Grade: A

One Battle After Another: Inherent ICE

Jeremy BeckReviews
Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another

Did Paul Thomas Anderson just make an action movie? Yes and no. Certainly, One Battle After Another is a robust and muscular production, replete with car chases, kidnappings, and explosions. Yet its most exhilarating sequence—the one that best encapsulates its singular combination of tumultuous suspense and whip-smart comedy—is just a guy talking on the phone.

It helps, of course, that said guy is Leonardo DiCaprio, one of our last true movie stars. He plays Bob Ferguson, a lapsed revolutionary whose stormy past as an ideological militant has long since subsided into a cloud of bong smoke and disorientation. With his scraggly facial hair and his fried brain cells, Bob seems an unlikely hero of a decades-spanning epic from the acclaimed director of Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. But One Battle After Another, which Anderson adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, has no interest in being bound by expectation or convention. It is a wildly ambitious picture that takes as its subject no less than the precarity of the American experiment, yet it is also an intimate family melodrama—a poignant tale of darkened souls clawing their way back toward the light. Read More

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Poor Things: Pride of Frankenstein

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo in Poor Things

Poor Things opens at a stately manor in Victorian London, where chickens bark, pigs quack, and legless horses draw steam-powered carriages. These hybridized bastardizations are the work of Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a brilliant surgeon with scars on his face and curiosity in his heart. When he isn’t tutoring pompous medical students or belching out his farts through a contraption that turns gas into floating spheres, God (as he prefers to be called) toils in his vast private laboratory, concocting unholy experiments in his ongoing quest to investigate and bend the laws of nature. God wields his scalpel with such rigorous dispassion—a blend of mighty intelligence and clinical precision—that you might be tempted to perceive him as a proxy for Yorgos Lanthimos, the movie’s director and cinema’s preeminent scholar of human oddity. But that reading disserves Poor Things, which finds Lanthimos applying his craft with generosity as well as exactitude. God’s creations are perverse; Lanthimos has manufactured a miracle.

In doing so, he has sacrificed none of his talent for arresting imagery (not to mention caustic comedy). From its very first shot—that of a pregnant woman in a blue dress on a bridge, flinging herself to the icy waters below—Poor Things routinely marries the ghastly and the gorgeous. The production design, by Shona Heath and James Price, concocts environments of terrible wonder, like the airborne trams that slice through a smoggy metropolis or the yellow Escheresque staircase that crumbles in midair. (Even the black-and-white title cards that divide the picture into discrete chapters ripple with dazzling eccentricity.) The costumes, by Holly Waddington, are a resplendent array of gowns and bodices, despite every male character wanting to tear them to shreds. And the cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who also shot Lanthimos’ The Favourite, features bursts of bold color yet repeatedly contorts the frame into his singular fisheye style; at times he even shrinks the canvas to a small circle, as though we’re squinting through a peephole at all of the movie’s beautiful grotesqueries. Read More

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Past Lives: No Sublime Like the Present

Jeremy BeckReviews
Teo Yoo and Greta Lee in Past Lives

Late at night in a Manhattan bar, we see three people: an Asian woman seated in between two men (one white, the other Asian). They’re chatting amiably, but we can’t hear what they’re saying; instead, we listen to the observations of an unseen couple who speculate about the triad’s possible relationships. Perhaps two of them are married and the other man is her brother, they suggest, or maybe the white guy is an American tour guide. As they conjecture, the woman turns her head and looks directly into the camera, her eyes both inviting and comprehending of our attentions, as though she’s slyly caught us in the act.

This is the opening scene of Past Lives, the debut feature of writer-director Celine Song, and it immediately signals the film’s rare, delicate intimacy. When you buy a ticket for Past Lives, you end up not so much watching a movie as participating in an act of eavesdropping. Sure, you’re seeing actors pantomime a fictional story of love and loss, but you are also receiving an unauthorized glimpse into the inner worlds of two people—a secret chance to understand their desires and bear witness to their heartbreak. Read More

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Hulu’s “Normal People” Is the Show of the Year

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal in "Normal People"

The title practically demands deconstruction. Are the characters in Normal People… normal? The simple, unsatisfying, entirely accurate answer is that, well, they are and they aren’t. The more complex response requires delving into the thematic contradictions that are inherent in most great works of art. The players at the center of this stupendous new series, which is based on a novel by Sally Rooney, are familiar, relatable, and ordinary. They are also unique, complicated, and fascinating.

The brilliance of Normal People, which Rooney has adapted to television with the help of co-writer Alice Birch and showrunner Ed Guiney, is how it captures the universal qualities of its experiences—love and loss, elation and confusion, falling down and growing up—without sacrificing an ounce of its characters’ individuality. The story that it tells is resolutely intimate, never resorting to false contrivances or cheap melodrama. Yet as it progresses, the series accumulates a certain grandeur, an invisible sweep that magnifies the intensity of its images and emotions. On paper (I haven’t read the novel), Normal People’s boy-meets-girl premise may sound prosaic. But on the screen, with beauty and force, it turns that prose into poetry. Read More

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Parasite: Out of the Basement, Climbing the Social Ladder

Jeremy BeckReviews
The family of Bong Joon-ho's "Parasite".

The underground is both a geographic location and a lowly caste in Parasite, the electrifying new movie from Bong Joon-ho. In this tonally shifting and artistically unwavering film—it’s part comedy, part thriller, all silky craft—the social order is upended with mayhem and precision, as the dwellers of the subterrane invade the castles of the aristocracy. Yet Parasite’s ravishing, blood-soaked imagery is complemented by its patience, its humor, and its observational savvy. Consider that it largely transpires in two different homes, whose contrasting layouts illuminate a crucial truth: that some basements are more equal than others.

The film’s title suggests an infestation, though Bong, who also wrote the screenplay with Han Jin-won, plays it coy, leaving open to interpretation just who’s the scourge and who’s the plagued. What’s obvious from the jump, however, is that Parasite is a movie about class. This is nothing new for Bong; in Snowpiercer, he imagined a giant train that separated its inhabitants according to their inherent station, a rigid hierarchy enforced by Tilda Swinton, who brutally reminded the steerage occupants of their lesser status with a chillingly didactic fable featuring the edict, “Be the shoe.” The stratification in Parasite may not be as linear, but it’s still firmly in place, visible to the eye and—as becomes at first amusingly and then grotesquely clear—detectable to the nose. Read More

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