Grade: B

Alpha review: The Girl with the Nag and Tattoo

Jeremy BeckReviews
Golshifteh Farahani and Mélissa Boros in Alpha

She’s only made three movies, but Julia Ducournau has already built her own cinematic festival of female suffering and endurance, focusing on women plagued by peculiar conditions. In Raw, the heroine seemed perfectly normal until she was overcome with a genetic craving that compelled her to eat her sister’s severed finger. Her challenges were trivial compared to the lead in Titane, a murderess whose automotive copulations slowly transformed her internal fluids into motor oil. Next to her, the tribulations of Alpha, the 13-year-old girl at the center of Ducournau’s eponymous new whatsit, are relatively prosaic; she just got a tattoo via a dirty needle and may have become infected with a strange virus. This quickly proves to be the least of her problems.

Having seen all of Ducournau’s features, I’m not sure that I’ve properly understood any of them. This is, mostly, a compliment. Aesthetically speaking, the French provocateur is a gifted and fearless stylist, using robust techniques and bold aural and visual flourishes. Intellectually, her works tend to be ambitious and enigmatic, probing thorny ideas but refusing to neatly spell out their themes. This can be vexing, but the inherent tension—the collision between muscular filmmaking and knotty storytelling—is also enveloping. You enjoy getting lost in the labyrinth. Read More

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Avatar: Fire and Ash review: In the Flame of the Father

Jeremy BeckReviews
Zoe Saldaña and Sam Worthington in Avatar: Fire and Ash

Pandora represents the promise of the new. In narrative terms, the Avatar pictures aren’t revolutionary; they refract age-old tales—about conquest and heroism, exploration and degradation, love and loss—through their own giddy popular mythology. But they are nonetheless designed to astonish viewers with their visual bravado and innovative grammar. In Avatar and its sequel, The Way of Water, James Cameron showed us things we’ve never seen before: blue warriors catapulting through the air and landing on orange winged beasts; reef-dwellers diving into the ocean and communing with its exotic flora and fauna; luminescent landscapes glittering with color and danger. The challenge for the third installment, Fire and Ash, is not just to perpetuate Pandora’s extant wonders, but to conceive of even more dazzling forms of cinematic novelty.

Judged against that lofty standard, Fire and Ash falls a bit short. It is, to be clear, a hugely impressive movie: vibrant and gorgeous, with engaging characters and provocative ideas. But it is also something of a recycling, repurposing its predecessors’ brilliant technique without equaling their sense of true discovery. It’s expectedly amazing. Read More

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In Jay Kelly and 100 Nights of Hero, Storytelling Is the Story

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Maika Monroe in 100 Nights of Hero; George Clooney in Jay Kelly

Movies aren’t folktales. They don’t change over time, like myths relayed around a campfire. But they are nevertheless ideal vehicles for telling stories, and their unique form allows them to explore the process of how we perpetuate fiction. Last weekend featured the arrival of two films that are very different in structure and style, but which both wrestle with the metatextual relationship between artist and audience. It’s a subject that sounds academic but proves, at least in these two instances, to be awfully entertaining.

Jay Kelly is named for its main character, a man who is less a famous actor than a megawatt celebrity. Entering his 60s, he’s been captivating ticket-buyers for decades, working in a variety of genres—action flicks, mature dramas, romantic comedies—yet always brandishing his singular screen presence. He is handsome, eloquent, charming. I should probably mention that he’s played by George Clooney. Read More

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Thanksgiving Roundup: Zootopia 2, Frankenstein, Train Dreams, Rental Family, Sentimental Value

Jeremy BeckReviews
The fox in Zootopia 2; Oscar Isaac in Frankenstein; Joel Edgerton in Train Dreams; Brendan Fraser in Rental Family; Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value

In a perfect world, I’d use this website to write long-form reviews of every new movie I watched. Sadly, I lack both the time and the talent to do so. Yet my combination of OCD and narcissism compels me to always register my opinions in some fashion—typically via Letterboxd, where I can scribble down two-paragraph capsules that convey my overarching thoughts without adhering to the formal style and detail of a proper review. (For example, I never found the time to review Hamnet, but my spoiler-heavy Letterboxd blurb digs into that film’s majestic ending.) I try not to shill for corporations, but whether you’re the dorkiest of cinephiles or just a casual viewer, it’s a free and useful app, and—what was I saying about narcissism again?—if you’re ever searching for my thoughts on a movie that I didn’t review here, you can likely find them there.

This week, though, rather than choosing a single title to highlight, we’re going rapid-fire through some recent releases—a blend of audience-pleasing blockbusters, independent fare, and streamers that Netflix refused to let you see in a theater. Let’s get to it. Read More

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Predator: Badlands review: All Riot on the Western Hunt

Jeremy BeckReviews
Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi in Predator: Badlands

In Alien, Ian Holm described the titular xenomorph as a creature “unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” The Predator, the snarling extraterrestrial villain of Fox’s other flagship sci-fi/horror franchise, is marginally more humanoid, but it’s similarly ruthless; in the 38 years since Arnold Schwarzenegger christened it “one ugly motherfucker,” it’s never betrayed any sense of compassion. Still, beneath its primal bloodlust there has always lurked a hint of, if not humanity, then at least sincerity. Whereas the Alien is driven by evolutionary imperatives, the Predator carries itself with a certain swagger, busting heads and ripping out spinal cords with taunting superiority. It doesn’t kill because it has to; it kills because that’s what makes it happy.

So it isn’t entirely a subversion that Predator: Badlands envisions its central beast not as a savage lone wolf but as a scorned member of a functioning society. Its main character, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), may have the flattened snout and black dreadlocks from Predator flicks of yore, but he is initially defined by his relative weakness. Dek isn’t a murdering machine; he’s just a little brother, one who’s desperate to impress both his elder sibling and his disapproving father, the latter of whom dismisses him as a runt. Inferiority complex, daddy issues, obsessed with cool toys—Predators, they’re just like us! Read More

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