascending, which Wachowski made with her sister Lilly, the mistakes of The Matrix Resurrections are errors of commission; they are the consequences of an artist desperately trying to channel her fusillade of thoughts and emotions onto the screen. The blunders on display here are at least failures of personality rather than anonymity.

Speaking of personality: What makes us who we are? That was just one of countless questions posed and pondered by the first Matrix, the crown jewel of the cinematic treasure trove that was 1999. A bolt from the green-tinted blue, it was an electrifying fusion of brains and brawn that made a sizable swath of viewers question their own existence (not that I have anyone in mind), even as it attacked their nerve centers with eye-popping effects and kinetic fight scenes. The ensuing episodes, Reloaded and Revolutions, were less intellectually mind-scraping but were nevertheless heroic achievements in their own right; the jaw-dropping freeway chase in Reloaded remains the gold standard in contemporary action filmmaking, and it’s just one of a dozen-odd invigorating set pieces spread across the two sequels. So the standard challenge which attends any attempt at resuscitating a moribund franchise—the need to revivify a long-dormant universe in a way that both integrates the prior installments and upstages them—is especially perilous in this case. Read More

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Spider-Man: No Way Home: Once, Twice, Three Times a Spidey

Jeremy BeckReviews
Zendaya and a masked Tom Holland in Spider-Man: No Way Home

The twin cornerstones of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (not to be confused with the six infinity stones) are fan service and self-reference. Fan service, in that the primary purpose of these movies is satisfaction—not telling satisfying stories, but catering to their audience’s collective wants. And self-reference, in that the most efficient method of achieving this goal is to cram each picture with copious easter eggs, cameos, and callbacks, the better to flatter viewers’ knowledge and inspire periodic bursts of applause. The point of new installments is to remind people of older ones. The MCU is arguably the most successful global franchise in the history of popular culture, and its success derives from how it operates as a cumulative series of homework assignments.

So it’s fitting that Spider-Man: No Way Home—the third entry to center on Peter Parker, everyone’s favorite science nerd turned friendly webslinger, and the whopping 27th episode of the MCU overall (with another half-dozen films slated for theatrical release over the next two years)—finds its hero applying to college. (Never mind that Tom Holland, the talented British actor who again plays Peter with an appealing combination of gawkiness and sincerity, turned 25 this past summer; proper aging is the least of Marvel’s continuity concerns.) Sure, the movie that bears him carries the hallmarks of modern fantasy: warped spells, fractured universes, toppled buildings, freighted battles. But it is first and foremost a history lesson—a crash course in Spider-Man lore designed to reward viewers for their continued attention and scrupulous studying. If the past two decades of comic-book cinema were the substance of the curriculum, No Way Home is the refreshingly easy final exam. Read More

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West Side Story: There’s Still Grace for Us

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ariana DeBose and David Alvarez in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story

Is West Side Story Steven Spielberg’s first musical, or his 30th? For nearly half a century, one of cinema’s greatest directors has been concocting robust sequences that bear the indicia of musical numbers: nimble choreography, balletic grace, syncopated rhythm. To survey his most impressive achievements—the vigorous chases of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the rampaging dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, the futuristic mayhem of Minority Report, and countless more—is to witness the work of a filmmaker who applies his craft with the precision of an inveterate composer. In essence, Spielberg has been making musicals for 50 years; West Side Story is just the first one that happens to include songs.

One of the ironies of his new feature is that those songs are virtually the opposite of original creations. Instead, viewers with even a cursory knowledge of Broadway hits will instantly recognize the soaring melodies of Leonard Bernstein and the snappy lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, which (as if you need me to tell you) were repurposed six decades ago by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins into an Oscar-sweeping smash. This familiarity necessarily dilutes the frisson of anticipation that attends any new Spielberg picture—how can Hollywood’s preeminent dazzler dazzle us when we’ve already been dazzled?—yet it also makes a certain sense. Spielberg’s virtuosity as a director lies not in his talent for pure invention (he hardly ever writes his own scripts), but in his gift for wielding the traditional elements of cinematic action—running, jumping, driving, dancing—in exhilarating new ways. Read More

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The Power of the Dog: West for Success

Jeremy BeckReviews
Benedict Cumberbatch in The Power of the Dog

A man in a black hat riding a horse. A woman with a flower in her hair serving a meal. A sprawling ranch, a glinting sunset, a bottle of booze. These are the artifacts of the Western, one of cinema’s oldest and most durable genres. They are also, in the hands of Jane Campion, raw clay to be modeled and molded, reshaped into new forms both beautiful and angular. The Power of the Dog, Campion’s first feature in a dozen years and arguably the best work of her long, too-infrequent career, treats the Western much like the carcass that one of its characters encounters on his dusty travels; it picks its bones clean and then assembles the harvest into a rich, tantalizing story of cruelty, desire, and retribution. It doesn’t so much upend the form’s conventions as weaponize them to reimagine a new kind of movie altogether.

Campion is hardly the first filmmaker to interrogate the complicated history and inherent stereotypes lurking beneath the familiar tales of cowboys and Indians; it’s been nearly three decades since Clint Eastwood deconstructed his own mythos in Unforgiven, and ever since (not to mention before), countless artists have breathed new, investigative life into that same classic carcass. But The Power of the Dog is especially notable for how it wields the twin powers of absence and suggestion. There are no bloody shootouts (nary a gun is even fired), but the threat of incipient violence still looms over its Montana setting like a storm cloud. There is no sex—an offscreen marriage generates no more visible ardor than a few chaste kisses on the cheek—but the screen nevertheless seethes with unconsummated longing. And there is no tin-starred sheriff maintaining law and order, but crime is still very much afoot. Read More

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Thanksgiving Roundup: Encanto and House of Gucci

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Stephanie Beatriz in Encanto; Lady Gaga in House of Gucci

The double feature is a long-defunct relic of moviegoing, but lately I’ve done my best to revive the concept in my writing, if only to give myself the excuse to review as many films as possible. But while I’ve previously managed to contort unrelated movies into purportedly similar shapes—Dune and The French Dispatch are both made by obsessive world-building auteurs, King Richard and Tick Tick Boom both contemplate tortured geniuses, Malignant and The Card Counter both go for broke, etc.—this Thanksgiving’s pair of high-profile releases presents a more daunting challenge. How to possibly unify Encanto, the cheery new animated musical from Disney, with House of Gucci, Ridley Scott’s sordid fact-based saga of opulence, betrayal, and murder? I could argue that both films center on crumbling dynasties who cling to their power through deceit and corruption, but let’s not kid ourselves—not when one of them is geared toward kids and the other toward creeps. Instead, let’s focus on their qualitative differences, because one of these movies is quite good and the other one isn’t.

Conceptually speaking, Encanto isn’t anything special. Directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard (Zootopia) from a script Bush wrote with co-director Charise Castro Smith, it’s another of Disney’s misfit-kid pictures, centering on a plucky heroine who, despite her wholesome spirit and positive attitude, is unsure of her place in the world and within her family. Of course, world and family are essentially the same thing for Mirabel (voiced by Stephanie Beatriz), who technically isn’t a princess in the same way Moana technically wasn’t a princess. She’s nonetheless the granddaughter of Alma (María Cecilia Botero), the benevolent matriarch who rules over her brood, the Madrigal family, with what might be called generous rigidity; everyone is happy, so long as—and perhaps because—everyone abides by Alma’s decree. There is even something vaguely feudal about the Madrigals’ elevated position; they’re basically aristocratic leaders of a humble South American village, one whose welfare hinges on the noble class’ prosperity and munificence. Read More

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