Grade: A minus

The Northman: It Takes a Pillage to Faze a Child

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alexander Skarsgård in The Northman

Awesome in multiple senses of the word, Robert Eggers’ The Northman is a swaggering, delirious monument to cinematic excess. It’s difficult to select a single scene that best encapsulates its bravura decadence—the moonlit swordfight against a skeleton? the hallucinogen-aided bonding session where father and son bark and howl like feral dogs? the fiery duel at the literal gates of Hell?—but I’m partial to the early sequence where a Viking warrior fells a helpless adversary with his axe and then, having already vanquished his hapless foe, bends down and sinks his teeth into the dying man’s neck.

This unchecked, animalistic ferocity is part of what animates The Northman, which is noteworthy for its sheer frenzy alone; on the surface, it seems to have been constructed purely to inspire giddy instant reactions along the lines of, “omg u guyz this movie FUCKS.” (A quick Twitter search confirms its success in this regard.) Yet look past the blood-soaked savagery on display, and you will discover that there is something more sophisticated at play here. I don’t mean to minimize the berserk (and berserker?) quality of the film’s content, or to imply that its straightforward themes of vengeance and obsession stretch beyond the obvious. What I mean is that, for all its gonzo energy, as a piece of aesthetic craftsmanship, The Northman is absolutely beautiful. Read More

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Everything Everywhere All at Once: In the Multiverse of Radness

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All at Once

Among the innumerable genres represented in Everything Everywhere All at Once—the universe-hopping, tone-mutating, brain-scrambling whatsit from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as Daniels)—is the martial-arts instruction picture. Like Ralph Macchio in The Karate Kid and Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, its protagonist receives tutelage from a wiser, more experienced combat veteran. But here, rather than preaching about the virtues of discipline or the importance of practice, the seasoned mentor encourages our hero to weaponize absurdity. “The less sense it makes,” he insists, “the better.”

This is a matter of opinion, at least when it comes to movies. At the cinema, the twin values of logic and imagination are often in tension with one another, resulting in an artistic seesaw in which adding weight to one sacrifices the other. The brilliance of Everything Everywhere All at Once isn’t that it strikes the perfect balance between these qualities but that it loads up so heavily on one as to render the other irrelevant. Here is a work of bold, boisterous originality, teeming with rich ideas and vivid images and the quixotic thrill of genuine inspiration. It isn’t better because it doesn’t make sense. It’s better because it redefines the concept of making sense entirely. Read More

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Cyrano: A Nose by Any Other Name

Jeremy BeckReviews
Peter Dinklage and Haley Bennett in Cyrano

In the eighth-season finale of Seinfeld, Jerry and George are again bemoaning their inability to sustain a functioning relationship when the latter seizes on the concept of a “relationship intern”—a way of combining forces and channeling them into a single partnership. “Maybe the two of us, working together at full capacity, could do the job of one normal man,” George hypothesizes. This is a very funny conceit that also bears more than a cursory resemblance to the plot of Cyrano de Bergerac, the Edmond Rostand play in which a disfigured poet invisibly assists a dimwitted beefcake in his pursuit of a beautiful woman. Showing us a hero, Rostand wrote us a tragedy, but the comedy inherent in his premise has proved irresistible for American studios, which time and again—in the 1987 Steve Martin vehicle Roxanne, in the poorly regarded 2000 teen flick Whatever It Takes, in the tender 2020 queer romance The Half of It—have sweetened the original’s heartbreak with dollops of reassuring syrup. Among its many achievements, Joe Wright’s new big-screen adaptation, simply titled Cyrano, honors its progenitor’s abiding despair. It’s a movie full of big, bold emotions—lust and love, anger and hunger, jealousy and solidarity—but most of all, it is profoundly sad.

This isn’t to say that the picture is unduly dour or moribund. To the contrary, Wright has leveraged his considerable technical skill—alongside the contributions of his customarily skilled retinue of artisans—to create a spry and dynamic production, one that retains the essence of Rostand’s text while also updating it with lush cinematic vigor. This isn’t simply a matter of prettifying the screen, though the costumes and wigs (by Massimo Cantini Parrini and Jacqueline Durran) are appropriately fabulous, while Sarah Greenwood’s striking production design imbues the film with a bold degree of theatricality. Special mention must be made of Seamus McGarvey’s cinematography, which combines light and shadow in intoxicating ways; certain dusky scenes possess an ethereal glow as though the actors are being illuminated less by a lighting rig than by the moon. Yet the most obvious change from the stage version is structural: This Cyrano is a musical. Read More

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Licorice Pizza: Age Is Just a Wonder

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cooper Hoffman and Alana Haim in Licorice Pizza

The heroes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza are always running, though they never seem to get anywhere. Their sprinting is heedless—the kind of panicked, exuberant racing that epitomizes the heightened quality of youth, when every crisis is life or death and every experience provokes either jubilation or disconsolation. They run and they run—across vacant golf courses and through crowded malls and down sunbaked streets—but they always end up back where they started, confused and angry and lost. They’re essentially attached to opposite ends of the same spoke, moving together in a constant circle, yet never coming any closer to their quixotic destination: each other.

This would seem to describe a doomed romance, a tragic love story that follows the trajectory of a Wong Kar-wai picture. Such a suspicion is only reinforced by the arc of Anderson’s filmography. He may be a more variable and omnivorous director than, say, his namesake Wes, but his movies tend to thrive on tension and conflict; the ruthless oil baron of There Will Be Blood, the fanatical cult leader of The Master, and the imperious fashion designer of Phantom Thread are all defined by their indomitable will, and his films derive their energy from the way their protagonists attempt to impose that will on a society that shackles and stifles them. So perhaps the happiest surprise of Licorice Pizza is how loose it is. Rather than straining to flatten us with grandiosity, Anderson has applied his considerable craft to a story that is warm, earnest, and relaxed. This is far from the weightiest effort of his career, but it may well be the sweetest. (The only real competition in that regard comes from the euphoric Punch-Drunk Love.) Read More

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West Side Story: There’s Still Grace for Us

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ariana DeBose and David Alvarez in Steven Spielberg's West Side Story

Is West Side Story Steven Spielberg’s first musical, or his 30th? For nearly half a century, one of cinema’s greatest directors has been concocting robust sequences that bear the indicia of musical numbers: nimble choreography, balletic grace, syncopated rhythm. To survey his most impressive achievements—the vigorous chases of Raiders of the Lost Ark, the rampaging dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, the futuristic mayhem of Minority Report, and countless more—is to witness the work of a filmmaker who applies his craft with the precision of an inveterate composer. In essence, Spielberg has been making musicals for 50 years; West Side Story is just the first one that happens to include songs.

One of the ironies of his new feature is that those songs are virtually the opposite of original creations. Instead, viewers with even a cursory knowledge of Broadway hits will instantly recognize the soaring melodies of Leonard Bernstein and the snappy lyrics of Stephen Sondheim, which (as if you need me to tell you) were repurposed six decades ago by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins into an Oscar-sweeping smash. This familiarity necessarily dilutes the frisson of anticipation that attends any new Spielberg picture—how can Hollywood’s preeminent dazzler dazzle us when we’ve already been dazzled?—yet it also makes a certain sense. Spielberg’s virtuosity as a director lies not in his talent for pure invention (he hardly ever writes his own scripts), but in his gift for wielding the traditional elements of cinematic action—running, jumping, driving, dancing—in exhilarating new ways. Read More

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