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Eighth Grade: Welcome to Hell. Don’t Forget Your Zit Cream.

Jeremy BeckReviews
Elsie Fisher in the piercing coming-of-age film "Eighth Grade"

Kayla, the heroine of the skin-crawling dramedy Eighth Grade, is a perfectly normal 14-year-old girl, which is another way of saying that her life is a complete disaster. She is anxious, awkward, and prone to extremities of emotion, mood swinging violently from euphoria to despair. As you watch this graceful and lovely movie, the directorial debut of the comedian Bo Burnham, you will feel compelled to envelop Kayla with affection, to promise her that everything will be OK. Of course, if you actually did that, she would likely shrink away from you and squeal in embarrassment. The only people more annoying than the kids who make Kayla miserable are the adults who try to make her feel better.

In a certain sense, Eighth Grade is a horror movie, given how it evokes memories of adolescence with ruthless clarity; you cannot experience Kayla’s tribulations without recalling the heightened agonies of your own youth. Yet one of Burnham’s smart storytelling choices is to avoid ladling on the trauma too heavily. This film is not an after-school special about bullying or self-esteem, nor is it a nauseating tale of social and sexual misadventure in the vein of Welcome to the Dollhouse. It is instead a measured, compassionate look at one teenager’s particular struggles as she suffers through one final week of middle school. Read More

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Hereditary: Pall in the Family

Jeremy BeckReviews
Toni Collette is terrorized and terrifying in "Hereditary"

She just had to be a miniaturist. Hereditary, the impressive and excessive and frequently electrifying debut feature from Ari Aster, would have been scary enough if its besieged heroine had worked as a lawyer or a teacher or a writer. But no, the recently orphaned Annie (Toni Collette) is a conceptual artist who specializes in designing tiny panoramas, and there’s something extra-creepy about the way she uses paint and glue to manufacture ornately detailed dollhouses. Maybe it’s the notion of a powerful creator exercising absolute dominion over her realm, not unlike a movie director domineering his helpless audience. It seems more than just a fancy flourish that Hereditary opens in an abandoned attic, the camera slowly rotating from a sunlit window to the shadowy interior, then gradually pushing in on one such minuscule dollhouse bedroom; one invisible special effect later, and that facsimile has become the film’s actual environment, with a man striding through the door to wake his son. It soon becomes clear that this movie, with its countless shrieks and shocks, is itself an artfully assembled prison. You cannot escape from it; you can only hold on for dear life, as Aster buffets you where he may.

That may not sound like your idea of a good time, but for cineastes, Hereditary is essential viewing purely as a matter of formal technique. The horror genre is so durable in part because of its mutability—any political point or allegorical tribute achieves more force when appearing in the guise of zombies or ghosts—but it also draws talented craftsmen with an innate command of cinematic grammar. And while Hereditary is not without its flaws—most notably a third-act tilt into absurdity—Aster’s abilities cannot be in dispute. He wields the camera with elegant precision rather than brute force, favoring silky and captivating long takes as opposed to vulgar jump cuts. His directing is always controlled, even when his writing is utterly bonkers. Read More

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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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