Drama

Golda: Funny, She Doesn’t Look Shrewish

Jeremy BeckReviews
Helen Mirren in Golda

Was Golda Meir a brilliant stateswoman or a power-hungry extremist? A crusader for justice or an enabler of discrimination? You’ve likely already made up your mind on such matters, and even if you haven’t, Golda is unlikely to inform your opinion. Directed by Guy Nattiv from a script by Nicholas Martin, it is a thin and meager picture, providing little insight into its subject beyond a vague intimation of her tenacity. If it defies Truffaut’s maxim that war movies inevitably glorify battle, it does so by virtue of being boring.

Not bloated, though. To its credit, Golda doesn’t try to contemplate the entirety of its heroine’s life; its 100 minutes contain no flashbacks to her childhood or formative sequences depicting her political ascendancy. Instead, the screenplay adopts what might be called the Lincoln approach, attempting to build a sweeping character study by chronicling a single famous event. That would be the Yom Kippur War of 1973, a 20-day conflict in which Israel reeled from a two-pronged attack initiated by Syria and Egypt. The theory of the movie is that, by showing us Meir’s behavior in the face of this catastrophe—her keen intelligence, her dry wit, her steely resolve—it will turn a narrow slice of history into a rich and evocative portrait. Read More

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Landscape with Invisible Hand: Grave New World

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kylie Rogers and Asante Blackk in Landscape with Invisible Hand

Cory Finley won’t repeat himself. You couldn’t have blamed him, following his electrifying debut of Thoroughbreds, if he’d chosen to keep making razor-sharp thrillers his whole career. Instead he pivoted to docudrama with Bad Education, telling the fact-based story of a different sort of sociopath who preyed on people not with poison and knives but with smiles and scams. His new movie, Landscape with Invisible Hand, is also partially set in the classroom, but the malfeasance it chronicles is far stranger than garden-variety embezzlement. Early on, an English teacher informs his students that his “microscopic salary” has nevertheless been deemed too onerous for the new administration. He then strolls into the courtyard and, with minimal fanfare, puts a gun in his mouth and splatters his brains all over the concrete. Bad education, indeed.

It’s a jolting introduction, one which signals that the ensuing picture won’t conform to the sanitized standards of the young-adult playbook. But the oddness of Landscape with Invisible Hand is apparent even earlier. Its very first scene finds a young aspiring painter named Adam Campbell (Asante Blackk, from This Is Us) sketching a vista of the bright blue sky, only for his view to become clouded when a gigantic flying saucer rolls overhead. That might seem alarming, but Adam reacts with resigned annoyance—“Find someplace else to park!”—and we immediately realize that we’re watching a piece of dystopian fiction. But where many alien-invasion films traffic in terror and violence, this one is characterized by drudgery and disenchantment. Read More

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Passages: Weird Sex But OK

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adèle Exarchopoulos and Franz Rogowski in Passages

It takes less than a minute before we learn that Tomas, the antihero at the center of Ira Sachs’ Passages, is an asshole. He’s directing a movie (also called Passages), and he’s unhappy with how his lead actor is walking down a flight of stairs. Frustrated that the performer keeps swinging his arms, Tomas offers up a piece of criticism that is less than constructive: “Why do you keep fucking up?”

He might be better served asking that question of himself. But then, self-reflection is a foreign practice to the modern narcissist (even if narcissism’s classical etymology is rooted in literal self-reflection). An absorbing portrait of a consummate jerk, Passages is a whirlwind journey of desire and destruction. It has already received notoriety for its sex scenes, which are vigorous and persuasive if not quite pornographic. But it is even more shocking—more raw—as a study of gluttonous appetite and thoughtless cruelty. The callous behavior it displays is recognizably human and also utterly monstrous. Read More

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Oppenheimer: The Bomb Before the Storm

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan doesn’t always make movies about the end of the world, but the worlds of his movies always feel like they’re about to end. Regardless of their focus—a memory-impaired man searching for meaning, a group of con artists invading the realm of dreams, a squad of soldiers marooned on a beach—their combustible tension creates the sense that their characters’ lives are on the perpetual verge of implosion. So it’s both fitting and perverse that Oppenheimer, Nolan’s study of the (mad?) scientist who developed the atomic bomb, is his least outwardly visceral picture in decades. The stakes here couldn’t possibly be higher—at various points, people discuss the possibility of “atmospheric ignition,” a chain reaction that would engulf the planet (the odds of this, we’re assured, are “near zero”)—yet they unfold in the context of a talky, intimate chamber drama. The apocalypse will be ushered in not by motorcycle chases or time paradoxes, but by stern looks and harsh words.

If you think that sounds gentle or staid, did I mention that this was a Chris Nolan movie? Unbound from his usual need to dazzle us with eye-popping set pieces and brain-scraping premises, cinema’s most enduring populist (OK, second-most) has channeled his commercial savvy into depicting a concept that’s disarmingly straightforward: men at work. Oppenheimer is a film of grave power and sweeping intensity, made all the more propulsive by Jennifer Lame’s exacting editing and Ludwig Göransson’s majestic score, but its energy is grounded in recognizable anxieties and human emotions. It’s the product of a science-fiction filmmaker pivoting to science-fact. Read More

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From the Vault: Seabiscuit, 20 Years Later

Jeremy BeckReviews
Seabiscuit

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

There is an epic majesty about Seabiscuit, and I don’t just mean the horse. This is a throwback motion picture, one that is redolent of a distant era of cinema in which filmmakers suffused their creations with spirit and passion. It is by no means a flawless film – it is too long, too sentimental, and too reverential – but it carries itself with an elegant grace and nobility, and it has unanticipated moments of considerable power. For all its faults, Seabiscuit is a complete film, both uncommonly thoughtful and undeniably exhilarating, all the way to the finish line. Read More

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