Coming-of-Age

Getting Personal: The Banshees of Inisherin, Armageddon Time, and Aftersun

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin, Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal in Aftersun, Banks Repeta and Anthony Hopkins in Armageddon Time

Today marks the long-awaited arrival of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, an enormous blockbuster that will make gobs of money, thereby rescuing the box office from its “post-summer slump.” But just because recent releases haven’t been financially successful doesn’t mean they haven’t been interesting. This past weekend featured modest expansions of three small-scale movies that collectively scraped together less than $3 million, which is less than Wakanda Forever will earn in an hour. There’s nothing inherently venerable about independent films, but these three pictures have more in common than modest budgets; they’re also all notably personal in their storytelling, with original screenplays written by their director. If Black Panther is the antidote for Hollywood’s commercial doldrums, these movies provide a valuable reminder that contemporary cinema consists of more than franchises and superheroes.

It doesn’t get much more personal than Armageddon Time, James Gray’s autobiographical depiction of his childhood in Queens in 1980. (In this, Gray gets a jump on Steven Spielberg, whose Arizona-set self-reflection, The Fabelmans, hits select cities today and will go nationwide the day before Thanksgiving.) Gray casts the fresh-faced, soft-featured Banks Repeta (recently in The Devil All the Time and The Black Phone) in the role of young James Gray Paul Graff, an aspiring artist whose idle classroom drawings exhibit greater skill than your typical 12-year-old doodle. Maybe someday he’ll grow up to be a talented filmmaker. Who can say? Read More

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Lightyear, Turning Red, and the Two Pixars

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Chris Evans as Buzz in Lightyear; Rosalie Chiang as a panda in Turning Red

In 2013, six days after the release of Monsters University, then-Pixar president Ed Catmull said in an interview that the animation juggernaut was newly committed to making an original picture every year, and to correspondingly limit its sequels to biennial productions. The announcement came in the wake of a widely perceived (if relative) creative drought for the studio, whose prior two movies, the misbegotten Cars 2 and the pleasant but familiar Brave, hadn’t lived up to the legacy of greatness established during its inaugural 15-year run—a run that concluded, ironically, with a sequel (the stupendous Toy Story 3). Mathematically speaking, Pixar didn’t quite make good on its promise—of the next 10 films it released, four were sequels—but the wunderkinds of computer-drawn fantasy have for the most part threaded a delicate needle over the past decade, simultaneously making risky original movies and cranking out commercially safe follow-ups.

This “original vs. sequel” framing perpetuates a false dichotomy—the idea that original films are inherently works of boisterous ingenuity, whereas sequels are lazy and mercenary. (For this writer’s money, the existential crises conjured in Toy Story 4 are far more thought-provoking than the recognizable road-trip hijinks of Onward.) Still, in an era where Pixar’s parent company Disney continues to gobble up market share thanks to its ownership of mighty franchises like Star Wars and the Marvel Cinematic Universe—and where the apparent antidote to Mouse-House supremacy involves a competitor sequelizing a hit from 1986—it’s understandable for critics to prize the production of original screenplays as an independent good. Given that, it’s fascinating to examine Pixar’s two releases in 2022: one a science-fiction adventure that spins off from beloved intellectual property, the other a tender coming-of-age story whose only tie to the Pixar brand is its embrace of innovative storytelling. Read More

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The Survivor, Hatching, and Movies Resisting Genre

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Ben Foster in The Survivor; Siiri Solalinna in Hatching

Genre is a limiting concept. Movies are too complicated, too messy, to be reduced to single-word classifications. It’s a comedy. What if it’s scary? It’s a drama. What if it’s funny? It’s a Western. What if it doesn’t have any guns? These reductive descriptors attempt to package complex pieces of art into tidy little boxes, deceiving viewers into believing that movies can only be one thing, rather than many things at once.

