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Beau Is Afraid: Never Shed a Single Fear

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joaquin Phoenix in Beau Is Afraid

The title of Beau Is Afraid may be a declarative statement, but its contents prompt an earnest question: Can you blame him? The story of a man beset by all manner of physical and existential terrors—angry neighbors, poisonous insects, deranged combat veterans, despondent cheerleaders, mommy issues, and (above all) his own crippling anxiety—Ari Aster’s third feature is a cavalcade of fear and anguish. Such torment is perhaps to be expected from the dude who became an indie-horror sensation with Hereditary; what’s surprising about Beau Is Afraid is that it’s such a rollicking entertainment. Sure, it subjects its hero to an unceasing ordeal of misery and humiliation, but it does so in a way that’s often (if not always) hypnotic, beautiful, and funny.

None of those adjectives would apply to Beau himself; in fact, his personality seems to revolve around a single emotion, and it’s right there in the title. We first meet Beau when he first meets the world: The film’s opening scene (“impression” might be a more accurate word) simulates the process of his birth—an unnerving disharmony of yelps and screams, set against an inky blackness that gradually gives way to blinding light. It’s one of the only times in the movie when Aster wields his formidable talent with visible stress, and it’s a bold introduction to a picture that is at once rigorous and chaotic. Read More

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The Whale: Fat’s All, Folks

Jeremy BeckReviews
Brendan Fraser in The Whale

The first time we see Charlie, the protagonist of Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale, he’s masturbating to pornography on his couch. You might think that such a recreational pursuit would grant him enjoyment, but Aronofsky stages the scene with sober, funereal gloom. The lighting, by the cinematographer Matthew Libatique, is dark and muted; the music, by Rob Simonsen, is swollen and sinister. Charlie’s breathing is ragged, and the intensity of his effort presumably stems from his weight—a gargantuan 600 pounds. His obesity, we instantly realize, has plunged him into deep despair, such that even a ritual of pleasure has become a labor of misery.

Aronofsky is no stranger to depicting anguish, and Charlie shares with the director’s other heroes—the feverish addicts of Requiem for a Dream, the haunted dancer of Black Swan, the panicked housewife of mother!—an essential helplessness. Typically, Aronofsky amplifies this level of torment by wielding his own restless energy and rambunctious filmmaking imagination, but The Whale requires a more restrained approach. Based on a play by Samuel D. Hunter (who also wrote the screenplay), it’s an intimate chamber drama, set in a single location (Charlie’s Idaho home) and featuring minimal action or excitement. Read More

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Getting Personal: The Banshees of Inisherin, Armageddon Time, and Aftersun

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin, Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal in Aftersun, Banks Repeta and Anthony Hopkins in Armageddon Time

Today marks the long-awaited arrival of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, an enormous blockbuster that will make gobs of money, thereby rescuing the box office from its “post-summer slump.” But just because recent releases haven’t been financially successful doesn’t mean they haven’t been interesting. This past weekend featured modest expansions of three small-scale movies that collectively scraped together less than $3 million, which is less than Wakanda Forever will earn in an hour. There’s nothing inherently venerable about independent films, but these three pictures have more in common than modest budgets; they’re also all notably personal in their storytelling, with original screenplays written by their director. If Black Panther is the antidote for Hollywood’s commercial doldrums, these movies provide a valuable reminder that contemporary cinema consists of more than franchises and superheroes.

It doesn’t get much more personal than Armageddon Time, James Gray’s autobiographical depiction of his childhood in Queens in 1980. (In this, Gray gets a jump on Steven Spielberg, whose Arizona-set self-reflection, The Fabelmans, hits select cities today and will go nationwide the day before Thanksgiving.) Gray casts the fresh-faced, soft-featured Banks Repeta (recently in The Devil All the Time and The Black Phone) in the role of young James Gray Paul Graff, an aspiring artist whose idle classroom drawings exhibit greater skill than your typical 12-year-old doodle. Maybe someday he’ll grow up to be a talented filmmaker. Who can say? Read More

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Violent Femmes: The Woman King, Pearl, and God’s Country

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Viola Davis in The Woman King, Mia Goth in Pearl, and Thandiwe Newton in God's Country

Women are fighting back. Well, at least at the movies. Women aren’t a monolith on screen or off, but this past weekend’s new theatrical releases were striking for how they centralized female characters, and how they placed them in varying postures of defiance. At the cinema, the fairer sex is through with unfairness.

The most ambitious of these movies, The Woman King, is also the most conventional. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from a script by Dana Stevens, it’s an old-fashioned historical epic, in the vein of Spartacus or (for a more recent vintage) Gladiator. And when it comes to women fighting, its depiction is quite literal: It tells the story of the Agojie, a troop of female soldiers for the Dahomey kingdom in nineteenth-century West Africa. Led by the fearsome Nanisca (a reliable Viola Davis), they wage war against a rival empire—not out of territorial bloodlust, but out of desire to prevent their citizens from being conscripted into slavery. Read More

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Bodies Bodies Bodies: Youngs Full of Air

Jeremy BeckReviews
The cast of Bodies Bodies Bodies: Amandla Stenberg, Maria Bakalova, Chase Sui Wonders, and Rachel Sennott

The murder mystery gets a modern makeover in Bodies Bodies Bodies, the slick, enjoyable, somewhat obnoxious thriller from Halina Reijn. As the title suggests, corpses slowly stack up over the course of the movie, though the bloodshed is less a sign of inhuman evil than a natural consequence of characters lacking access to wifi. After all, when you can’t check your Instagram account, what else is there to do but kill people? Adapting a witty, smirky screenplay by Sarah DeLappe, Reijn has crafted a confident and provocative picture in which new-age brashness nestles up against cinematic classicism. It’s Agatha Christie on TikTok.

The setting, quite delectably, is a dark and stormy night. Seven attractive young people pile into a mansion in upstate New York, not that far from where Clue took place. This privileged septet has assembled, in advance of the landfall of a hurricane, for an evening of revelry—a bawdy, corrosive cocktail spiked with sex and drugs and jealousy. Before long, one of them is dead, resulting in a hectic, bloody night full of paranoia, finger-pointing, and violence. Whaddya need, a GPS-powered roadmap? Read More

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