Grade: A minus

Bridge of Spies: In This Cold War, It’s Chilliest Indoors

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Hanks stars as a lawyer over his head in Steven Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies"

The protagonist of Bridge of Spies, Steven Spielberg’s sage, supremely enjoyable Cold War thriller, doesn’t much look like a hero. With his graying hair and natty wardrobe, his appearance suggests a man more comfortable on the golf course than the battlefield. He doesn’t act like a hero either, not in the strictest sense of action; he never picks up a gun, and he spends half the movie sniffling, complaining about his cold. “I just want to go home and go to bed,” he says, more than once. These are not words you expect to hear from the hero of a spy flick. But even if James B. Donovan is not the square-jawed archetype who anchors most war pictures, he is a profoundly heroic character, effortlessly earning your admiration even as he’s quietly lifting your spirits. And Bridge of Spies itself is a sly, delightful piece of Spielbergian misdirection. Through the careful application of his typical late-period formula—namely, the combination of superb technique and wistful patriotism—Spielberg makes you feel, watching this film, as though you’re bearing witness to something grand. The trick is that you are, even if you’re also just listening to people talk.

Talk was the name of the game in the Cold War, a decades-long battle of bluster and braggadocio. Bridge of Spies instantly plugs into that atmosphere of boiling tension—the sense of constant threat, followed by perpetual inaction—during its brilliant, wordless opening sequence. A Brooklyn man picks up a ringing phone, listens impassively, then heads to the subway. A pair of FBI agents (including The Wire‘s Domenick Lombardozzi) cautiously tail him, then lose him, and then, in their frantic search to relocate him, literally run smack into him on a staircase. That was close! But in addition to serving as a wry piece of anticlimax, this non-chase sets the stage for the mounting anxiousness and fakery to come. Read More

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Sicario: A Land with No Laws, a War with No Heroes

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emily Blunt gets in way over her head in "Sicario"

For a film of such engulfing darkness, Sicario spends a surprising amount of time in broad daylight. In a different story, its frequent aerial shots of the Southwest’s rolling hills and dusty deserts might feel enchanting rather than foreboding. Yet right from its electric opening sequence—a daytime FBI raid in suburban Phoenix on a cartel stash house, the kind where all the residents pack shotguns, and cadavers line the walls like asbestos—Sicario turns that pervasive sunlight into a mirage. A vicious, lacerating depiction of the Mexican-American drug trade, the movie slowly and systematically snuffs out the slightest flicker of hope. They say drug use is a victimless crime, but in this arid land, narcotics distribution is a literal cutthroat industry, a ceaseless cycle of violence, corruption, and death.

Sounds fun, right? You’d be surprised. Yes, as a political think piece, Sicario is powerful, persuasive, and even enraging. But what makes it a great movie—something more than just a forcefully conceived polemic—is that it is also crackerjack crime fiction. Directed by Denis Villeneuve from a script by Taylor Sheridan, Sicario is a pulse-pounding piece of prime-cut entertainment, one that thrills just as much as it chills. It is both literally and metaphorically explosive, and while its suffocating bleakness may get you down, its taut plotting and bracing technique will knock you out. Read More

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Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation: Keep Hold of That Plane, and Your Breath

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Cruise keeps on trucking in "Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation"

Just what is the Rogue Nation, anyway? Is it the Syndicate, a group of presumed-dead spies working covertly to kill or corrupt fellow agents across the globe? Is it the IMF (that’s “Impossible Mission Force”, not “International Monetary Fund”), a disgraced organization that operates without oversight and that has come under legislative fire for its “wanton brinksmanship”? Or could it be the Mission: Impossible franchise itself, a series of supremely entertaining smashes that exhibit no interest in playing by industry rules? In an era of world-building and synthesis—of movies meshing with TV and of Batman battling Superman—these films are largely self-contained, eschewing continuity in favor of methodical reinvention and authorial vision. (Each installment has been helmed by a new director.) Models of energy, style, and craft, the Mission: Impossible movies don’t care about building a world; they just want to astonish an audience.

And does Rogue Nation ever do that. The fifth and flashiest entry in the Mission: Impossible series, Rogue Nation is a fleet and exhilarating affair, dazzling viewers with gripping stunt work and expertly conceived set pieces. To complain that it elevates action over story is to miss the point. Here, the action is the story. Each crackerjack chase sequence, each audacious stunt, each close-quarters combat scene—all are executed with the rigor and thoughtfulness typically reserved for screenwriting. When two men in this movie trade blows while cartwheeling along a rafter beam hundreds of feet in the air, you aren’t just taking in an obligatory fight scene. You’re watching art. Read More

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Ex Machina: Of Gods and Men, and Their Beautiful Machines

Jeremy BeckReviews
Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac in Alex Garland's "Ex Machina"

“Deus ex machina,” the literary term used to describe the contrived resolution of a complicated plot, translates as “God from the machine”. You might think, given that the title of Alex Garland’s arresting, deeply promising directorial debut is merely Ex Machina (sans “deus”), that there are no gods to be found here, only hubristic men and their miraculous machines. You’d be right, but only from a literal perspective. The two characters at the center of Ex Machina may be men, but they act like gods (one even proclaims himself as such), and while they play different parts—one fancies himself the benevolent savior, the other the impassive creator—they each seek to manipulate the fates of others. They soon learn that playing God comes with a cost.

Of course, they themselves are behaving at the whim of their own maker. Every director is the god of his own movie, and Garland hurls a Zeus-like thunderbolt in the film’s very first scene. His camera opens with a close-up of Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson, nicely cast and effectively blank), with rivulets of electronic-blue light dancing across his face as though constructing a topographical map. An email with the subject “Staff lottery: WINNER” flashes across his computer screen, his cell phone blows up with congratulatory messages, and then without a word he’s off, flying via helicopter over the frigid lands of Norway. Garland conveys a reel’s worth of exposition in a few silent seconds, and this extraordinary economy demonstrates that Ex Machina isn’t interested in second place. It wants to be great, and it mostly is. Read More

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It Follows: Getting Off to Pass It On

Jeremy BeckReviews
Maika Monroe is stalked by Death in "It Follows"

It is so easy to make a bad horror movie, and so hard to make a good one. Any filmmaker can momentarily shock audiences with a monster bursting from the closet or a killer slashing from the shadows. But It Follows, David Robert Mitchell’s tense, terrifying second feature, is a master class in horror precisely because of what it doesn’t do. It doesn’t simply rely on a familiar pattern of “Boo!” moments, punctuating moments of dark silence with sudden screams. Instead, it develops a sustained, unrelenting sense of dread, building on its clever premise in smart and tantalizing ways. It chokes you with fear, but it never cheats.

It also serves as a showcase for Mitchell’s undeniable craft. His formal command is evident right from the film’s killer opening sequence, in which a teenage girl, Annie (Bailey Spry), bursts from her house in the twilight hours, wearing heels and looking panicked. She stumbles along the street as her neighbors inquire concernedly, and Mitchell’s camera begins a slow 360-degree turn, eventually relocating Annie as she hightails it in her car, with the soundtrack (by electronica outfit Disasterpeace, aka Rich Vreeland) blaring synths ominously. The following morning, Annie is lying dead on the beach, her bloodied body mangled at an awkward angle, and it’s clear that death is stalking this nondescript Detroit suburb. Read More

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