A24

Queer: Another Gay in Paradise

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daniel Craig in Queer

Luca Guadagnino makes movies about lust. William S. Burroughs wrote books about pain. The obvious overlap between those two emotions might suggest a fruitful creative partnership—a provocative picture that marries the writer’s jagged prose with the director’s sensual style. Alas, Queer, Guadagnino’s adaptation of Burroughs’ second novel, is both obtuse and banal, defying comprehension while also courting boredom. It may traffic in addiction, but it isn’t stimulating. It just plunges you into a stupor.

Which might be the whole idea. Being poorly read, I’m only familiar with Burroughs’ work via reputation rather than experience, but I know that he deployed an experimental style designed to mirror his own challenges with substance abuse. To the extent Queer is intended to evoke the perpetual desolation of the junkie, well, mission accomplished I guess? The movie dabbles in purported forms of intrigue—sex, violence, blackmail, journeys in the jungle—but it’s mostly just one long bummer, a sludgy morass of misery. Read More

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Y2K: Millennium Ugh

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, and Julian Dennison in Y2K

Being unpopular in high school can feel like the end of the world. Your parents are embarrassing. Your best friend is a loser. The cool kids either bully you or ignore you. The girl you have a crush on barely knows you exist. And sentient computers have hatched a conspiracy to enslave the human race.

That the last of these items feels concordant with its predecessors is the central joke of Y2K, Kyle Mooney’s occasionally inspired, ultimately tedious new horror comedy. For Eli (Jaeden Martell, one of those anodyne actors who seems destined to play teenagers into his 30s), every day feels like its own miniature apocalypse—a perpetual ritual of awkwardness and humiliation. That’s an exaggeration, of course; his parents (Alicia Silverstone and Tim Heidecker) are sweet and supportive (how mortifying!), and he has plenty of fun playing videogames and goofing around with his closest pal, Danny (a solid Julian Dennison). But Eli still feels anxious and unfulfilled, especially because Laura (Rachel Zegler), the hot brainiac whom he sweatily flirts with online, seems more interested in older, more muscular dudes. So when his humdrum Friday night turns into a chaotic free-for-all full of death and dismemberment, he’s more than ready to save the day and get the girl. Read More

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Heretic: Creeping the Faith

Jeremy BeckReviews
Hugh Grant in Heretic

The girls aren’t stupid. They know that something is off—that the house is too small, the man too odd, the light too dim. They don’t behave like stereotypical female victims in a horror movie, even as they gradually realize they’re very much starring in one.

Their names are Sister Paxton (Chloe East) and Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher), and they are Mormon missionaries crisscrossing their way through the mountain west. We first meet them sitting on a homey park bench, as Paxton is regaling Barnes with the story of how she first witnessed the existence of God in, of all things, a piece of amateur pornography. When Barnes doesn’t reciprocate with her own tale of almighty discovery, Paxton isn’t deterred. “But you know God is real,” she says sunnily, less of a leading question than a warm affirmation. That Barnes doesn’t reply speaks volumes about the temperamental differences between these two parishioners, as does the flicker of disquiet that flashes across Thatcher’s face. Read More

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MaXXXine: Body Trouble, But Dressed to Thrill

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Goth in MaXXXine

A sweaty and methodical build-up followed by a burst of spurting fluids—am I describing a horror movie, or a porno? The two genres collide in MaXXXine, though without the satisfactory release you might hope for. Sure, there is a bit of bare flesh on display and a good deal of blood, but surprisingly little in the way of tension or excitement. Sexploitation homages shouldn’t feel this neutered.

MaXXXine supplies enough visual style to make it watchable, but it’s still a disappointment, especially when you consider its genealogy. It’s the third consecutive collaboration between writer-director Ti West and actor Mia Goth, who two years ago gave us X, a snappy slasher that subtly interrogated the puritanical attitudes of the skin-flick ’70s while also delivering some humdinger set pieces. They followed that with Pearl, a cheeky prequel which excavated the origins of X’s geriatric villainess and provided Goth (who co-wrote it) with the monologue of a lifetime. MaXXXine flashes forward to the more recent past, bringing back Goth’s now-titular character from X along with a few tedious plot points. Set in 1985, the action has shifted from the clammy farmland of rural Texas to the glitzy neon of the Hollywood Hills, but the thematic preoccupations are similar to those of X. Once again, West is examining retrograde gender norms surrounding sex and cinema, imagining a lurid universe that blurs the line between on-screen indecency and real-world brutality. Read More

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Janet Planet: Smothering Instinct

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler in Janet Planet

Lacy is bored. Eleven years old and marooned in her woodland home in western Massachusetts, she has no friends, no hobbies (compulsory piano lessons don’t count), and no apparent reason to live. “If you don’t come get me, I’m gonna kill myself,” she declares on the phone in a prayer for deliverance from sleepaway camp. It’s an empty threat because nothing in Lacy’s life is all that bad—her fellow camp kids and counselors seem perfectly nice—but such mediocrity is just another affront. If things were terrible, at least she’d have something to rail against. Having nothing to complain about is somehow worse.

Janet Planet, the directorial debut of Annie Baker, is an eerily persuasive piece of storytelling that understands Lacy’s circumstances almost too well. It transpires over a few sleepy summer months in 1991, and it evokes her predicament—the specific sensation of flailing against the aimlessness of youth—with a clarity that verges on lethargy. In so convincingly depicting tedium, it risks succumbing to it. Read More

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