Us: Meeting the Enemy, and Looking in the Mirror

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lupita Nyong'o in "Us"

Jordan Peele’s Get Out was such a unique and exhilarating blend of images and ideas—a suspenseful horror movie with a pointed political message—that it was easy to tolerate its third-act slide into ordinariness. His follow-up, Us, is not quite as thematically bracing; it feels more like a superlative exemplar of nightmare cinema than a full-on reinvention of the form. But even if Us is more entertaining than extraordinary—and to be clear, it would be deeply unfair to demand that Peele’s encore be equally groundbreaking—it is in some ways a more impressive picture than Get Out, with superior visuals and more consistent follow-through. Minimizing sociopolitical allegory in favor of visceral dread, it finds Peele sharpening his focus and refining his technique. He’s less interested in making you look inward in self-reflection than in forcing you to shut your eyes in fear.

This isn’t to say that Us is altogether silent with respect to race and politics. Its vision of an unseen underclass—a toiling horde of perpetually neglected laborers, à la The Time Machine—isn’t all that far removed from Get Out’s conceit of white aristocrats bidding on black bodies. But the most striking overlap between the two films is their use of the same indelible image: a close-up of a central character’s face, eyes widening in dismay and filling with tears as they perceive the terror of what surrounds them. Read More

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Climax: Trip Like Nobody’s Watching

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Gaspar Noé's "Climax".

Some movies climb the walls, but in Climax, the walls blur into the ceiling and the floor. In this ambitious and enervating whatsit from the French-Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, the camera floats and swirls and glides, taking delirious flight through the air as bodies writhe before it in blissed-out ecstasy and unhinged agony. At one point, it becomes unclear whether the characters are vertical or horizontal, and they’re surely tripping too hard to tell the difference. It’s a dazzling visual achievement, which makes it all the more frustrating that Climax is, well, a Gaspar Noé film, which means that its technical audacity is marshaled in the service of cardboard characters, repugnant themes, and a story that is by turns skeletal and grotesque. Few directors have labored so much, and with such evident skill, to produce art that means so little.

Following the relentless banality of Love, a 135-minute borefest whose notion of boldness was to slather a dozen explicit sex scenes on top of its monotonous chronicle of a doomed relationship, Climax finds Noé returning to the lurid violence and operatic camerawork of his prior two features, Irreversible and Enter the Void. That’s for the best; despite its surfeit of stimulated genitals and spurting fluids, Love found Noé out of his element, straining to tell a character-driven story with a minimum of visual embellishment. (Well, relative minimum; as with Enter the Void, Love featured a POV shot of a penis ejaculating inside a vagina.) He’s far more comfortable trafficking in ornate brutality, which he likes to turn arty with pounding music and sweeping long takes. Working again with his regular cinematographer, Benoît Debie, Noé takes the ostensibly flat setting of Climax—an abandoned high school in France—and, with unflinching verve, transforms it into a hellish landscape of quaking terror, the Parisian equivalent of the Overlook Hotel. Read More

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Captain Marvel: Blasting Into the Past, with a Feminine Touch

Jeremy BeckReviews
Brie Larson travels back to the '90s in "Captain Marvel".

Trawling through the visualized memories of a warrior captive who’s suspended upside-down via electromagnets, the interrogator becomes baffled by the shapelessness of what he’s seeing. “Is anyone else confused?” asks Talos (Ben Mendelsohn), a member of a green-skinned, shape-shifting extraterrestrial species called the Skrulls. It’s a question that would ordinarily carry a meta charge; after all, this is the Marvel Cinematic Universe we’re talking about, that ginormous, globally branded franchise which has grown so sprawling, even those weaned on comics can barely navigate it without a map. Yet one of the satisfying things about Captain Marvel, the 21st and decidedly not-bad entry in the MCU proper, is that you don’t need to possess a doctorate in comic-book lore to appreciate its familiar origin-story rhythms. This isn’t to say that the movie skimps on fantastical elements or idiosyncratic detail; there are intergalactic wars, levitating soldiers, enigmatic androids, photon blasters, aptitude suppressors, and countless shots of characters manipulating or absorbing beams of glowing blue energy. But that’s all souped-up window dressing. At its core, Captain Marvel is about a hero grappling with her powers and struggling to claim her identity.

Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck from a script they wrote with Geneva Robertson-Dworet, Captain Marvel’s relative streamlining comes as something of a reprieve following the overstuffed Avengers: Infinity War. Where that bulky behemoth crammed countless characters and subplots into its 160-minute running time, this movie feels positively slender, with a refreshing clarity of focus. Sure, the obligatory mid-credits scene necessarily links what you just watched to the broader narrative of the MCU—a narrative that will theoretically conclude (ha!) next month with Avengers: Endgame—but otherwise, Boden and Fleck’s film features a welcome lack of duty-bound integration. Blessedly, Captain Marvel is about Captain Marvel. Read More

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Greta: Come for Dinner, Stay Forever

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chloë Grace Moretz and Isabelle Huppert in "Greta".

It would be unfair to accuse Greta of jumping the rails, because it’s never on the rails in the first place. Deeply silly and persistently entertaining, this campy thriller would be laughable if it were remotely interested in being taken seriously. Thankfully, the director Neil Jordan, working from a script he wrote with Ray Wright, seems to have recognized the material’s inherent kitsch; he abandons logic and nuance in favor of cheesy suspense. He wants to give you goose bumps, not dig under your skin.

It’s a smart decision, if not as smart as casting Isabelle Huppert in the title role. One of the most intuitive actors in the world, Huppert often flashes a steely sternness, a rigidity that she wields to mask her characters’ inner pain and longing. The logline of Greta—elderly immigrant widow befriends bereaved Manhattan twentysomething—feints at a sober exploration of maternal isolation and compassion, and if you enter the film with no knowledge of its premise, you might expect the title character to be another of Huppert’s keenly intelligent, emotionally fraught women. But while she may be quick-witted and determined, Greta is not especially humane. In fact, she isn’t even human, because she’s actually a vampire. Read More

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Velvet Buzzsaw: Killer Painting. What’s It Worth?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rene Russo and Jake Gyllenhaal in "Velvet Buzzsaw"

The emperor’s clothes get ripped to shreds in Velvet Buzzsaw, an asinine satire of the modern art scene that paints its targets and its characters in crude, bloody strokes. Written and directed by Dan Gilroy (and distributed by Netflix), it imagines a world full of rubes and sharks, a corrupt ecosystem in which artists, dealers, and critics conspire and compete in their feverish efforts to defraud you, the guileless consumer. It’s a tale of sickly glamour; most of the people we meet in this ugly little movie are extremely wealthy, though their morals are as bankrupt as Gilroy’s themes.

As a satire, Velvet Buzzsaw is profoundly idiotic, but as a halfway-intentional comedy, it is not without its diversions. Chief among those is Jake Gyllenhaal, who in Gilroy’s Nightcrawler delivered the performance of his career as a gaunt, wild-eyed videographer who crept from TV newsrooms into your nightmares. His work here is less unsettling but no less entertaining, full of rococo flourishes that underline his zany commitment. His mania holds your attention even as the film around him burns to the ground. Read More

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