Grade: A minus

Avatar: The Way of Water: If the Blue Fits

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Avatar: The Way of Water

James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water is a movie full of miracles—floating mountains, underwater trees, resurrected warriors, talking whales—but perhaps the most miraculous thing about it is that it exists at all. With more than a decade spent in mysterious development, its hypothetical completion and release became something of an industry joke—the cinematic equivalent of hell freezing over. Yet defying the odds has long been Cameron’s forte; remember, Titanic was a colossal boondoggle until it became the biggest movie in the world, and the original Avatar was initially anticipated to be a misbegotten foray into motion-capture extravagance before it dethroned Titanic and attained box-office supremacy. (Until Star Wars: The Force Awakens came along, financial analysts resorted to qualifying new hits as setting records among movies “not directed by James Cameron.”) Now, 13 years later, the self-proclaimed king of the world has finally emerged from the oceanic depths with a sequel, and it’s both exactly what you expected and more than you could’ve imagined: repetitive, eye-popping, clunky, spectacular. Strictly speaking, The Way of Water may not be better than Avatar—which, to be clear, is fantastic—but there is certainly more of it.

In a sense, Cameron’s triumph here is limited, even as it’s also boundless. His reputation as a cinematic pioneer remains intact—he once again channels his instinctual pop savvy and his extraordinary grasp of technology to conjure images, environments, and sequences that have never before been glimpsed on screen—yet his innovation is still exclusively (if exquisitely) visual. From a storytelling standpoint, he prefers to mine familiar terrain. If Avatar was derivative of a dozen prior adventure epics (it’s Dances with Wolves! it’s Pocahontas! it’s FernGully!), The Way of Water is derivative of Avatar. Once again, the native Na’vi—those twelve-foot blue-skinned forest-dwellers who are indigenous to the bountiful planet of Pandora—find themselves under attack by marauding human invaders. There are minor tweaks—instead of installing a mining operation, the colonizers now seek to permanently inhabit Pandora in light of Earth’s impending ecological demise; rather than extracting the precious mineral “unobtanium,” venal poachers now hunt down giant sea beasts to secure a priceless enzyme that prevents people from aging—but the movie’s central conflict remains largely uncomplicated: The Na’vi and the humans are still at war, and the good guys—led by Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), the former Marine who defected after he fell in love with the beautiful and fearsome Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña)—are the ones in blue. Read More

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The Fabelmans: The Art of a Lion

Jeremy BeckReviews
Gabriel LaBelle in The Fabelmans

Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans is undoubtedly a valentine, but who is the target of its affection? Is it an ode to the movies—a celebration of the populist art form’s beauty and magic? Is it a self-congratulatory testament to Spielberg’s own genius, given that it chronicles a lightly fictionalized version of his childhood? Or is it meant as a gift to you, the audience—the appreciative populace that regularly crowds into auditoriums to stare upward at a silver screen? Early in the film, a young boy makes his first visit to the theater in 1952 in what proves to be a transformative experience; surrounded by hundreds of strangers, he gapes in awe, making the same wide-eyed face that he will spend the rest of his life earnestly recreating.

Watching The Fabelmans in a half-empty 53-seat multiplex, I felt a twinge of irony at that image; the notion of throngs of ticket-buyers piling into giant caverns to watch movies would seem to be less a halcyon vision than a distant memory. (Unless you’re talking about superhero flicks; across the hall, in its third week of release, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was gobbling up $64 million, more than 20 times The Fabelmans’ gross.) But one of the lessons of this sweet, enchanting movie is that cinema can retain its power in settings that are intimate as well as expansive, and that art can be a vehicle for personal expression in addition to a commercial product. It may find Spielberg operating in a gentler register than typical, but that sensitivity hasn’t dulled his instincts as an entertainer or hampered his gifts as a storyteller. Read More

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Decision to Leave: Should He Stray or Should She Go?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tang Wei and Park Hae-il in Decision to Leave

He’s a good cop: smart, confident, decisive. He’s looking down at a fresh corpse on a coroner’s table, asking the right questions, making the proper deductions. But when the woman enters the room, he glances up from the body, and for a split second his breath catches in his throat, and his typically impassive countenance is replaced with astonishment. He recovers his poise quickly enough—after all, he’s a professional—but that single skipped beat of his heart foreshadows a future of desire and ruin. He isn’t in control anymore; she is.

