Grade: B

Thunderbolts: Avengers, Resembled

Jeremy BeckReviews
Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan, and Hannah John-Kamen in Thunderbolts

Yelena Belova is bored. She’s just elegantly parachuted into a secret laboratory in Kuala Lumpur, swiftly dispatching a crew of anonymous guards before overpowering a hapless scientist so that she can bypass the facility’s facial-recognition security and retrieve… forget it, it doesn’t matter. The point is that she’s done this sort of thing before. To a layman, such strenuous effort may sound exciting, but for Yelena, it’s just another day at the superhero-adjacent office. She needs something fulfilling, something inspiring, something new.

Thunderbolts is the 36th(!) installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the key to its moderate success is its understanding of Yelena’s self-described ennui. The MCU is no longer the global box-office behemoth it once was, in part because there are only so many times self-important men in metallic suits and spandex can save the world from imminent catastrophe. Thunderbolts, directed by Jake Schreier from a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, is not a great movie; it remains overly reliant on franchise mythology, and its storytelling is a little choppy. But it’s an appealing sit—not just for its welcome lightness of tone, but for its willingness to shift away from standard-issue heroes and toward more colorful, esoteric characters. Specifically, it’s about a bunch of losers. Read More

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Mickey 17: Live Esprit or Die Scarred

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17

Cinema is a medium of imagination, and science-fiction is a genre of possibility. So it’s understandable that movies about the future tend to be, if not optimistic, at least aspirational—conjuring a realm of flying cars and exotic planets and soulful cyborgs. Mickey 17, the latest whatsit from Bong Joon-ho, tacks in the opposite direction. It asks, with a mixture of whimsy and sincerity: What if the future sucks?

To be fair, this line of prospective apprehension has its own gloomy descendants. (Just last year, Alien: Romulus continued that franchise’s preoccupation with capitalistic drudgery, conceiving of a mining colony where indentured servants labored in permanent darkness.) But Bong’s vision here is distinctive for how it depicts galactic exploration as an error-riddled process that’s permanently, perpetually janky. Hardly anything works smoothly in Mickey 17; its characters are constantly beset by glitchy conveyor belts and ineffectual antidotes and crappy cooking, not to mention the usual human malice and venality. It feels a lot like the world of today, only with more spaceships and aliens. Read More

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Presence: Phantom Dread

Jeremy BeckReviews
Callina Liang in Presence

As auteurs go, Steven Soderbergh is relatively humble. His closing credits never use the phrase “a film by,” and while he typically shoots and edits his movies himself—not since 2011’s Contagion has anyone else fulfilled either of those roles in one of his features—he also deploys pseudonyms (Peter Andrews for cinematography, Mary Ann Bernard for editing), as if to minimize the fastidious control he exerts over his own productions. That’s especially noteworthy in the case of Presence, given that its star is, well, Steven Soderbergh—or rather, his camera.

To be sure, there are actors in this movie, which centers on a white-collar nuclear family that’s just moved into an appealing new home in suburban New Jersey; Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan play the parents, respectively named Rebekah and Chris, while their disaffected teenage children are Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang). But the heart of Presence is its titular entity, an invisible being that roams about the house in a state of persistent curiosity, and whose field of vision doubles as the audience’s point of view. Read More

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A Complete Unknown: Don’t Judge a Schnook by His Covers

Jeremy BeckReviews
Timothée Chalamet in A Complete Unknown

In the most memorable scene of Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, a band takes the stage at a music show and turns to their guitar cases, only to retrieve a cache of machine guns and open fire on their unsuspecting audience. It’s a metaphor for the 1965 Newport Festival where Bob Dylan, beginning his pivot from homespun folk to electric oomph, infuriated the fans who’d clamored to hear the plaintive, stripped-down ballads that made him famous. A Complete Unknown, James Mangold’s new Dylan biopic, recreates that historic moment, though it does so with careful fidelity rather than brash surreality. That’s in keeping with the guiding spirit of the movie, which follows Dylan’s early rise and initial backlash while faithfully abiding by the conventions of the genre. In telling the story of the man who revolutionized an art form, it doesn’t exhibit a rebellious bone in its body.

This doesn’t make it bad. In fact, A Complete Unknown is pretty good. It has good music, good actors, good pacing, and good dialogue. (While you’re considering the source, I happen to think I’m Not There is Haynes’ worst picture, but that’s another story.) What it lacks—what it doesn’t even seem to try to achieve—is a sense of majesty or wonder that might befit its subject. It plays the greatest hits without evincing any aspirations toward true greatness. Read More

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Wicked: Thank U, Hexed

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande-Butera in Wicked

At the risk of defying Julie Andrews, let’s start at the ending. Well, it’s really the middle, given that Wicked—Jon M. Chu’s big-screen adaptation of the hit play by Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz, which in turn was based on a novel by Gregory Maguire—has been split into two parts, with the second installment slated to arrive next November. (Lest unsuspecting viewers be startled by this division, the label “Part 1” appears beneath the opening title.) Anyway, shortly before this movie’s intermission conclusion, several of the characters survey architectural blueprints for a planned renovation of Oz, including a certain brick road of indeterminate color. “You don’t like yellow?” the engineer asks. He then magically toggles through a number of alternatives, the miniature boulevard shifting from blue to green to purple.

There’s a lot to process here. To begin with, the mastermind’s effortless manipulation of his punctilious model functions as an obvious metaphor for the role of film director—a visionary tasked with fabricating an environment and bending it to his artistic will. But my more pressing concern is the concept of color itself, and how Wicked dutifully traffics in pigmentation—there are a variety of shades and hues on display—without fully exploiting its power. Read More

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