You Were Never Really Here: Out for Blood, But Lost in Fog

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joaquin Phoenix as a sullen killer in Lynne Ramsay's "You Were Never Really Here"

Action-packed but not kinetic, stimulating but not engaging, immersive but not intimate—Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here might be described as an anti-thriller. Its plot, which is essentially Taken by way of Taxi Driver, features a handful of genre staples: a rugged but troubled hero, a girl in peril, a cadre of reprehensible evildoers, crushed skulls and buckets of blood. But while the movie hits all of the familiar revenge-narrative beats, it does so in decidedly offbeat ways, preferring to linger in the unsettling spaces that bubble up between the requisite moments of violence and mayhem. It’s less interested in elevating your pulse than in digging under your skin.

This approach has its rewards. You will surely see more exciting movies in 2018 than You Were Never Really Here, but you may not see a more distinctive one, and there’s intrigue in the way Ramsay upends expectations and shows you something creepy and new. But her assaultive style has limitations, too; when viewed from a certain angle, her commitment to jaggedness is less suggestive of a disciplined artist abiding by her principles than of a smug director refusing to entertain her audience. The result is a film that’s easy to admire but difficult to, you know, actually like. Read More

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Beirut: Watch the Terrorists, and Your Back

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rosamund Pike and Jon Hamm in the spy thriller "Beirut"

For a movie purportedly concerned with the strife and factionalism that have ravaged its war-torn central city, it’s telling that Beirut opens with a scene of hobnobbing luxury. The year is 1972, and we’re at a lavish dinner party where the host, Mason Skiles (Jon Hamm), is schmoozing effortlessly with his well-to-do guests. He’s regaling them with some Lebanese history, and while his tale—a loaded parable about uninvited immigrants chafing an entrenched citizenry—may be troubling, his tone is buttery velvet, his face all smiles. It’s a productive dissonance that proves to be an apt metaphor for Beirut itself, a film that strives to be profound and discomfiting and settles instead for being broadly, almost inadvertently enjoyable. As brokered compromises go, the Middle East has seen worse.

The most obvious source of this accidental pleasure is Hamm, who plays Mason with a twinkly intelligence that nicely complements his patented superiority and world-weariness. As sketched in Tony Gilroy’s uneven script—which punctuates that initial soiree with a fatal spray of gunfire before fast-forwarding ten years—the Mason of the present is a classic redemption case, a morose drunkard who scarcely resembles the cheery mingler from a decade earlier. Hamm articulates Mason’s superficial glumness well enough—and it doesn’t get much glummer than mediating labor disputes in a rainy Boston suburb—but he’s better at revealing the smooth operator underneath, the intuitive poker player who once served as one of his country’s top diplomats. Mason, who may be the highest-functioning alcoholic in recent cinematic memory, is too up on his game to be down in the dumps. Read More

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A Quiet Place: Staying Alive, with Mouths Shut and Eyes Open

Jeremy BeckReviews
John Krasinski and Noah Jupe in "A Quiet Place"

We begin with a stark title card: “Day 89.” A family prowls through a deserted pharmacy, the mother scanning labels on vials while the kids amble through the aisles and pluck goodies from the shelves. It’s a familiar scene to fans of apocalyptic fiction, the dusty sills and sparse surroundings recalling similarly ominous openings from movies like 28 Days Later and I Am Legend. The key difference here is that the characters, plainly well-versed in this foreboding new normal, take special care not to make any noise whatsoever. Yet before long, a mistake is made, a sound is blared, and in the blink of an eye and the rustle of some leaves, a life is taken.

And with this brief and riveting and ghastly cold open, A Quiet Place announces itself as an expertly conceived and executed horror film, perhaps the best of its kind since It Follows. Combining a knockout premise—stop, hey, what’s that sound?—with white-knuckle set pieces and a bracing degree of economy, the movie both elevates your pulse and digs under your skin. It’s scary, sure, but not so scary that it prevents you from admiring it as a polished, fiendishly inventive piece of pulp art. Read More

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Isle of Dogs: Barking Mad, and Canines Too

Jeremy BeckReviews
Bryan Cranston leads a pack of tender beasts in Wes Anderson's "Isle of Dogs"

In Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, a corrupt and bigoted politician mongers fear to stigmatize a vulnerable class of citizenry, which he then unilaterally deports to a faraway land for the supposed safety of his voter base, despite scientific data demonstrating that this marginalized sect poses no threat to the populace. Also, there are talking dogs.

Anderson’s films are typically too micro-focused to toy with big-picture ideas, but this isn’t the first time he’s dabbled in political allegory; his last movie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, smuggled a poignant anti-fascist message inside its candy-colored packaging. The politics in Isle of Dogs are more pointed, the parallels to contemporary figures more easily drawn. But it would be a mistake to reduce this whimsical, stupendously well-made film to its symbolic elements. Anderson’s themes may be partisan, but his exquisite craftsmanship knows no ideology, except maybe perfection. Read More

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Ready Player One: For These Teens, It’s Game On or Game Over

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke in Steven Spielberg's "Ready Player One"

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: An intrepid young man, living in a dystopian future, must use his pluck and ingenuity to defeat a powerful villain whose mercenary greed threatens our hero’s livelihood, along with the rest of the planet’s. In so doing, he will assemble a ragtag team of similarly disenfranchised youths, one of whom will catch his eye as a potential love interest, another of whom will support him with weapons and wisecracks. Foes will be vanquished, bonds will be forged, and while setbacks will surely be suffered (tertiary characters may even be killed), in the end, the world will almost certainly be saved.

Ready Player One, the robust and flawed film adaptation of Ernest Cline’s immensely popular book, doesn’t so much follow this familiar script as live inside it. It envisions a universe where the very act of engaging with popular art—mostly playing videogames, but also watching movies and spotting references—becomes the fulcrum of its story. It’s a recursive premise that’s less interesting than it sounds, primarily serving as the excuse for a non-stop parade of pop-culture allusions and winking asides. And perhaps in an alternate dimension—maybe one reached by traveling through some sort of vaguely defined wormhole whose laws are breathlessly explained to us in a bout of foggy exposition—Ready Player One would have been a piece of hackwork that turned out to be a tedious, imitative slog. But in our reality, it’s better than that, because in our reality, it’s been directed by Steven Spielberg. Read More

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