Drama

Project Hail Mary review: Galaxy Stressed

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary

The novelist Andy Weir specializes in “hard” science-fiction, embroidering his stories with mathematical precision and analytic rigor. He’s a best-selling author whom you might also call a serious writer. The filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, by contrast, have built their success on silliness, making droll animated yarns (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie) and the spoofy Jump Street pictures. They seem unlikely candidates to translate Weir’s brainy acumen to the screen. But while Project Hail Mary, which Lord and Miller have adapted from Weir’s 2021 book (via a screenplay by Drew Goddard), may be a blend of durable genres—part space opera, part survival saga, part buddy comedy—it isn’t a jumble of tones. Instead, the directing duo has applied their quippy instincts with warmth and sincerity, resulting in a crowd-pleasing movie that’s both playful and earnest. Call it hardy har har sci-fi.

This doesn’t mean Project Hail Mary is a model of discipline. It’s long, sappy, and choppy, with set pieces that are more intriguing than eye-popping. But it’s nonetheless coherent, and its humor works in tandem with both its muscular ambition and its abiding sweetness. Read More

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Wuthering Heights review: Promising Stung Woman

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie in Wuthering Heights

In the opening scene of Emily, Charlotte Brontë disparages Wuthering Heights as “an ugly book, base and ugly.” Emerald Fennell must have missed that memo. To be sure, this umpteenth screen adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel is suffused with crude, primal emotions: lust, hatred, anguish, cruelty, more lust. But because Fennell fancies herself one of modern cinema’s most flamboyant stylists, her version clothes this vulgarity in beauty and extravagance. This is not your literature professor’s Wuthering Heights; this is more of the music-video edition.

Does that make it sacrilegious or sensible? Maybe a bit of both. I am not sure we needed another update of Brontë’s classic, much less one so high-strung and turgid. At the same time, if you are going to reimagine an article of the literary canon, you may as well do so with some flair. Fennell’s first two movies, Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, were original conceits, (arguably) teeming with provocative ideas and piercing insights into contemporary class and gender. Now pivoting from the freedoms of invention to the constraints of adaptation, she has redirected her inflammatory instincts away from theme and toward feverish form. The results may not be great, but at least they’re distinctive. Read More

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In the Testament of Ann Lee and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Religion Gets Musical

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Amanda Seyfried in The Testament of Ann Lee; Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

All movies compel suspension of disbelief, but the musical demands an extra dose of willful credulity. In real life, people don’t break into choreographed song-and-dance routines, so appreciating the genre requires accepting the form’s heightened surreality. It’s an act of faith—a gesture of surrender to a higher power whom you trust to guide you through the inexplicable.

This means that musicals about religion create a kind of feedback loop, reinforcing their characters’ spirituality—the belief in the unseen, the quest to convert others through vigorous performance—via their staging and technique. As (ahem) fate would have it, two recent releases toy with this idea, even if neither of them conforms to classical conventions of how movie musicals are meant to operate. Read More

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Indie New Year: No Other Choice, We Bury the Dead, The Plague

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lee Byung-hun in No Other Choice; Daisy Ridley in We Bury the Dead; Everett Blunck in The Plague

Christmas tends to be a big holiday for new movies, but New Year’s Day, not so much. Major studios rarely drop new films in the chill of early January, so the flip of the calendar instead becomes an opportunity for limited releases to expand slowly (sometimes glacially—looking at you, The Testament of Ann Lee). Today, we’re catching up with three independent pictures gradually making their way around the country, though viewers in some markets may be forced to wait until they hit streaming. This is why I support a national law requiring all movies to play in all theaters at all times.

No Other Choice. Capitalism is murder. You work and you work, pouring your blood and sweat into a numbing career that drains the life from you, in service of unfeeling bosses who can sack you whenever they want. (Note to any of my superiors who happen to be reading this piece: I love you and I love my job, please don’t fire me.) If you’re a CEO, they send you packing with a golden parachute. If you’re a line worker, they give you an eel. Read More

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Marty Supreme review: Nights of the Downed Table Tennis

Jeremy BeckReviews
Timothee Chalamet in Marty Supreme

There’s a moment in Marty Supreme when someone tells the title character to stay calm. I generally don’t like spoiling things, but given that the movie was directed by Josh Safdie—and given that Marty (surname Mauser) is played as a bundle of raw nerves and febrile energy by Timothée Chalamet—I feel comfortable in informing you that this advice proves unsuccessful. Asking Marty Mauser not to get agitated is like asking the earth not to rotate on its axis. It’s a plea in defiance of natural order.

The cinema of the Safdie Brothers, which includes grubby scraps like Good Time and Heaven Knows What, places a premium on speed and shock while also championing aesthetic ugliness in the name of visceral authenticity. They found the right calibration on Uncut Gems, their 2019 tour de force of addictive anxiety, before venturing out on their own. Benny recently made The Smashing Machine, a solid enough picture that was largely forgettable outside of Dwayne Johnson’s committed performance. Marty Supreme is hardly a perfect movie, but it sure is a memorable one. It’s got sex and violence and mad dogs and crooked cops and Chalamet’s bare ass and Gwyneth Paltrow in mink-wrapped lingerie. Josh Safdie may have gone solo, but he hasn’t gone acoustic; he remains committed to pulverizing viewers with volume and intensity, resulting in an experience that straddles the line between exhilarating and exhausting. Read More

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