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The Farewell: Honesty Is the West’s Policy

Jeremy BeckReviews
Awkwafina and others in Lulu Wang's "The Farewell"

The Farewell might have been a minor movie, if it didn’t plainly house such major talents. With its gentle tone and delicate sense of scale, it’s so intimate, it could have verged on flimsy. But writer-director Lulu Wang, making her second feature, invests the melancholy story with grace notes of lyricism that give it some stylistic heft. She’s also found the perfect star in Awkwafina, the rapper and comedienne who here makes a seamless transition to more somber material. It’s a heavy story told with a beautifully light touch.

The movie opens with a title card that reads “based on an actual lie”, establishing both its autobiographical bona fides—Awkwafina’s Billi is in many ways a stand-in for Wang—and its cheeky wit. But the falsehood at its center does more than just drive the slender plot; it becomes the foundation on which Wang builds the film’s intriguing explorations of culture, geography, and identity. And The Farewell, despite its narrow scope and quiet bearing, ends up operating on multiple levels. It’s a human melodrama that doubles as an empathetic treatise on humanity. Read More

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Midsommar: A Vacation to Paradise, But Darkness Looms

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jack Reynor and Florence Pugh in Ari Aster's "Midsommar"

Toxic relationships have rarely faced as brutal a reckoning as the one visited upon the central couple in Midsommar, the breakup film to end all breakup films. Consistently ravishing, frequently mesmerizing, and occasionally exasperating, this horror whatsit from Ari Aster fixes on a festering union, the pus that oozes from its wounds slowly morphing into nightmare fuel. With Hereditary, Aster transformed a family’s hellish history into a gateway to literal Hell. Now with Midsommar, he’s turned his precise, pitiless eye to a doomed romance, exposing every crack in its fetid underpinning. Some directors might seize on the concept of attractive people taking a European idyll as the chance to tell a beautiful love story. This is a death story.

Still a beautiful one, though. Most of Midsommar takes place in Sweden (shooting was held in Hungary), in a bucolic paradise whose natural loveliness makes it the perfect camouflage for the inevitable suffering to come. It’s a land of warm, inviting colors: rippling green grass, snowy white gowns, a cheery yellow temple whose simple architecture seems to have been plucked from a book of fairy tales. There are slender trees with spangled leaves, and vast meadows full of swaying flowers. It’s heaven on earth, a rejuvenating escape from the persistent recognition that hell is other people. Read More

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High Life: Entering the Void, High-Strung and Horny

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson in Claire Denis's "High Life".

The spaceship has a garden. Somewhere, amid the instrument panels and the spartan bunks and the anti-gravity suits, there is a verdant room full of plants, moss, and dirt. It’s as if the astronauts, saddened by the prospect of leaving Earth behind, insisted on bringing a bit of earth along with them.

This contrast—between the personal and the fantastical, between presence and absence, between flowering life and merciless death—is emblematic of High Life, Claire Denis’ strange, frustrating, beguiling new film. Part sci-fi thriller, part philosophical meditation, it is always challenging, often boring, and occasionally mesmerizing. Read More

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Climax: Trip Like Nobody’s Watching

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Gaspar Noé's "Climax".

Some movies climb the walls, but in Climax, the walls blur into the ceiling and the floor. In this ambitious and enervating whatsit from the French-Argentine provocateur Gaspar Noé, the camera floats and swirls and glides, taking delirious flight through the air as bodies writhe before it in blissed-out ecstasy and unhinged agony. At one point, it becomes unclear whether the characters are vertical or horizontal, and they’re surely tripping too hard to tell the difference. It’s a dazzling visual achievement, which makes it all the more frustrating that Climax is, well, a Gaspar Noé film, which means that its technical audacity is marshaled in the service of cardboard characters, repugnant themes, and a story that is by turns skeletal and grotesque. Few directors have labored so much, and with such evident skill, to produce art that means so little.

Following the relentless banality of Love, a 135-minute borefest whose notion of boldness was to slather a dozen explicit sex scenes on top of its monotonous chronicle of a doomed relationship, Climax finds Noé returning to the lurid violence and operatic camerawork of his prior two features, Irreversible and Enter the Void. That’s for the best; despite its surfeit of stimulated genitals and spurting fluids, Love found Noé out of his element, straining to tell a character-driven story with a minimum of visual embellishment. (Well, relative minimum; as with Enter the Void, Love featured a POV shot of a penis ejaculating inside a vagina.) He’s far more comfortable trafficking in ornate brutality, which he likes to turn arty with pounding music and sweeping long takes. Working again with his regular cinematographer, Benoît Debie, Noé takes the ostensibly flat setting of Climax—an abandoned high school in France—and, with unflinching verve, transforms it into a hellish landscape of quaking terror, the Parisian equivalent of the Overlook Hotel. Read More

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The 10 Best Movies of 2018

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists
Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible—Fallout"

There may not have been a ton of great movies released in 2018, but 2018 was still a great year for movies. It was one of the most fertile cinematic years that I can remember, full of challenging, fascinating films that were far from perfect but were resolutely good and—more important—interesting. Even as the industry continues to undergo seismic change, the movies themselves remain a vibrant cultural center, a thriving bazaar where viewers can converse, promote, argue, and discover.

It was also a year full of exciting and diverse voices, varied not only in terms of race and gender, but also with respect to age, style, and even mode of distribution. Black directors made themselves heard, and loudly, from the stirring adventure of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther to the fiery agitprop of Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman to the scalding satire of Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You to the youthful anger of George Tillman Jr.’s The Hate U Give to the piercing melancholy of Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk. Women, too, continued to assert themselves as equals in a marketplace that has treated them as inferiors for far too long; Kay Cannon’s Blockers made us laugh, Chloé Zhao’s The Rider made us cry, and Marielle Heller’s Can You Ever Forgive Me? made us do both, while Karyn Kusama’s Destroyer and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here made us tremble in fear and awe. Read More

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