Still, the conceptual construction of genre makes sense, and not just as a matter of commercial advertising. It also functions as a conversational shorthand, a convenient way of identifying a film’s scale and tone. (This website, I should note, routinely affixes genre tags to its reviews, the better to group like-minded pictures together.) Describing a movie as a comedy or a thriller conveys an established set of expectations—suggesting that you’re likely to laugh, shudder, or squirm—which it’s then naturally judged against. But what happens when movies actively resist the genre territory that they appear to be occupying? I’m not talking about gearshift features, like Something Wild or Parasite, which intentionally fake out viewers by swerving from one mode of storytelling to another. I’m talking about movies that seem uncomfortable within their own skin, and that struggle to satisfy those preconceived expectations because their interests appear to lie elsewhere. Read More

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Licorice Pizza: Age Is Just a Wonder

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza

The heroes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza are always running, though they never seem to get anywhere. Their sprinting is heedless—the kind of panicked, exuberant racing that epitomizes the heightened quality of youth, when every crisis is life or death and every experience provokes either jubilation or disconsolation. They run and they run—across vacant golf courses and through crowded malls and down sunbaked streets—but they always end up back where they started, confused and angry and lost. They’re essentially attached to opposite ends of the same spoke, moving together in a constant circle, yet never coming any closer to their quixotic destination: each other.

This would seem to describe a doomed romance, a tragic love story that follows the trajectory of a Wong Kar-wai picture. Such a suspicion is only reinforced by the arc of Anderson’s filmography. He may be a more variable and omnivorous director than, say, his namesake Wes, but his movies tend to thrive on tension and conflict; the ruthless oil baron of There Will Be Blood, the fanatical cult leader of The Master, and the imperious fashion designer of Phantom Thread are all defined by their indomitable will, and his films derive their energy from the way their protagonists attempt to impose that will on a society that shackles and stifles them. So perhaps the happiest surprise of Licorice Pizza is how loose it is. Rather than straining to flatten us with grandiosity, Anderson has applied his considerable craft to a story that is warm, earnest, and relaxed. This is far from the weightiest effort of his career, but it may well be the sweetest. (The only real competition in that regard comes from the euphoric Punch-Drunk Love.) Read More

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Belfast: The Troubles of Growing Up, Like and Unlike Everyone Else

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Jude Hill, and Judi Dench in Belfast

The opening scene of Belfast, the new film from Kenneth Branagh, announces the movie as both a narrow slice-of-life comedy and a more ambitious historical drama. Following some trivial narration from Judi Dench, the wan colors shift into crisp black-and-white, and the camera glides along a street in Northern Ireland, revealing a homey, intimate neighborhood. (A title card informs us that the date is August 1969.) The mood is relaxed and cheerful; children are kicking a ball around, adults are yammering idly, and everyone seems to know everybody’s name. Yet as nine-year-old Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill) traverses the road and spars good-naturedly with some shopkeepers, this peaceful idyll is shattered by the sudden arrival of armed hooligans. As they snarl threats and smash windows, the camera pivots around Buddy, spinning faster and faster, underlining his vulnerability and panic. What was once bliss has been replaced by terror.

Roughly based on Branagh’s own childhood, Belfast is a noble, enjoyable, not entirely successful attempt to document both sides of this formative coin. It seeks to frame the traditional hallmarks of the coming-of-age picture—the fledgling romances, the quixotically striving parents, the classroom grievances, the petty illegalities—against the backdrop of social unrest and religious conflict. That it struggles to fuse these disparate halves into a cohesive whole is due less to tonal inconsistency than cinematic execution, or maybe priorities. Over the course of a long and uneven career, Branagh has proved himself capable of working on a large scale—I remain a fan of his straitlaced Hamlet, while the operatic thriller Dead Again is arguably his best work—but here, whether because of lack of interest or inadequate filmmaking chops, he fails to invest the movie’s ostensibly sweeping commentary with much energy or clarity. He’s more committed to evoking the particular pleasures and predicaments of his youth with loving detail and misty-eyed nostalgia. Read More

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