Grade: A minus

The Outrun: Don’t Drink-Shame

Jeremy BeckReviews
Saoirse Ronan in The Outrun

The first time we see Saoirse Ronan’s face in The Outrun, she’s dancing in a nightclub, neck tilted upward and lips slightly parted, like she’s trying to kiss a black sky. It’s an image of divine rapture, which makes it a jarring contrast to her next few appearances—first getting unceremoniously dragged out of a bar after hours, then checking herself into a rehabilitation clinic while sporting a horrific purple bruise over her right eye. For this woman, agony can follow ecstasy in the span of a night or the blink of a single camera cut.

The notion that substance abuse can inspire both pleasure and pain is by no means novel; cinema is littered with depictions of actors articulating the euphoria and despair caused by various intoxicants. And The Outrun, which was directed by Nora Fingscheidt from a screenplay she wrote with Amy Liptrot (based on the latter’s book), doesn’t entirely evade the durable conventions of the genre. But it does inject those old customs with considerable new life, thanks both to the boldness of its structure and the vivacity of its lead performance. You’ve seen this movie before, but also, you very much haven’t. Read More

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Furiosa, a Mad Max Saga: Witness Glee

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in Furiosa

We often talk about directors playing around in a metaphorical sandbox, but George Miller uses the most actual sand. The Australian auteur has made an impressive variety of pictures—a sick-kid melodrama, an animated penguin musical, a mythological whatsit about a narratologist and her djinn—but he’ll forever be associated with the Mad Max films, those apocalyptic action epics where he wanders into the desert and smashes his million-dollar toys into bits. It isn’t quite that Miller keeps making the same movie over and over—more that he keeps finding new ways to reignite the simple, cathartic charge of vehicles speeding across the screen and bursting into flames. Furiosa represents his fifth such effort, and whether or not it’s his best (must our infernal culture always rank things?), it’s proof that he’s gotten awfully good at blowing things up.

In quantitative terms, Furiosa is a less herculean effort than its immediate precursor, Mad Max: Fury Road, which achieved cinematic immortality for its wall-to-wall (dune-to-dune?) automotive carnage. I remain a modest dissenter to Fury Road’s reception as a modern masterpiece—for all its brawny magnificence, it’s deficient in terms of theme and character—but I admire it for its bravura skill and relentless momentum; aside from a brief (and fairly dull) interlude by a desolate tree, it’s essentially one long, exhilarating car chase. Structurally, Furiosa is more conventional, using rip-roaring set pieces as exclamation points as it unspools a fraught, sprawling narrative. Yet conceptually, it’s far more ambitious—spanning decades instead of days, adopting a Tarantino-esque blueprint (five numbered chapters), and interrogating the ecstasy and futility of vengeance. Read More

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Challengers: Thirst Serve

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O'Connor in Challengers

One of the first times we see Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) in Challengers, she’s clad only in black lingerie, the camera observing her backside in a manner somewhere between appreciative and exploitative. Empirically, it’s the most skin we see in the movie, yet from the characters’ point of view, it doesn’t represent Tashi at her most alluring. That comes later (really earlier, in the film’s chronology), when two admirers are watching her play tennis at the junior U.S. Open. As she trades ground strokes with an overmatched opponent, they gawk at her combination of power and grace. “Look at that fucking backhand,” one of them whispers, in an awed tone that suggests a repressed teenager who just caught a glimpse of Pamela Anderson in Playboy.

It seems diminishing to characterize Challengers, the riveting and ravishing new picture from Luca Guadagnino, as a sports movie. Sure, it follows the entwined lives of three gifted tennis players, but it’s more about their emotional cravings than their physical exploits. Yet it doesn’t treat tennis as mere window dressing. Instead, it captures the ineffable appeal of sports—the cathartic thrill of competition, the rigor of perfecting one’s craft, the blurry line between passion and professionalism—and binds it to the characters’ omnipresent hunger and vulnerability. There are all sorts of games being played here, and some have nothing to do with rackets. 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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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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