Grade: B minus

Labor Day roundup: Onslaught, Fall 2: Deadpoint, The Sun Never Sets, and Finding Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adria Arjona in Onslaught; Harriet Slater in Fall 2: Deadpoint; Dakota Fanning in The Sun Never Sets; Angourie Rice in Finding Emily

Hollywood generally dismisses Labor Day Weekend as a dead zone—a dumping ground for thinly marketed fare that studios forgot to release in January. In its history, the holiday has hosted exactly one smash hit (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), while only two other films (The Equalizer 3 and Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake) have ever topped $20M for the Friday-Sunday window. This year was no different—the highest-grossing new release was By Any Means, which pulled in just $7.5M, and which I skipped on account of it starring Mark Wahlberg—but the September slate nonetheless provided a range of odd and diverse pictures. Only one is, y’know, good, but two others are at least worth seeing, and all four are conceptually worthwhile.

Onslaught. The only thing worse than the screenplay in Onslaught is the hairstyling. Adria Arjona, one of the most desirable women in the world, is afflicted with a tangled mane, suggesting that her survivalist heroine devoted all of her budget turning her mobile home into a roving armory and thus can’t afford a comb. Drew Starkey, the handsome actor who has recently engaged in steamy on-screen romances with both Daniel Craig (in Queer) and Anya Taylor-Joy (on TV’s Lucky), sports a blond mohawk that he appears to have trimmed with a cleaver. And Dan Stevens, who embodied aesthetic male perfection in I’m Your Man, is fitted with a frightening bald cap framed by tufts of white follicles. The movie places a handful of ordinary citizens in a nightmarish situation, desperate for deliverance, but what they truly need is less a savior than a barber. Read More

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One Night Only review: Sex, Love, and Uncontrollable Purges

Jeremy BeckReviews
Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner in One Night Only

Earlier this summer, the Trump administration issued new grant criteria, stating that nonprofits seeking federal funding to help prevent teen pregnancy must counsel adolescents about “family stability” and “marriage prior to childbearing.” It then revoked the grant of an agency called Fact Forward, presumably for the sin of teaching teenagers about proper condom use. So the premise of One Night Only—which takes place in an alternate America where premarital sex has been outlawed, with the exception of a single evening per year—seems less preposterous than it might have a decade ago. The movie is set three years in the future, but it may as well take place in a realm of perpetual Project 2025.

You might perceive this scenario—the U.S. government wielding its power as a surveillance state to curtail the bodily autonomy of its citizens, in part by branding trackers onto people’s wrists—as the backbone of a harrowing piece of dystopian fiction. But Will Gluck, directing from a script by Travis Braun, has no interest in exploring the troubling sociopolitical ramifications of this conceit. Instead, he has molded the idea into a lighter, more frivolous creature (those trackers take the form of colored animal tattoos, how cute!), one whose shape is classically familiar but whose appearance on the big screen is vanishingly rare. He’s made a romantic comedy. Read More

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Let’s Get Experimental: Her Private Hell and Motor City

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophie Thatcher in Her Private Hell; Alan Ritchson in Motor City

Fifteen years ago, Nicolas Winding Refn improbably delighted audiences with Drive, a glittering, electronica-tinged jewel of a thriller about a wheelman mired in gangland savagery. Since then, the Danish provocateur has made three features, two TV shows, a handful of shorts, and few new fans. I haven’t seen all of Refn’s post-Drive output, but what I have watched—the films Only God Forgives and The Neon Demon, plus the Netflix miniseries Copenhagen Cowboy—suggests the work of a postmodern imp concocting some sort of experiment in anti-entertainment. With perverse pleasure, Refn assembles the raw materials of putatively interesting pictures—vivid colors, gorgeous actors, shocking violence—and then scrambles them into final products that are dreary and charmless. He seems to fancy himself the cinematic prince of darkness, but his movies are less devilish than simply dull.

Her Private Hell, Refn’s latest piece of feature-length trolling, isn’t without its surface diversions. As befits the studio that distributed it, it supplies a good deal of neon—bright bursts of pink and blue slashing through its literal and metaphoric fog. The production design is, if not exactly legible, at least striking, with jagged plinths and infinite spires. The costumes are eye-catching, in particular a seductive red leather coat that seems intended to inspire fetishism. The movie might be appealing if it weren’t so insufferable. Read More

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Backrooms review: If These Walls Could Stalk

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chiwetel Ejiofor in Backrooms

It’s been a rough few decades for the retail furniture business. First came the internet. Then the housing market crashed. And now arrives Backrooms, a head-tripping horror picture that conceives of a big-box emporium whose basement contains a secret gateway to hell. It’s a work of fiction, but it still might give homeowners pause before they go browsing through the aisles looking for their next loveseat.

Backrooms is the brainchild of Kane Parsons, and the story behind the story—why is this thing such a hit? Just what exactly is a YouTuber? Wait, this guy is twenty?—threatens to overwhelm the movie proper. So it’s important to acknowledge that Backrooms, while far from perfect, is an accomplished and distinctive feature debut. It suggests the work of an artist with his own unique vision, even if that vision isn’t yet fully formed. Read More

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Mother Mary review: Bless This Dress

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway in Mother Mary

The tagline for David Lowery’s Mother Mary reads, “This is not a ghost story.” For certain cinephiles, this seems less like an ominous pronouncement than a bizarre statement of the obvious. Of course this isn’t A Ghost Story; that was Lowery’s 2017 experimental drama, which found Casey Affleck standing under a sheet and Rooney Mara stuffing pie in her face. It was challenging and slow, but it rewarded patience, with a remarkable third act that posed provocative questions about love, marriage, societal evolution, and the whole damn human condition.

Mother Mary is similarly ambitious and not nearly as good. But it has its moments, with impressive individual scenes and striking images. It wields its beauty in service of a thin and listless narrative, but taglines and titles aside, “story” has never been Lowery’s department. Read More

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