Midsommar: A Vacation to Paradise, But Darkness Looms

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jack Reynor and Florence Pugh in Ari Aster's "Midsommar"

Toxic relationships have rarely faced as brutal a reckoning as the one visited upon the central couple in Midsommar, the breakup film to end all breakup films. Consistently ravishing, frequently mesmerizing, and occasionally exasperating, this horror whatsit from Ari Aster fixes on a festering union, the pus that oozes from its wounds slowly morphing into nightmare fuel. With Hereditary, Aster transformed a family’s hellish history into a gateway to literal Hell. Now with Midsommar, he’s turned his precise, pitiless eye to a doomed romance, exposing every crack in its fetid underpinning. Some directors might seize on the concept of attractive people taking a European idyll as the chance to tell a beautiful love story. This is a death story.

Still a beautiful one, though. Most of Midsommar takes place in Sweden (shooting was held in Hungary), in a bucolic paradise whose natural loveliness makes it the perfect camouflage for the inevitable suffering to come. It’s a land of warm, inviting colors: rippling green grass, snowy white gowns, a cheery yellow temple whose simple architecture seems to have been plucked from a book of fairy tales. There are slender trees with spangled leaves, and vast meadows full of swaying flowers. It’s heaven on earth, a rejuvenating escape from the persistent recognition that hell is other people. Read More

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Spider-Man: Far from Home: Still Neighborly, Even Across the Pond

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Holland in "Spider-Man: Far from Home"

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has metastasized into an American institution, as sacred as apple pie or the Super Bowl or Beyoncé. Its supremacy is absolute. Still, following the seismic finale of Avengers: Endgame, it was fair to wonder if cinema’s most colossal franchise might have some difficulty regrouping, might fumble to develop a newfound sense of purpose. It takes all of 30 seconds for Spider-Man: Far from Home to obliterate that fear. Following a lightning-quick prologue set in Mexico, this jaunty new adventure opens with a cut-rate “In Memoriam” slideshow paying tribute to our fallen heroes. The crappy presentation of the images—the plastic look, the tacky music, the Getty Images watermark—proves to be intentional, as it’s quickly revealed that we’re watching a student newscast at Midtown High. And with that, in the span of just a few screenshots and some curmudgeonly narration from the immortally sour-faced Betty Brant (Angourie Rice), Far from Home dismisses any supposed continuity concerns—those who vanished in “The Blip” at the end of Avengers: Infinity War have barely aged since their return, those who remained are now five years older, please keep up—and also establishes its light, breezy tone.

This is no small feat, even if it’s one that the director, Jon Watts, also managed with Spider-Man: Homecoming, the prior Spidey installment whose first main scene brilliantly reimagined the famous airport fight from Captain America: Civil War as glimpsed through the chintzy, vertical iPhone camera of an anxious teenager. Liberated from the laborious world-building that encumbers so many comic-book crossovers, Watts and his writers (Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers) prove agile with both atmosphere and exposition. Sure, there are a few scenes where warriors congregate in dimly lit clandestine bases and worriedly chat about the latest catastrophic threat to the human race, but even allowing for these bits of superhero scheming, Far from Home’s primary concern is its characters. Read More

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Toy Story 4: Growing Old and Living Young, All Over Again

Jeremy BeckReviews
Woody, Bo Peep, and Duke Caboom in "Toy Story 4"

Toy Story 4 is a movie about fear, loneliness, pain, disillusionment, and loss. Your kids will love it.

You might too, if perhaps not quite as much as you adored its predecessors. It’s been 24 years since the computer wizards at Pixar released an 81-minute feature about playthings that leap to life when their owners leave the room, launching a mega brand and revolutionizing the concept of animation filmmaking in the process. Now the studio’s longest-running franchise (take that, Cars!), the Toy Story movies remain durable thanks to their nervy fusion of reliable adventure tropes and provocative philosophizing, the way they make you take stock of your life and yourself even as they place you back in touch with your inner child. In terms of raw entertainment, Toy Story 4 isn’t quite as boisterous as prior installments; the new director, Josh Cooley (one of the writers of the stupendous Inside Out), is certainly capable, but his set pieces lack the series’ trademark Rube Goldbergian complexity or eye-popping gusto. But the screenplay, by Andrew Stanton and Stephany Folsom, teems with ideas, challenges, and possibilities. The result is a movie that may not ascend beyond infinity, but at least gets most of the way there. Read More

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The Dead Don’t Die: A Zombie Comedy, But the Jokes Are DOA

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adam Driver and Bill Murray in Jim Jarmusch's "The Dead Don't Die".

The Dead Don’t Die, the new film from veteran auteur Jim Jarmusch, has been marketed in some circles as a zombie comedy. This description, which could also apply to modern cult hits like Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, might lead you to believe that the movie is both funny and entertaining. It is neither. In fact, it isn’t really much of anything, beyond maybe a perverse practical joke or perhaps a diabolical social experiment. It’s almost like Jarmusch is trolling his viewers, tantalizing us with the possibility of a top-flight cast, then subjecting us to a parade of bafflingly inert scenes. This isn’t a movie. This is Andy Kaufman reading The Great Gatsby.

If Jarmusch is laughing, he’s the only one. Forced to put a label on the putative comedy of The Dead Don’t Die, I suppose I’d call it meta deadpan, which is already giving it far more credit than it deserves. Actors tend to recite the same lines of dialogue over and over, typically in flat, bored tones. There are lots of references and in-jokes, which try and fail to perform the function of actual jokes. Sometimes people swear; sometimes they yell. Mostly, they exchange mundane observations with a stiffness that masquerades as arch cleverness. Surely the extreme detachment is some sort of feint, right? Guess again. Deadpan humor has rarely felt so lifeless. Read More

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Dark Phoenix: Rise from the Ashes, or Just Burn It Down?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophie Turner as Jean Grey in "Dark Phoenix"

To paraphrase Patrick McGoohan’s line from Braveheart, the trouble with superhero movies is that they’re full of superheroes. On the flat pages of comic books, readers can rely on their imagination, translating two-dimensional splash panels into vibrant, kinetic action in their mind’s eye. But on film, the crude literalism of the screen requires directors to convey often ambiguous powers—psychic energy, beams of light, metaphysical toil—in blunt cinematic language. The result tends to be a strange sensation of detachment, as though you’re watching stage actors pantomime their performances in an early rehearsal, knowing that the production flourishes will be locked in by opening night.

Jean Grey, whose malevolent alter ego gives the film Dark Phoenix its name, presents an especially formidable challenge in this regard. She wields her mutant abilities, which in the comic-book lexicon carry fancy terms like astral projection and telekinesis, not via any visible external method but through internal concentration. She can practically rip the world apart with her mind, but how do you articulate that process with any spatial coherence or physical weight? Read More

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