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Let’s Get Experimental: Her Private Hell and Motor City

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophie Thatcher in Her Private Hell; Alan Ritchson in Motor City

Fifteen years ago, Nicolas Winding Refn improbably delighted audiences with Drive, a glittering, electronica-tinged jewel of a thriller about a wheelman mired in gangland savagery. Since then, the Danish provocateur has made three features, two TV shows, a handful of shorts, and few new fans. I haven’t seen all of Refn’s post-Drive output, but what I have watched—the films Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, plus the Netflix miniseries Copenhagen Cowboy—suggests the work of a postmodern imp concocting some sort of experiment in anti-entertainment. With perverse pleasure, Refn assembles the raw materials of putatively interesting pictures—vivid colors, gorgeous actors, shocking violence—and then scrambles them into final products that are dreary and charmless. He seems to fancy himself the cinematic prince of darkness, but his movies are less devilish than simply dull.

Her Private Hell, Refn’s latest piece of feature-length trolling, isn’t without its surface diversions. As befits the studio that distributed it, it supplies a good deal of neon—bright bursts of pink and blue slashing through its literal and metaphoric fog. The production design is, if not exactly legible, at least striking, with jagged plinths and infinite spires. The costumes are eye-catching, in particular a seductive red leather coat that seems intended to inspire fetishism. The movie might be appealing if it weren’t so insufferable. Read More

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The Odyssey review: The Call Is Coming from Inside the Horse

Jeremy BeckReviews
Matt Damon in The Odyssey

Nobody else could have done this. I’m not suggesting that no other contemporary filmmaker could have adapted The Odyssey, which seems to get remade in some fashion every few years, officially or otherwise. But only Christopher Nolan possesses the requisite combination of vision and hubris to remold Homer’s classic poem into a movie so tailored to his thematic, aesthetic, and moral concerns. For a quarter-century, Nolan has built a distinctive brand of scrambled timelines, breathtaking innovation, and cornball romanticism; he’s cultivated his own mythology. Now he has the chutzpah to bring his singular artistry to bear on the granddaddy of all myths.

The results of his herculean labor (sorry) are both expected and surprising. In terms of scale, The Odyssey is a monumental achievement—a huge, exhilarating work of relentless energy and unimpeachable technique. Such an accomplishment shouldn’t be taken for granted, but it was virtually axiomatic the instant the projected was announced. What proves more striking is the movie’s gritty humanity. It’s an epic yarn of pillaging and seafaring, of gods and monsters, but its grandeur is engraved with punchy writing and credible emotions. Read More

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Disclosure Day review: The Day the Earth Stood Thrilled

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emily Blunt in Disclosure Day

The possibility of intelligent life on other planets has long preoccupied countless dreamers, philosophers, and filmmakers—few more famous than Steven Spielberg. The director’s career is as versatile as it is vast, but every so often he has returned, like a pilot locked in an orbital loop, to the topic of extraterrestrials. Disclosure Day, his deeply enjoyable and sneakily provocative new movie, represents both another iteration of this process and a thoughtful update of it. It is plainly a work of science-fiction, featuring cosmic discoveries, dastardly villains, and earth-shaking developments. But it is also an urgent and thorny tract that fixates, quite profoundly, on the nature of the human race. For all its stargazing, it’s less about aliens than people.

Not that anyone would confuse Disclosure Day for a sterile think-piece. It is instead, in nuts and bolts, a chase picture. Daniel (Josh O’Connor), a programmer at a paramilitary security firm called Wardex, has smuggled a trove of classified materials out of the company’s Virginia archives, along with a handheld MacGuffin-y device that looks like a cross between the cryptex from The Da Vinci Code and the neuralyzer from Men in Black. Catching him if he can is Wardex’s CEO, Scanlon (Colin Firth), who acquires some leverage by kidnapping Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane (Eve Hewson, who worked with Spielberg in Bridge of Spies). In the movie’s tense opening sequence, Scanlon and his no-nonsense underlings hold the lovers at gunpoint, only for Daniel to threaten to activate the device and use its apparent danger to pull off a daring escape, at which point the hunt is on. Read More

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Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu review: A Blaster and an Apprentice

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from The Mandalorian and Grogu, featuring both title characters

A long time ago, in a galaxy not far away, there was a swashbuckling sci-fi/Western TV series whose snappy writing and charismatic actors eventually inspired a bona fide big-screen adventure. But enough about Firefly. Here we have The Mandalorian and Grogu, the latest product in the Disney empire’s content-generation machine. It’s been seven years since the last Star Wars movie (the unduly maligned Rise of Skywalker), during which time the Mouse House has glutted your streaming queue with all manner of Sithian spin-offs. These offshoots varied in quality—Andor was quite good, The Book of Boba Fett was pretty bad, I forget everything that happened in Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka—but they all fulfilled their mission of sating fans’ appetites for intergalactic mayhem and Force-laden profundity. The Mandalorian was the first of these, and also the most successful according to certain commercial metrics, so it’s been plucked from the outer rim of television and holo-projected into the multiplex, where Disney hopes that the universe’s deadliest bounty hunter and his loveable little green friend will restore the franchise to its prior cinematic glory.

It’s a dubious bet. But when I tell you that The Mandalorian and Grogu is my least favorite Star Wars film to date, it’s both an expression of my disappointment and an acknowledgement of my advancing age. This world that once filled me with excitement and joy—the blue-tinted rushes through hyperspace, the exotic lightsaber duels, the premonitions that someone has a bad feeling about this—now seems chilly and mercenary. Did I grow up, or did the movies bog down? Read More

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Avatar: Fire and Ash review: In the Flame of the Father

Jeremy BeckReviews
Zoe Saldaña and Sam Worthington in Avatar: Fire and Ash

Pandora represents the promise of the new. In narrative terms, the Avatar pictures aren’t revolutionary; they refract age-old tales—about conquest and heroism, exploration and degradation, love and loss—through their own giddy popular mythology. But they are nonetheless designed to astonish viewers with their visual bravado and innovative grammar. In Avatar and its sequel, The Way of Water, James Cameron showed us things we’ve never seen before: blue warriors catapulting through the air and landing on orange winged beasts; reef-dwellers diving into the ocean and communing with its exotic flora and fauna; luminescent landscapes glittering with color and danger. The challenge for the third installment, Fire and Ash, is not just to perpetuate Pandora’s extant wonders, but to conceive of even more dazzling forms of cinematic novelty.

Judged against that lofty standard, Fire and Ash falls a bit short. It is, to be clear, a hugely impressive movie: vibrant and gorgeous, with engaging characters and provocative ideas. But it is also something of a recycling, repurposing its predecessors’ brilliant technique without equaling their sense of true discovery. It’s expectedly amazing. Read More

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