A24

Priscilla: Can’t Help Bawling in Love

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cailee Spaeny in Priscilla

It takes roughly 15 minutes before Priscilla announces itself as a Sofia Coppola movie. Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny), a meek 14-year-old American girl living on an army base in Germany, has just shared her first kiss with Elvis Presley (Euphoria’s Jacob Elordi), possibly the most popular musical artist on the planet. As she glides down her school hallway—oblivious to her surroundings, deep in the swoon of adolescent love—“Crimson and Clover” flares to life on the soundtrack. The year is 1959, nearly a decade before Tommy James yearned for a girl he hardly knew to come walking over, but Coppola has never let anachronisms get in the way of emotions. Priscilla is hopelessly smitten, and Priscilla represents Coppola’s attempt to capture both the purity of her rapture and the agony of its inevitable deflation.

Strangely, this blissful sequence is something of an outlier—a fleeting moment of canny cinematic imagination in a picture that is broadly functional and orthodox. It’s weird, because conceptually speaking, Priscilla’s pairing of artist and subject seems ideal. Even setting aside her filial connections to Hollywood royalty, Coppola has long been fascinated by celebrity, having considered it through the various lenses of middle-aged ennui (Lost in Translation), historical opulence (Marie Antoinette), and vicarious obsession (The Bling Ring). Yet where those movies all hummed with vivacious technique and energetic style, Priscilla is oddly conventional. Apart from some sharp music cues and a few arresting images (such as a woman walking down a corridor bathed in red light), it feels like anyone could have made it. Read More

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Talk to Me: Balk to the Hand

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophie Wilde in Talk to Me

Cruising down a darkened roadway while belting out the lyrics to a Sia song, the teenaged Mia (Sophie Wilde) suddenly slams on the brakes to avoid running over a wounded kangaroo, which is lying helpless in the middle of the street. Her young companion, an eager 13-year-old boy named Riley (Joe Bird), urges her to put the poor animal out of its misery. Mia initially resolves to oblige, but—whether due to a surfeit of compassion or a lack of determination—she ultimately chooses to leave the pitiful creature be. This scene, which is never explicitly referenced again, has absolutely no figurative bearing on anything that comes after.

I’m kidding, of course. But one of the intriguing things about Talk to Me, the creepy and jagged new horror picture from Danny and Michael Philippou, is how it operates as a metaphorical Rorschach test. Is it a critique of the restlessness of the TikTok generation? A commentary on the fraying bonds of the modern nuclear family? A sobering portrait of the perils of drug addiction? Or is it just a really scary movie in which a few hapless kids make the mistake of messing with some very angry demons? Read More

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Past Lives: No Sublime Like the Present

Jeremy BeckReviews
Teo Yoo and Greta Lee in Past Lives

Late at night in a Manhattan bar, we see three people: an Asian woman seated in between two men (one white, the other Asian). They’re chatting amiably, but we can’t hear what they’re saying; instead, we listen to the observations of an unseen couple who speculate about the triad’s possible relationships. Perhaps two of them are married and the other man is her brother, they suggest, or maybe the white guy is an American tour guide. As they conjecture, the woman turns her head and looks directly into the camera, her eyes both inviting and comprehending of our attentions, as though she’s slyly caught us in the act.

This is the opening scene of Past Lives, the debut feature of writer-director Celine Song, and it immediately signals the film’s rare, delicate intimacy. When you buy a ticket for Past Lives, you end up not so much watching a movie as participating in an act of eavesdropping. Sure, you’re seeing actors pantomime a fictional story of love and loss, but you are also receiving an unauthorized glimpse into the inner worlds of two people—a secret chance to understand their desires and bear witness to their heartbreak. Read More

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Quick Hits: You Hurt My Feelings; The Starling Girl

Jeremy BeckReviews
Eliza Scanlen in The Starling Girl; Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Your Hurt My Feelings

The characters in a Nicole Holofcener picture always have problems, but they tend to be cute problems—like how Catherine Keener can’t decide how to donate her wealth in Please Give, or how James Gandolfini is incapable of whispering in Enough Said. This doesn’t make their emotional confusion or existential despair any less real; it’s just that their floundering is undergirded by a bedrock of professional success and academic sophistication. So what’s interesting about You Hurt My Feelings, Holofcener’s latest look at privileged people, is that while this sense of accomplishment remains firmly in place, it’s also questionably earned. The heroes of this movie all live in nice Manhattan homes and hold impressive jobs, yet they don’t seem to actually be good at anything.

Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is a published author who teaches a creative writing course, but her memoir didn’t sell and she’s yet to land a second book deal; her students are shocked to learn that she’s a real writer. Her husband, Don (Tobias Menzies), is a therapist who’s been practicing for decades, yet his patients are constantly complaining that he never actually helps them. (Whenever he’s with a client, he hangs a shabby “In Session” sign on his door.) Their son, Eliot (Owen Teague), works at a weed dispensary and is perpetually drafting a play that’s never close to being finished. Beth’s sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), is an interior decorator who seems to only have one client—a woman who never approves of her banal fixture suggestions. Sarah’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), is a struggling actor who’s yet to receive his big break. Read More

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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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