Eternals: Yuck Everlasting

Jeremy BeckReviews
Angelina Jolie, Richard Madden, Salma Hayek, and Gemma Chan in Eternals

Auteur theory meets its match in Eternals, the strange, occasionally beguiling, ultimately tedious new entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Critics tend to consider movies as belonging to their director, but Disney’s primary interest in property has always been intellectual rather than artistic. This doesn’t mean that the 21st century’s dominant franchise is devoid of personality—just that its cagiest filmmakers (James Gunn and Ryan Coogler among them) operate simultaneously as smugglers and stewards, sneaking in eccentric touches while hewing to commercial imperatives. Hell, the Russo brothers turned the latter Avengers pictures into billion-dollar hits less through innovation than carefully calibrated deference; they served their fans, pleased their bosses, and didn’t make anyone unhappy, which becomes easier when you take so few risks.

Into this minefield of consumer expectation and corporate ownership now steps Chloé Zhao, fresh off of winning two Oscars for Nomadland, and laboring to bring some art-house punch to the multiplex’s most anodyne commodity. It’s tempting to accuse the Marvel machine of squeezing the color out of Zhao’s filmmaking, and to brand her as yet another victim sacrificed on the altar of sequel churn. But Eternals, which Zhao also wrote with Patrick Burleigh (repurposing an original script by Ryan and Kaz Firpo), is too odd and intriguing to be disregarded as the product of studio interference. No, its failings are more pedestrian and predictable; its characters are unmemorable, its plot is nonsensical, and its action is risible. Read More

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Last Night in Soho: Going Back, Going Blonde, Going Bonkers

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in Last Night in Soho

Remember the Swinging Sixties? That blissful English era of artistic revolution, high hedonism, and rampant sexism? At least, I think that’s what it involved; I wasn’t alive at the time, but I’ve consumed enough cultural artifacts from the period to approximate the woozy sensations of decadence and discovery. So has Edgar Wright, a voracious student of 20th-century pop culture whose movies tend to function as tributes to his dilettantish obsessions, as well as advertisements for the breadth of his own taste; his prior film, Baby Driver, was less a heist thriller than a feature-length playlist of classic tunes with vibrant visual accompaniment. Wright’s new feature, Last Night in Soho, initially scans as an ode to the lascivious London of yesteryear, a passionate homage to the pristine past that doubles as a sour lament for the degraded present. But there is more going on here than you might suspect—more ideas, more innovation, more mistakes.

“I like the old stuff better,” says Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), an aspiring fashion designer newly arrived in London from the country. It’s a valid preference—the music that pours through her Beats by Dre headphones includes hits by The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, and Peter & Gordon—that nonetheless carries dubious implications. Nostalgia can be simplistic as well as seductive, and many a filmmaker has fallen prone to romanticizing the gauzy bygone days without grappling with their dark marks and complications. This time around, Wright is smarter than that; Last Night in Soho is simultaneously an appreciation and a reckoning. It conjures a hypnotic veil of old-world glamour, then vigorously pierces it to reveal the rot festering underneath. Read More

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Dune, The French Dispatch, and World-Building Great and Small

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Timothée Chalamet in Dune and The French Dispatch

Denis Villeneuve and Wes Anderson are strangely similar filmmakers, even though they make exceedingly dissimilar films. Villeneuve’s movies are grand, sprawling adventures that envision alien life forms and contemplate dystopian futures. Anderson, by contrast, makes tidy, compact comedies whose foremost exotica are their characters’ eccentricities, and which tend to unfold in an unspecified but highly particular recent past. Yet both directors are true artisans skilled in the craft of cinematic world-building; for them, the screen is a coloring book for their fertile imaginations, one that should be sketched in as boldly and minutely as possible. Put differently, Villeneuve and Anderson treat movie-making like a work of galactic creation. One looks to the skies, the other to the soul, but both construct their own universes, packed with detail, whimsy, and awe.

