It: School’s Out for Murder

Jeremy BeckReviews

Fear is universal, even if it’s also personal. We’re all afraid of something, but our fears are typically our own. As many pop-culture artifacts have done before, It attempts to trade on this inherent tension between the institutional and the individual, conjuring a parasitic, metaphysical evil that torments its victims by transforming into the very thing that terrifies them most. In this, the film invites you to imagine being confronted not just by the nightmarish visions visited upon its characters, but by the horrors of your own heart.

“What are you afraid of?” the trailer for It asks ominously. Good question. My own list of fears is quite lengthy, and while it contains a number of garden-variety phobias—snakes, rats, heights, etc.—it also includes a few anxieties specific to my temperament and amateur occupation. Like, say, the fear of being trapped in a theater watching a 135-minute horror movie that is by turns repetitive, silly, and dull. Read More

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Ingrid Goes West: California, Here She Comes, with Hand Bags and Hashtags

Jeremy BeckReviews
Aubrey Plaza is a compelling nutcase in "Ingrid Goes West"

Obsession goes dark in Ingrid Goes West, Matt Spicer’s funny and sad debut feature about a profoundly lonely person and the phony friendship she foists upon a vapid quasi-celebrity. The misery and the menace of the stalker is nothing new in cinema—Spicer’s screenplay (co-written with David Branson Smith) even name-checks Single White Female—but here the trope of classical fixation is, ahem, filtered through the distinctly modern lens of social media. The movie’s protagonist is decidedly deranged, but she’s also strangely sympathetic, perhaps because she represents the logical extreme of a culture that tallies friends and competes for followers. When you’re constantly uploading exquisite images of your sun-kissed California lifestyle to thousands of adoring fans, isn’t it only rational to expect a rando from Pennsylvania to become unhealthily attached to you? #justsaying

Not that Ingrid Goes West is a crotchety, Luddite take on How We Live Now. While the script exhibits fluency in the linguistic and behavioral quirks of social media—the hashtags and emojis, the constant scrolling and double-tapping—it is too smart and savvy to insult an entire generation of potential customers. Ingrid Goes West is persistently scathing, almost as a matter of principle, but it directs its scorn toward its characters, not its viewers. And while it uses contemporary technology as its entry point, the feelings that it traffics in and stirs up—loneliness, jealousy, fervor, fear—are emphatically age-old. #instawisdom Read More

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Good Time: One Bad Night on the Big Apple’s Mean Streets

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson stars in the thriller "Good Time"

I’ll say this for Good Time: It has personality. Awash in a toxic sludge of neon and grime, it is a distinctive, assaultive film, made with energy and aggression by its sibling directors, Josh and Benny Safdie. It is also a deeply unpleasant experience, and not in the way it seeks to be. Desperate to rattle you with its jittery style and glammed-up ugliness, Good Time instead just feels punishing and self-indulgent, mistaking excess for excitement and confusing shock with craft.

In their previous feature, Heaven Knows What, the Safdies explored the agony of urban drug addiction, plucking actual addict Arielle Holmes off the street and then building a movie around her sad circumstances. (Holmes went on to appear as one of Andrea Arnold’s itinerant magazine salespeople in American Honey.) Most critics praised Heaven Knows What for its grubby authenticity, but I found it cold, slack, and unrelentingly miserable. I feel much the same about Good Time, which is marginally less bleak and slightly more polished but shares with its predecessor a defiant disregard for visual coherence. Working again with cinematographer Sean Price Williams (who also shot Alex Ross Perry’s Queen of Earth), the Safdies favor extreme, unsteady close-ups, the camera hovering near the characters’ faces like a drunken dermatologist. Some might call this approach intimate. I’d call it a mess. Read More

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Logan Lucky: Robbing That Racetrack, and Maybe Stealing Your Heart

Jeremy BeckReviews
Channing Tatum and Adam Driver plan a robbery in "Logan Lucky"

Steven Soderbergh’s Logan Lucky opens with Jimmy Logan (Channing Tatum) regaling his 10-year-old daughter, Sadie (Farrah Mackenzie), about the creation of “Take Me Home, Country Roads”. It’s a colorful tale, complete with serendipitous car crashes and an all-night jam session, and Sadie asks her father if he perhaps admires the classic ballad because of the story behind its genesis. Jimmy responds that, while he appreciates the ditty’s backstory, that isn’t what makes it special. “I like the song because of the song,” he says.

It’s a sweet, disarming scene, quickly establishing the film’s gentle and laid-back vibe, but for cinephiles, it takes on a meta context. Those of us who mourned Soderbergh’s announcement in 2013—that, after releasing two movies that year (the slightly overrated Behind the Candelabra and the decidedly underrated Side Effects), he was retiring from filmmaking—could be forgiven for cherishing Logan Lucky simply because it heralds the return of one of American cinema’s most gifted and versatile directors. But while I’m delighted to have Soderbergh back in theaters (during his so-called retirement, he made two seasons of The Knick for Cinemax), my appreciation of Logan Lucky doesn’t stem primarily from him ending his self-imposed hiatus. To paraphrase Jimmy: I like the movie because of the movie. Read More

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Wind River: Danger in a Strange Land

Jeremy BeckReviews
Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner hunt a killer in "Wind River"

The chill runs bone-deep in Wind River, the astute and mournful second feature from Taylor Sheridan. After penning two electric screenplays that sweltered in the suffocating Southwest heat, the actor-turned-writer-turned-director has turned his gaze north and flipped his thermometer upside-down. Taking place on the titular Indian reservation in Wyoming (filming took place in Utah), Sheridan’s newest movie is cold and stark, the snow blanketing its landscapes and its characters like a paralytic force. The opening shot, of a teenage girl racing barefoot across a frozen plain in the dead of night, will make you shiver. Don’t expect to warm up anytime soon.

Not that Wind River is emotionally icy or remote. Quite the contrary; it’s a lively crime picture that’s also unusually elegiac, as interested in grief as it is in thrills. Sheridan’s protagonists may be ruthless—Benicio Del Toro’s vengeful assassin in Sicario can still trigger nightmares, while Ben Foster’s wolfish reprobate in Hell or High Water gunned down innocents without hesitation—but they are also motivated by anger and loss. Wind River’s hero, a Fish and Wildlife agent named Cory Lambert, is a literal hunter, a killing machine with a rifle on his back and a hole in his heart. Read More

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