The title is plural for a reason. The characters in Weapons brandish any number of destructive instruments—not just guns and knives, but also needles, scissors, forks, teeth, locks of hair, and more. You’ll never look at your vegetable peeler the same way again.
Yet the most potent tool on display here—maybe second-most, given how the use of that peeler has seared itself in my brain—is writer-director Zach Cregger’s craftsmanship. Weapons is a bold and bloody movie, full of ghoulish turns and ghastly violence. It is also a work of consummate skill—a deftly constructed tapestry that weaves imagination, precision, and patience. It’s a beautiful nightmare. Read More
Wes Anderson’s movies are so meticulously constructed, it’s easy to overlook that they also tend to be explosive, messy, and violent. It takes all of 30 seconds into The Phoenician Scheme, his latest lavishly imagined whirligig, before someone gets literally blown in half by a missile. Not long after, the picture’s unscrupulous hero, an entrepreneur named Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), emerges from the wreckage of a plane crash, trying to stuff a protruding organ back inside his body. Over the picaresque adventure that follows, Korda will face flaming arrows, gun-toting guerillas, duplicitous spies, overcooked pigeons, and a pit of quicksand. He’s the unflappable eye of a fastidiously unstable hurricane.
That all of this mayhem unfolds in the context of Anderson’s characteristic rigor—a method of careful framing, crisp camerawork, and filigreed production design—isn’t really a product of dissonance. Rather, The Phoenician Scheme harmonizes control and commotion. Anderson’s style is often pejoratively deemed fussy, but his exacting craft doesn’t drain the life from his filmmaking. Quite the opposite: The rich colors, the sharp wordplay, and the impeccable ornamentation all coalesce to imbue the proceedings with urgency and vivacity. In this heightened alternate reality, precision generates momentum. Read More
We always say we want more original movies, but how many movies are truly original? Sinners, the latest feature from Ryan Coogler, is in some ways a work of pastiche, incorporating strains of gangster cinema, music videos, and horror lore. But despite embracing its influences (which is not, in itself, a bad thing), it manages to feel new—both for the urgency of its ideas and the vibrancy of its filmmaking.
That description also applied, with partial force, to two of Coogler’s earlier efforts, Creed and Black Panther. In those pictures, the director managed to imprint his personality onto the material while still operating within the brand-managed confines of the cinematic franchise. (His attempt to repeat the feat with Black Panther’s sequel, Wakanda Forever, was markedly less successful, if partly for tragic reasons beyond his control.) Sinners, for all its boisterous entertainment value, shackles him with no such commercial chains. No longer is Coogler reinterpreting and revitalizing a cherished piece of intellectual property. He’s reimagining the world. Read More
The American dream gets flipped upside-down in The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s soaring, scathing portrait of post-war greed. Yet while it may be a troubling tale of moral decline, it opens with its hero going up, up, up, climbing toward the prospect of salvation. His name is László, and we first see him in the steerage of a ship docking at Ellis Island, his pallid skin and crooked nose long shielded from the light of day. As his mind recites a letter from his absent wife, he begins to ascend along with countless other sweaty hopefuls, the camera swooping and twisting like he’s navigating a labyrinth. When he finally bursts onto the deck, his face breaks into an ecstatic grin, the sunlight beaming down on him, the score’s trumpets booming in triumph. Never mind that our first view of Lady Liberty comes at an inverted angle, as though she’s about to plunge her torch—and its elusive promise of prosperity—into the harbor.
This knockout introduction instantly signals The Brutalist’s monumental ambition, both thematic and aesthetic. Much has been made of the film’s length (over three-and-a-half hours, including a 15-minute intermission), but its running time is just one of its many extravagances. Corbet, eschewing subtlety in favor of sheer grandeur, has delivered a truly maximalist production, a work of sweeping scope, vigorous style, and provocative rhetoric. The movie is, to borrow the tagline from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, an epic of epic epicness. Read More
Bathed in ghostly white moonlight, a man stands in the center of a black roadway lined with forest-green pines. In the distance, he spots the faint outline of a moving object, which he gradually perceives to be a horse-drawn carriage. As the animals gather velocity and momentum, he realizes that he’s about to be trampled. He shuts his eyes and braces for impact, only to realize that the vehicle has magically stopped and angled itself perpendicular to him, its door thrown open, beckoning him into the waiting darkness. And then the coachman calls out, “Did you order an Uber?”
I made that last part up. The vampire mythos, with its lustful symbolism and its gargled accents, is easily vulnerable to ridicule. And there are certainly times when Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’ sumptuous remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 touchstone, dances up to the cliff’s edge of parody. But what rescues it—what turns your stifled laughter into shrieks of horror and gapes of wonder—is that it approaches its material with absolute sincerity, and without a shred of irony or detachment. Eggers, undertaking the perilous task of updating a 102-year-old classic, has of course renovated the silent black-and-white original, imprinting it with intoxicating sound and color. Yet he has not sacrificed any of its elemental power, forgoing the temptation for winking archness and instead operating with brazen, old-fashioned conviction. Read More