This past weekend was something of a feast for cinephiles, as it brought new films from the two auteurs, both of which the COVID-19 pandemic had delayed for roughly a year. Villeneuve’s Dune, the long-awaited adaptation of the beloved science-fiction novel by Frank Herbert, finds the Canadian literally building a brand new world, one teeming with wonder and innovation. Anderson’s The French Dispatch, meanwhile, is more earthbound but no less profligate in its assembly. Both are natural progressions that reflect their makers’ career-long preoccupations, yet while both are undeniably impressive aesthetic achievements, only one fully succeeds as a piece of dramatic entertainment. Read More

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The Last Duel: He Said, She Said, They Bled, Who’s Dead?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adam Driver and Matt Damon in The Last Duel

Things get hairy in The Last Duel, and not just metaphorically. In this proudly old-fashioned, deceptively intricate medieval drama from Ridley Scott, a fraught marriage faces down a crucible of inequality—social, emotional, and intellectual, yes, but most of all follicular. As Jean de Carrouges, a hirsute warrior in perpetual need of both a paycheck and a shower, Matt Damon is armed with a bushy blond beard and an infested mullet that would make Joe Dirt jealous. Opposite him is Jodie Comer as Marguerite, whose flowing locks are regularly woven into elegant braids or neatly arranged into symmetrical ringlets. Gender disparity is the movie’s primary theme, one that’s tidily symbolized by Carrouges’ flagrant untidiness.

Coyly patient and sneakily stimulating, The Last Duel’s complexity reveals itself slowly, so much so that it initially seems familiar and drab, another of Scott’s ponderous Middle-Age epics. (Other examples include the underrated Kingdom of Heaven, the forgettable Robin Hood, and that one about the entertainer with the sword.) The superb screenplay, which Damon co-wrote with Nicole Holofcener and his bestie Ben Affleck (from a book by Eric Jager), cleaves neatly into three chapters, with each replaying the same series of critical events from the perspective of a different character. The first, which centers on Carrouges, is by far the weakest, though this is less a matter of poor execution than a byproduct of the script’s adroit design. Before surprising us with slippery variations and clever shifts in point of view, Scott and his writers must undertake the functional, somewhat laborious work of sketching out the film’s basic conflict. Read More

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No Time to Die: Do You Expect Me to Squawk? No, It Expects You to Cry

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daniel Craig in No Time to Die

The pandemic may have delayed James Bond, but can James Bond defeat a pandemic? It’s a piece of unnerving cinematic kismet that No Time to Die, the fifth and final entry starring Daniel Craig as everyone’s favorite martini-drinking secret agent, finds the erstwhile 007 racing to stop the release of a deadly bioweapon. Originally set for release in April 2020 (ha!) before being postponed roughly 35 different times over the past 18 months, this latest depiction of Ian Fleming’s tuxedoed superspy has suffered gravely on its bumpy journey to the multiplex, so much so that its fictional threat—mass distribution of airborne toxins—seems both eerily prescient (the script was completed well before COVID-19’s arrival) and oddly quaint. When compared with widespread vaccine obstinacy, performative litigation over mask mandates, and right-wing disinformation campaigns, how dangerous can a single supervillain really be?

But nobody watches a James Bond flick for the plot; it’s the man with the golden puns we’re after. Every new 007 develops his own signature—the pithy charm of Sean Connery, the jocular cheese of Roger Moore, the arch distance of Pierce Brosnan—and the Craig era has been defined by a brooding intensity that mingles, sometimes productively and sometimes awkwardly, with an emotional vulnerability. The first blond Bond has always been a capable puncher and competent quipper, but his legacy is the sting of loss that lingers over his romantic entanglements; what were once male-gaze rituals of masculine conquest and feminine adoration became, in the new millennium, something resembling genuine, mutual relationships. As the capstone to Craig’s decade-and-a-half term of service in the role of 007, No Time to Die strives to marry the franchise’s more traditional elements—the gadgets and the globe-trotting, the brutes and the babes—with its newfound sensibility of heartache and regret. Read More

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