Monkey Man: Punch and Broody

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dev Patel in Monkey Man

Did you know that Dev Patel looks good with his shirt off? The actor isn’t widely regarded as a sex symbol, despite some sticky fumblings with women in The Green Knight and the underrated Wedding Guest. Monkey Man, Patel’s feature directorial debut, is primarily a chance for him to demonstrate his filmmaking chops, but it also serves to showcase his well-earned immodesty. With his careless mane of black hair, a square jawline covered by a trimly untrimmed beard, and enough abs to fill a supermarket soda aisle, he’s a matinee idol with the unforced charisma to match. It’s only fair that he spends much of the movie getting his face bloodied to a pulp.

In fact, when Monkey Man opens, Patel’s character routinely receives bone-crunching body blows, and not as a consequence of any vigilantism; it’s just his job. Credited as Kid—though he also goes by the alias Bobby, not to mention the title moniker—he moonlights at an underground Indian boxing club, where he functions as (to borrow from an upcoming release) the designated fall guy, wearing a monkey mask and throwing fights in exchange for a meager cut of the take. (Given that he never seems to win a match, it’s unclear how the house makes any money, but let’s not worry about plausibility.) His earnings are commensurate to his suffering; as explained by the establishment’s oily promoter (a welcome Sharlto Copley), he needs to really wow the crowd with his injuries in order to collect the coveted “bleed bonus.” It isn’t exactly a glamorous lifestyle, but Kid’s pain is a tolerable means to a very specific end. Read More

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Godzilla x Kong, the New Empire: Animal Kingdumb

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

The tagline for Roland Emmerich’s 1998 version of Godzilla proclaimed, “Size does matter.” Fair enough, but so do scale, weight, and clarity. The computer-generated beasts who rampage through Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire are undeniably large. But as creatures of action cinema, they are paper tigers—ephemeral and insubstantial, lacking in true force. They look like giants and punch like toddlers.

This is something of a problem, because the whole point of an enterprise like Godzilla x Kong is for its titular monsters to haul off and kick ass. Director Adam Wingard, who previously helmed Godzilla vs. Kong (the prior entry in Warner Bros.’ increasingly unwieldy cinematic universe), is no fool; he knows that the audiences flocking to this movie expect it to feature extensive footage of the King of the Monsters and the Eighth Wonder of the World laying waste to assorted animal competitors. He obliges immediately, as the opening scene finds a grey-bearded King Kong sprinting through the jungles and mountains of the Hollow Earth—the subterranean realm where he’s taken up a semi-peaceful existence, away from prying human eyes—as he’s chased by snarling predators that look like a cross between a jackal and an anteater. Kong’s predictable thrashing of these puny foes immediately emblematizes the picture’s failings. The issue isn’t so much that the creatures look fake—the special effects are impressively detailed in terms of color and design—but that the combat carries no tangible impact. It feels like an elaborate WWE routine—all posturing and preening, no real pain. Read More

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Immaculate: Snacc of All Trades, Master of Nun

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate

Until she cracked the box-office code with Anyone But You (still in theaters, over three months later!), Sydney Sweeney was best known for her television work: as a tempestuous sexpot on Euphoria, as a privileged troublemaker on The White Lotus, as a mentally unstable cellmate on Sharp Objects. Even as her star ascended and she appeared in more movies, the pandemic and studio hesitation conspired to prevent her from arriving on the actual big screen, as streamers gobbled up solid pictures like Reality and Big Time Adolescence… and also The Voyeurs, a spiky little thriller that dropped on Amazon a few years ago with little fanfare. Strictly speaking, The Voyeurs wasn’t a good movie, but it did showcase Sweeney’s ability to be both exotic and innocent; it also afforded its director, Michael Mohan, the opportunity to ape Brian de Palma. Now, Mohan and Sweeney have reteamed for Immaculate, a horror flick that contemplates a different sort of lusty possession.

As with The Voyeurs, Immaculate isn’t very good, but it isn’t without its guilty pleasures. As a creature of pure genre, it offers a handful of images—a watchful eye peering through a crevice to witness a sacrilegious ritual; a distant figure launching herself from a background tower—that contain a certain elemental power. The opening scene finds a young nun (Simona Tabasco, also from The White Lotus) trying to escape from an Italian convent that might as well be a medieval castle; as she fumbles frantically with the keys at the wrought-iron gate, a quartet of elders inexorably stalk toward her, like four Darth Vaders in habits. There’s no ambiguity or complexity here, just primordial terror. Read More

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Love Lies Bleeding: Her Body Is a Rage

Jeremy BeckReviews
Katy O'Brian and Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding

The MPA advisement for Love Lies Bleeding informs viewers that the film is rated R “for violence and grisly images, sexual content, nudity, language throughout, and drug use.” Setting aside that certain sickos (who me?) might perceive this notice as an inducement rather than a warning, one vice that the agency declines to mention is smoking—perhaps because the movie itself condemns such behavior. Early on, a woman named Lou pushes play on a portable cassette recorder (the year is 1989); as she half-listens to a health official drone on about the dangers of nicotine addiction, she aimlessly puffs on a cigarette. The obvious conflict between her brain and her body is amusing, even if her inability to quit quickly becomes the least of her problems.

Lou is played by Kristen Stewart, who supplies the kind of earthy, hard-bitten performance that has become the actor’s specialty post-superstardom. Stewart’s naturalism makes her an intriguing match with Rose Glass, the promising writer-director whose first feature, Saint Maud, was a raw nerve of a horror movie, observing a pious caretaker’s descent into madness with unsettling chops. In Love Lies Bleeding, Stewart’s effortless plausibility draws you inside Lou’s orbit and makes you root for her, even as Glass sets about upending her meager circumstances with exuberant chaos. Read More

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Dune, Part Two: Getting the Sand Back Together

Jeremy BeckReviews
Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya in Dune: Part Two

We know by now about the Sand Walk—that syncopated stroll across the desert whose arrhythmia helps you avoid detection from those monstrous worms. The irony of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was that, despite its nominal exoticism, it delivered exactly what you anticipated: eye-popping visuals, grandiloquent design, and sonorous performances, all in the service of a predictable story that vacillated between diverting and tedious. You could be forgiven for expecting its sequel to provide more of the same; Dune was a critical and commercial hit, after all, and Hollywood tends not to mess with success. Yet the intervening years spent wandering the sands seem to have inspired Villeneuve, resulting in a richer and more thought-provoking follow-up. The happy surprise of Dune: Part Two isn’t that it’s good. It’s that it’s interesting.

Some of this may be a natural consequence of the source material; Villeneuve and his co-writer, Jon Spaihts, continue their adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, which I’ve never read but which presumably grows in complexity as it progresses. Still, regardless of the underlying inspiration, Dune 2 (or 2une, if you prefer) operates with a level of nuance that its predecessor lacked. The characters in the first movie were largely ciphers, secondary to the colossal world-building that preoccupied Villeneuve’s attention. They now feel like fully rounded people: emotionally fraught, yes, but also persuasively motivated and—in a note that’s unusual for blockbuster cinema—morally grey. Read More

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