This is an early scene from Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave, but it’s also the latest descendant in a long lineage of Meaningful Looks; it’s Fred MacMurray eyeing Barbara Stanwyck’s bare shoulders in Double Indemnity, and Jimmy Stewart staring across a restaurant at Kim Novak in Vertigo, and Russell Crowe watching Kim Basinger stroll into a liquor store in L.A. Confidential. It firmly plants the movie in the heightened universe of film noir, with its hot-blooded gumshoes and coolly captivating femme fatales, its furtive schemes and dastardly crimes. Yet because Park is an uncommonly gifted stylist, nothing about his thrilling new picture feels imitative or traditional. Noirs were always sexy, but they’ve never been quite this voluptuous. Read More

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Tár: Bittersweet Infamy

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cate Blanchett in Tár

Cate Blanchett is a titan. Whether playing a British monarch or an American actress or an elven queen, she emanates an unimpeachable authority, an innate rightness. Yet in some of her nerviest performances—as an abusive teacher in Notes on a Scandal, as a fallen socialite in Blue Jasmine, as a yearning lover in Carol—she chips away at this invincibility, hinting at desire and pain without showing any visible cracks or weakness. So Blanchett’s casting as the titular anti-heroine of Tár, the gripping new drama from Todd Field, is almost too perfect. She—by which I mean both Blanchett and Lydia, the character whose surname gives the film its title—is an avatar of supremacy, and the movie begins as a chronicle of her dominance before it gradually turns into… something else. Field reportedly wrote the script specifically for Blanchett, and he’s been rewarded. It’s not that you can’t imagine anyone else playing Lydia (Nicole Kidman? Rebecca Hall?); it’s that if you dared to suggest a different actor, Lydia would eat you for lunch.

That fluid lethality—the combination of cultured intelligence and formidable omnipotence—might not seem obvious from Lydia’s profession, though perhaps that gives short shrift to the cutthroat modern world of classical music. We first meet her at a festival interview conducted by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, a conversation that Field presents in multiple ways. Initially, as Gopnik’s voiceover informs us of Lydia’s estimable accomplishments—among other things, she’s won the EGOT, and she runs a fellowship that has nurtured numerous female composers (including Hildur Guðnadóttir, who provides the actual score here)—the screen provides a brisk montage, with a blizzard of crisp images (such as the precise tailoring of a suit) that evoke the specter of careerism. Field then brings us inside the auditorium and spends several minutes simply observing Lydia and Gopnik’s discussion, a curious choice that later proves to be a sly bit of misdirection. Read More

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Emily the Criminal: The Ex-Con Is On

Jeremy BeckReviews
Aubrey Plaza in Emily the Criminal

It’s just a flimsy piece of paper, but it carries the weight of an anvil—a scarlet letter printed in cold black and white. The man behind the desk utters two dreadful words—“background check”—and her face drains of color, her once-promising prospects vaporizing into smoke. “I just want you to be honest,” he says with a thin smile that masks a contemptuous sneer. But what he really wants is to dupe her, shame her, usher her into a confessional where he can play the role of supercilious priest. The interview was over before it started; it was over as soon as that banal printout found its way into his hands. Really, it was over years ago, when a courtroom stenographer typed the word “guilty”—a word that’s been invisibly hanging around her neck ever since.

This is a good deal of information to process, yet it’s all concisely packed into the brief opening scene of Emily the Criminal, which finds the title character (a riveting Aubrey Plaza) squirming at the end of a fishing line cast by a smug, purportedly upright middle manager (John Billingsley). Arguably, the film’s title alone, with its blunt two-word suffix, illustrates the hill its anti-heroine has been climbing most of her adult life. A long time ago, Emily did a bad thing. Now, that bad thing is all she is. Read More

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