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The Northman: It Takes a Pillage to Faze a Child

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alexander Skarsgård in The Northman

Awesome in multiple senses of the word, Robert Eggers’ The Northman is a swaggering, delirious monument to cinematic excess. It’s difficult to select a single scene that best encapsulates its bravura decadence—the moonlit swordfight against a skeleton? the hallucinogen-aided bonding session where father and son bark and howl like feral dogs? the fiery duel at the literal gates of Hell?—but I’m partial to the early sequence where a Viking warrior fells a helpless adversary with his axe and then, having already vanquished his hapless foe, bends down and sinks his teeth into the dying man’s neck.

This unchecked, animalistic ferocity is part of what animates The Northman, which is noteworthy for its sheer frenzy alone; on the surface, it seems to have been constructed purely to inspire giddy instant reactions along the lines of, “omg u guyz this movie FUCKS.” (A quick Twitter search confirms its success in this regard.) Yet look past the blood-soaked savagery on display, and you will discover that there is something more sophisticated at play here. I don’t mean to minimize the berserk (and berserker?) quality of the film’s content, or to imply that its straightforward themes of vengeance and obsession stretch beyond the obvious. What I mean is that, for all its gonzo energy, as a piece of aesthetic craftsmanship, The Northman is absolutely beautiful. Read More

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On Ambulance, and the Demented Personality of Michael Bay

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Jake Gyllenhaal in Ambulance

One of the qualities that I prize most in filmmaking is personality. It’s a quality that’s hard to find these days, at least at the multiplex. The exponentially increasing market share of the Walt Disney Company has crowded out riskier, more adventurous big-budget fare, forcing viewers who crave originality and audacity in their entertainment to flee to the art house or the internet. (Fortunately, there are still plenty of good original pictures being made.) So when a loud, brash action thriller arrives—a would-be blockbuster with no ties to any existing franchise, spandexed hero, or comic book—its mere existence is arguably cause for celebration; when its aesthetic bears the unmistakable stamp of its creator, that sense of collective joy should feel even more profound. And yet: What if the artistic personality that’s being so exuberantly flaunted is—for lack of a more precise critical term—bad?

I’m speaking of Ambulance, and more specifically of its director, Michael Bay. His name is perhaps not the first that leaps to mind when you hear the loaded word “auteur,” yet it’s impossible to deny that Bay has spent his lengthy career polishing and refining his own distinctive brand. It even has its own term: Bayhem. His movies represent less a viewing experience than a visual and sonic assault—a vigorous, over-caffeinated cocktail of metallic carnage, swaggering machismo, and militaristic fetishism. They don’t feature human characters so much as avatars of teenage-boy cool; his heroes are cigar-smoking quipsters who just want to have fun, but they’re also physically gifted warriors whose willingness to disregard societal rules in service of the mission purports to lend them a certain moral integrity. The putative story that unfolds around these muscle-bound he-men is merely a mechanism, a narrative device that assists in achieving the films’ true purpose: blowing shit up real good. Read More

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Everything Everywhere All at Once: In the Multiverse of Radness

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Among the innumerable genres represented in Everything Everywhere All at Once—the universe-hopping, tone-mutating, brain-scrambling whatsit from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as Daniels)—is the martial-arts instruction picture. Like Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, its protagonist receives tutelage from a wiser, more experienced combat veteran. But here, rather than preaching about the virtues of discipline or the importance of practice, the seasoned mentor encourages our hero to weaponize absurdity. “The less sense it makes,” he insists, “the better.”

This is a matter of opinion, at least when it comes to movies. At the cinema, the twin values of logic and imagination are often in tension with one another, resulting in an artistic seesaw in which adding weight to one sacrifices the other. The brilliance of Everything Everywhere All at Once isn’t that it strikes the perfect balance between these qualities but that it loads up so heavily on one as to render the other irrelevant. Here is a work of bold, boisterous originality, teeming with rich ideas and vivid images and the quixotic thrill of genuine inspiration. It isn’t better because it doesn’t make sense. It’s better because it redefines the concept of making sense entirely. Read More

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At the Movies in 2022, Concept Is King

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Ana de Armas in Deep Water, Sandra Bullock in The Lost City, Daisy Edgar-Jones in Fresh, Mark Rylance in The Outfit, Mia Goth in X

When it comes to modern movies, there are now two Americas. The first is a land of franchise dominance and corporate hegemony, where superhero flicks and sequels rule the multiplex. Even for fans of costumed entertainment—and I generally count myself among their number—surveying the box-office landscape can yield a dispiriting and homogenous view. The 10 highest-grossing films of 2019 were all based on existing IP, with seven hailing from the Walt Disney Company and an eighth (Spider-Man: Far from Home) that’s fully enmeshed within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, i.e., the Mouse House’s flagship franchise; zoom out to the top 15, and only two pictures (Us and Knives Out) were truly original creations. The COVID-19 pandemic aggressively accelerated this trend, and while cautious audiences may finally be returning to theaters, they only really pack the place for familiar properties. The mushrooming sprawl of these four-quadrant productions—competently made, ruthlessly merchandised, exceedingly familiar, rigorously safe—has inspired many industry experts to lament the death of cinema.

Maybe they’re right. After all, as the collective conception of a box-office hit perpetually narrows in scope and variety, it’s difficult to imagine studios routinely green-lighting risky original projects. And yet! I am once again compelled to repel these dire predictions, because there lurks beneath this marketplace of non-ideas a second America—one where original movies keep getting made, and in different shapes, sizes, and styles. Last month alone saw the release of at least five new films that are noteworthy for their strangeness, their pluck, their originality. Forget recycled superhero stories; these are movies with genuine concepts. Read More

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The Batman: A Dark Blight Rises

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson and Jeffrey Wright in The Batman

Who’s the big bad of The Batman? Modern superhero movies can scarcely subsist on just one antagonist, and this latest take on Gotham City’s caped crusader—directed with spirit and smarts by Matt Reeves, from a script he wrote with Peter Craig—piles on the villains the way his makeup artists slather prosthetics onto Colin Farrell’s face. Farrell, as it happens, plays the Penguin, but while his mannerisms seem to echo Robert de Niro’s work as Al Capone in The Untouchables, he’s hardly the film’s apex predator, instead operating as a mid-level mobster with women to leer at and masters to serve. One of those masters is Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), a slippery mafia don who’s too shallow and profit-oriented to fill the role of comic-book megalomaniac. It surely can’t be Selina Kyle (Zoë Kravitz), a waitress at Penguin’s sleazy nightclub who possesses several feline pets, some calf-high boots, and a knack for cracking safes; she may be Catwoman, but she’s not a madman. The most logical candidate is the Riddler, portrayed here by Paul Dano as a disturbed and disturbing serial killer who knows how to wield blunt instruments and a grudge. He’s a bad dude, no question, but The Batman has the nerve to suggest that his dastardly schemes are merely symptomatic—the inevitable consequence of a more pernicious evil. What if, the movie asks, the real villain is you?

Well, not you you; if you’re reading film criticism online, you’re surely more cultured than the particular brand of troglodytic malcontent that this movie places in its surprisingly topical crosshairs. The Batman posits, with unnerving fluency, that some of the creeps who swarm your social-media mentions are more inclined to blow up a theater than attend one. Remember the gun-toting monster who murdered 12 people and injured 70 others at a midnight showing of 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises? This time around, he might as well be a character. Read More

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