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First Reformed: Still Preaching, But Is Anyone Listening?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ethan Hawke as a plagued preacher in "First Reformed"

Ethan Hawke has always had a crease in his face, a thin vertical line running from the center of his forehead to the bridge of his nose. But this crinkle somehow looks more pronounced in First Reformed, as though the weight of the world has been pushing in on his features and flattening the surrounding skin. Hawke is a naturally garrulous presence—recall his motormouthed writer of Richard Linklater’s Before movies, as well as his cool dad of Boyhood—which makes him a curious choice to play Reverend Toller, a solitary preacher haunted by internal demons. But just as Hawke’s career has slowly illuminated the considerable talent behind the folksy Texas charm (he’s recently done some of his best work in low-profile films like Predestination and 10,000 Saints), First Reformed gradually reveals itself as a different creature, a more subtle beast, than it first appears. What starts as a sober character study eventually transforms, almost miraculously, into… something else.

To say too much would risk spoiling the story’s surprises, but it’s important to note that the story is surprising, and that it smartly leverages our expectations against us. As you settle in to First Reformed and absorb its particular aesthetic and narrative qualities—its cramped aspect ratio, its grey palette, its solemn and solitary voiceover—you are likely to deduce that the movie will unfold as an attentive but familiar exploration of its complicated, grief-stricken hero. Your assumption will not be entirely wrong; to the last, First Reformed commits completely to its mission of understanding what makes Reverend Toller tick. But Paul Schrader, the iconoclast who wrote and directed this movie and whose name will be forever linked with his script for Taxi Driver, is not interested in making a gentle prestige picture. He goes for the throat as well as the soul. Read More

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The 10 Best Movies of 2017

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists
Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps in "Phantom Thread"

As the world burns, the movies remain unfazed. Or maybe they remain properly fazed; many filmmakers, recognizing the eternal topicality of their art form, have cannily shifted their priorities to speak to today’s troubled times. That cinema can serve as a sounding board for social anxiety is nothing new, but in 2017, the reflective surface that is the movie screen bounced back particularly acute images of our reality, even if it also functioned as a temporary escape from it. Yet as I survey my favorite films of the past year, what strikes me is not consistency but variety. Movies can exist in a thrilling multiplicity of forms, and this year’s best—epic war films, slender family dramas, chilling domestic horror, a whopping three sequels—demonstrated the enduring versatility of the medium. As every day seems to bring with it new horrors, it’s no minor comfort to remember that artists will continue to tell their stories on the big screen, wielding their imagination and technique to create a sort of compass, a celestial roadmap that lights the way to our better selves.

Here are my 10 favorite movies of 2017:

(Honorable mention: Get Out; The Girl with All the Gifts; I, Tonya; It Comes at Night; Logan; Princess Cyd; Star Wars: Episode VIII—The Last Jedi; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; The Villainess.) Read More

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The Killing of a Sacred Deer: Revenge, Best Served at a Simmer, Then a Boil

Jeremy BeckReviews
Nicole Kidman and Colin Farrell in "The Killing of a Sacred Deer"

Weirdness is Yorgos Lanthimos’ calling card. His breakout film, Dogtooth, was about three homeschooled adult children who were so shielded from the outside world, they didn’t understand the concept of names and they perceived housecats as deadly animals; that’s weird. His follow-up, Alps, tracked a troupe of performers who interrogated the critically injured as they died, then impersonated them for their families; that’s also weird. And his best movie, last year’s The Lobster, took place in a dystopian society where singles who failed to find romantic mates were transformed into animals; that’s very weird. So it’s something of a shock that The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lanthimos’ punishing and baffling and routinely astonishing new film, arrives bearing no hallmarks of obvious strangeness.  It’s set in a Cincinnati suburb. It focuses on a happy and healthy nuclear family. Its characters attend casual barbecues and black-tie functions. Nobody kills a cat, and nobody gets turned into a dog. Has Lanthimos, our foremost purveyor of allegorical absurdity, lost his edge?

Hardly. Not that this movie, which is one of the more harrowing features I’ve seen in several years, is a sneaky bait-and-switch. Despite its ostensible banality—its tree-lined streets and sterile hospitals, its family dinners and choir practices—The Killing of a Sacred Deer isn’t trying to lull you into complacency. Lanthimos may be unsparing toward his characters, but he plays fair with his audience. He announces his severity with his strikingly grotesque opening shot: a close-up of a man’s open chest cavity, his heart thump-thumping like a ghastly metronome. The camera gradually pulls back, revealing the hands of a doctor snipping flesh, and as the horns of a Schubert oratorio blare on the soundtrack, Lanthimos makes plain that he’s out for blood. Read More

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Lady Bird: Desperate to Leave the Nest, But Still Learning to Fly

Jeremy BeckReviews
Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf in "Lady Bird"

There is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment late in Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s funny and piercing and achingly humane directorial debut, that perfectly encapsulates the movie’s warmth and lucidity. Christine, the tempestuous teenager at the center of Lady Bird who insists that everyone refer to her by the film’s title, is repainting her bedroom. As a ribbon of white varnish rolls over the formerly pink wallpaper, it obliterates the printed names of two boys that Lady Bird had previously scrawled into the wall. Those names, which once filled Lady Bird with ardent longing, have been erased, the desires they inspired living on only as relics of her own memory. The implications are plain: Time passes. People change. And life—forgive me if you’ve heard this before—goes on.

Movies, however, must end. Yet when the final frame of Lady Bird cut to black, I was not ready to be done with it. I preferred to linger a few moments longer in the finely textured world that Gerwig had conjured with such candor, intelligence, and care. Perhaps I was simply overpowered—by the film’s sincerity, by its humor, by its grace—but I like to think that I was expressing fidelity to one of the clichéd-but-undeniable truths that this movie articulates with such heartbreaking clarity: When you love someone, it is hard to let them go. Read More

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The Florida Project: The Tragic Kingdom

Jeremy BeckReviews
Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Kimberly Prince in "The Florida Project"

It’s a funny thing, how a movie can sneak up on you. Take The Florida Project, Sean Baker’s striking and incrementally devastating new film, which transpires over the course of a languid summer in a low-rent motel complex just outside of Orlando. An attentive humanist with a keen eye for illuminative details, Baker is committed to conveying the sweaty tedium that afflicts his hard-luck characters. In fact, he so convincingly captures the housing development’s collective lethargy—the sweltering heat, the pervasive boredom, the maddening feeling of having nothing to do—that he is almost too successful. For the first half hour that I spent watching these restless children scampering around bland parking lots and darting through paint-peeling hallways, I found myself stifling a yawn. So imagine my surprise when, as the movie barreled into its mesmerizing climax, tears welled in my eyes and my heart pounded in my chest. The Florida Project starts with a snooze. It ends with a sledgehammer.

Not that its beginning is entirely disposable. Even when the movie flirts with narrative monotony, it always offers something visually arresting. Baker’s last film was Tangerine, a day-in-the-life story that was notable not just because it starred two transgender actresses, but because it was shot entirely on an iPhone. The Florida Project, by contrast, is triumphantly widescreen, with a brilliantly vivid palette and elegantly composed frames that recall the formal mastery of Raise the Red Lantern. The opening act essentially functions as a tour of the neighborhood, a candy-colored district dotted with dopily themed motels, indistinguishable strip malls, and rinky-dink food stands. The pastels keep popping, from the cheery orange glow of a grocery to the powder blue of a gift shop to the gentle lavender of the titular housing complex, a bleak and raucous purgatory called The Magic Castle. Read More

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