Drama

Janet Planet: Smothering Instinct

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julianne Nicholson and Zoe Ziegler in Janet Planet

Lacy is bored. Eleven years old and marooned in her woodland home in western Massachusetts, she has no friends, no hobbies (compulsory piano lessons don’t count), and no apparent reason to live. “If you don’t come get me, I’m gonna kill myself,” she declares on the phone in a prayer for deliverance from sleepaway camp. It’s an empty threat because nothing in Lacy’s life is all that bad—her fellow camp kids and counselors seem perfectly nice—but such mediocrity is just another affront. If things were terrible, at least she’d have something to rail against. Having nothing to complain about is somehow worse.

Janet Planet, the directorial debut of Annie Baker, is an eerily persuasive piece of storytelling that understands Lacy’s circumstances almost too well. It transpires over a few sleepy summer months in 1991, and it evokes her predicament—the specific sensation of flailing against the aimlessness of youth—with a clarity that verges on lethargy. In so convincingly depicting tedium, it risks succumbing to it. Read More

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The Bikeriders: Mad Packs, Fury Rode

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Hardy and Austin Butler in The Bikeriders

Early in his career, the writer-director Jeff Nichols developed a reputation for making movies that felt unlike the work of anyone else. The paranoid thriller Take Shelter, the noirish coming-of-age story Mud, the science-fiction parable Midnight Special—none of these was exceptional, but they all toyed with genre expectations in a manner that made them feel gratifyingly unusual. That changed with Loving, a well-intentioned docudrama that was tender, intelligent, and disappointingly ordinary. Nichols’ latest picture, The Bikeriders, continues this regression toward normalcy in a peculiar way, less by occupying a familiar template than by imitating a specific filmmaker—namely, Martin Scorsese. This movie could easily have been called “Goodfellas: Easy Rider edition.”

There are worse touchstones to copy. Cinematically speaking, The Bikeriders may not venture too far off road, but it at least zooms forward with confidence and texture. It also acquires a sense of melancholy—an elegiac wistfulness—that is both genuinely touching and somewhat dubious. Read More

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Sasquatch Sunset, Ungentlemanly Warfare, and the Risk of Originality

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Eiza González in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare; a scene from Sasquatch Sunset

When it comes to intellectual property, cinema doesn’t operate in absolutes. There are great superhero movies and also terrible ones; there are great original movies and also terrible ones. Still, the franchise boom of the 2010s created an uneven playing field that lent a certain luster to smaller-scale films which weren’t rooted in comic books or young-adult literature. In fact, the continued survival of these types of pictures is what makes me confident that the medium isn’t on the verge of collapsing, despite the constant industry doomsaying about A.I. or tax write-offs or Netflix giving Zack Snyder a billion dollars to make seven different versions of an off-brand Star Wars rather than releasing any of its #content in theaters. The movies have been at death’s door ever since their birth over 100 years ago. They just never seem to die.

Currently, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe dwindling in dominance and audiences rewarding more ambitious storytelling like last year’s #Barbenheimer phenomenon, there seems to be an opportunity for studios to pivot away from the IP craze and toward more original movies. But again, the mere fact of a film’s putative originality doesn’t necessarily mean it’s, y’know… good. This past weekend featured two new releases that don’t feature masked heroes, magic wands, or talking animals. At last, real movies for adults! Except, well, suffice it to say that both have their flaws. Read More

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The Zone of Interest: Heart of Gas

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sandra Hüller in The Zone of Interest

The music speaks the truth. Strip away The Zone of Interest’s first few minutes—a grim overture in which Mica Levi’s doomy, dissonant score aches and seethes against a black screen—and you might suspect that you’ve stumbled into a gentle movie of bucolic bliss. The first image we see is that of a happy-looking family lounging lazily in a meadow. As a stream gurgles nearby, the children traipse along a dirt path, the sun glinting down on their golden hair. Their parents seem entirely relaxed, suggesting a life of comfort and security. Perhaps they’re on vacation, or maybe just enjoying a weekend picnic. Even after they return to their home, a cozy cottage with a carefully tended garden and a small in-ground pool, it takes some time before you pick up on the curious nature of their surroundings: the razor wire atop the large wall in the background, the smoke billowing from distant chimneys, the muffled echoes of gunfire and screams.

Adapted by Jonathan Glazer from a novel by Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest is decidedly a movie about the Holocaust. But it is also not a Holocaust picture—at least, not in the way the subgenre has traditionally been understood. There are no ghastly scenes of extermination, no heroic feats of endurance and survival, no condemnatory speeches, no comeuppance or catharsis. There is simply the pervasive aroma of death, and the people willfully oblivious to its stench. Read More

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American Fiction: By Book or by Crook

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction

Writing is a task infected with misery and failure: an endless cycle of staring at a blank screen, deleting reams of gibberish, and questioning your life choices. (Am I speaking hypothetically? Reader, I am not.) So it was with a mixture of envy and disbelief that I watched Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), better known for obvious reasons as Monk, sit at his desk and confidently compose an entire novel in what appeared to be a single night. What’s his next trick, building Rome?

Not that Monk is an especially successful artist. The flailing hero of American Fiction, Monk is a mythological scholar whose fearsome intellect has failed to translate into financial security or critical renown. (When he appears at a book panel, he scratches a missing vowel onto the placard that misspelled his name.) His latest text, a meticulous analysis of Aeschylus’ The Persians, hasn’t attracted the slightest nibble from publishers, given that it’s miles removed from the zeitgeist. “They want a Black book,” explains his agent, Arthur (John Ortiz). Monk’s frustrated response—“I’m Black, and it’s my book”—betrays not only his stubbornness, but his woeful ignorance of consumer demand. Read More

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