Drama

Eileen: That Pretty Red Mess

Jeremy BeckReviews
Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway in Eileen

Smoke gets in more than just your eyes in Eileen; it fills up your lungs and seeps into your pores. Directed by William Oldroyd from a script by Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh (adapting the latter’s novel), this sly and engrossing psychological thriller wields fog like a haunted-house barker, cloaking its characters and vehicles in clouds of swirling vapor. Seductive imagery aside, the omnipresent haze is a fitting device for a movie that obscures its intentions, priming you for a queasy study of obsession before pivoting into a nightmare of a different sort.

This isn’t to imply that Eileen, in its bold strokes, is especially novel or even surprising. Its titular heroine, played with supple intensity by Thomasin McKenzie, is a familiar type: a loner whose existence is so mundane, she can scarcely give voice to her repressed desires. Eileen works at a juvenile detention center in Nowheresville, Massachusetts, where she mindlessly frisks female visitors and shuffles inmates through corridors. On her evening commute, she stops by the liquor store; when she arrives home at her ramshackle house, she places the fresh bottles at the feet of her drunken father (Shea Whigham), collecting the day’s empties without comment. She’s less a wallflower than a smear of taupe. Read More

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May December: It’s a Generational Fling

Jeremy BeckReviews
Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in May December

When we first meet Gracie and Joe, the married couple who constitute two-thirds of the unstable triangle that makes up Todd Haynes’ May December, they seem to be living an enviable fantasy of domestic bliss. Hosting that most idyllic of pastimes, the backyard barbecue, they share a passing kiss before busying themselves with their duties; Joe (Charles Melton) gets to work on the grill, while Gracie (Julianne Moore) bustles in the kitchen. The weather is sunny, the guests are smiling, and the mood is relaxed. But then Gracie opens the refrigerator door, and the music swells ominously as she makes a cataclysmic discovery: “We don’t have enough hot dogs.”

This is a very funny scene, even as it telegraphs Haynes’ bold, borderline-perverse intentions. With this movie, he is taking the meager lives of three pitiful people and imbuing them with the sweep of classic melodrama. Yet he is also doing the opposite: tackling subject matter that is fundamentally vulgar and investing it with extraordinary grace and sensitivity. May December traffics in illicit affairs and tawdry desires, which it heightens with extravagant skill and unapologetic grandeur. But where its bones are theatrical, its heart is achingly sincere. Read More

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Saltburn: Brother, Can You Spare a Crime?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Barry Keoghan and Archie Madekwe in Saltburn

“Eat the rich” is generally meant as a metaphor, but in Saltburn, the new psychodrama from Emerald Fennell, it verges on becoming literal. Midway through the movie, during one of the many pivot points in its kinked narrative, a young man coos that he intends to devour his female quarry before burying his face between her legs. Shortly thereafter, we see him sinking into a bathtub, blood dripping down his chin, like a vampire crawling into his coffin after a fresh kill.

This is among the movie’s plentiful striking images that are designed to induce a gasp of horror or a shudder of pleasure. Saltburn’s plot may traffic in ghastly occurrences—deception, suicide, murder, undercooked eggs—but it primarily operates as a work of provocation. If you find yourself clucking your tongue at its tactlessness or wincing at its indecency, you are simply playing your part as the appalled observer. To paraphrase a popular line that tends to circulate on social media, the obscenity is the point. Read More

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Anatomy of a Fall: Death Landing

Jeremy BeckReviews
Swann Arlaud and Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall

The first frame of Anatomy of a Fall, even before the traditional procession of vanity cards, is the text of a URL: didshedoit.com. The ensuing movie, a tense and absorbing courtroom drama directed by Justine Triet, doesn’t so much investigate the answer to that question as emphasize its unknowability. Like Rashomon before so, it posits that the quest for truth is a fool’s errand, and that past events are refracted through individual prisms of memory and perspective. Initially tasked with finding guilt or innocence, it instead grapples with the notion that those terms are illusory.

The “she” of that URL is Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller), and the “it” is the death of her husband, Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis). That both characters share a first name with the actor playing them is just one sign that Triet is attempting to collapse fact and fiction, though her screenplay, which she wrote with Arthur Harari, isn’t rooted in any specific true-crime episode. It instead methodically builds itself out from the film’s opening scene, when Sandra and Samuel’s 11-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), returns from a walk with his dog to find his father’s bloody body splayed out at the base of their ski chalet. This completes the URL’s question: Did Samuel jump, or did Sandra push him? Read More

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Killers of the Flower Moon: Fail the Conquering Hero

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lily Gladstone and Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon

Among the most insufferable criticisms lobbed toward Martin Scorsese—not the most insufferable; here will be the first and last time this review mentions the words “Marvel Cinematic Universe”—is that his only good movies are the ones about gangsters. Taste may be subjective, but aside from ignoring the vast majority of the director’s fertile filmography, this grievance neglects the organizational rot that runs through so many of his pictures. Sure, it’s obvious that the suits in The Wolf of Wall Street are just thugs with brokerage licenses, but even when Scorsese isn’t explicitly dealing with lawbreakers, he is routinely wandering halls of power and exploring systems of iniquity. The snobbish aristocrats of The Age of Innocence, the monopolistic bureaucrats of The Aviator, the dogmatic zealots of The Last Temptation of Christ—they are all veritable hoodlums, seeking to impose their chosen brand of moral order upon the world, intolerant of individual resistance.

Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese’s latest movie and one of his best, is even less tangential to the gangster genre than his films about musicians or comedians or pool sharks. It doesn’t nominally feature mobsters who say “fuggedaboutit,” but its tale of criminality and corruption occupies the same thematic territory as that of Mean Streets or Goodfellas. Yet where those classics exhibited joy in depicting the mechanics of their antiheroes’ frenzied avarice, Flower Moon finds Scorsese operating in a more mournful register. It isn’t that age has mellowed him—in some ways, this is among the angriest pictures he’s ever made—so much as it’s nudged his focal point. The methods of vice are no longer the primary attraction; what matters now are the consequences. Read More

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