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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Inside Out 2: She’s Crossed That Loving Feeling

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Inside Out 2

Could Pixar be growing up? The idea seems odd; from the moment Woody and Buzz debated flying versus “falling with style,” the animation laureate has exhibited a fully formed sensibility—a rich blend of buoyant imagination and piercing insight, conveyed via painstaking computerized craft. But because Disney’s most celebrated cartoon arm remains a commercial enterprise, many of their works still center on wide-eyed children and (more directly) their anxious parents. In recent years, however, the studio has gently expanded its heroes’ ages and preoccupations, telling stories about childless adults (Soul), lovestruck twentysomethings (Elemental), awkward high schoolers (Onward), and angsty kids straddling adolescence (Luca, Turning Red). Now comes Inside Out 2, a movie about a 13-year-old grappling with the chilling prospect (perceived or actual) that her actions in the present will determine the course of her future. It might not be a coming-of-age story in all respects—the notion of sexual attraction stays safely outside its youthful boundaries—but it’s not for nothing that it features a literal alarm blaring the arrival of one of life’s most horrifying rites of passage: puberty.

Creatively speaking, Inside Out 2 attempts to accomplish a similar sort of maturation, expanding the original’s vibrantly detailed universe and complicating its themes. At the same time, it suffers from a certain, inevitable stasis. The first Inside Out, which landed on this critic’s list of the best movies of the 2010s, was remarkable above all for its conceptual innovation—its vision of emotions as anthropomorphized beings that guide our thoughts and behavior while collaborating and bickering in the fashion of a workplace sitcom. Inside Out 2, by virtue of being a sequel, can’t hope to replicate that sense of unprecedented wonder. Instead, it builds upon its predecessor with intelligence and variety, even as it traffics in a degree of repetition that is slightly dispiriting. Read More

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The Watchers: What You See Is What You Fret

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dakota Fanning in The Watchers

Think fast: Can you name a movie directed by someone with the surname Shyamalan where a handful of terrified survivors take shelter in primitive surroundings in the forest, bracing for an invasion of unseen monsters? If you guessed The Village, you’d be right, and also wrong. The Watchers, the debut feature from Ishana Night Shyamalan, conforms to a similar horror template as that 2004 tentpole, one of the most divisive (and best) pictures directed by her father, M. Night. It’s inevitable, in our era of toxic nepo-baby discourse, that the younger Shyamalan’s work will be measured against that of her sire (who serves as producer here), so there’s something admirable about her steering into the skid and inviting the comparison. In tone and style, The Watchers is a decidedly Shyamalan production, featuring a number of qualities—foreboding atmosphere, stiff dialogue, gripping images, hokey mythology—that inevitably evoke the filmmaker who was once infamously dubbed “the next Spielberg.”

It’s slightly disappointing, if hardly devastating, that The Watchers is a flawed movie, struggling to enliven its spooky premise with the requisite eccentricity or suspense. But it isn’t an ignoble effort, and it establishes Shyamalan as a director with a fine eye. She just isn’t always sure where to aim it. Read More

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