Grade: B minus

Greta: Come for Dinner, Stay Forever

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chloë Grace Moretz and Isabelle Huppert in "Greta".

It would be unfair to accuse Greta of jumping the rails, because it’s never on the rails in the first place. Deeply silly and persistently entertaining, this campy thriller would be laughable if it were remotely interested in being taken seriously. Thankfully, the director Neil Jordan, working from a script he wrote with Ray Wright, seems to have recognized the material’s inherent kitsch; he abandons logic and nuance in favor of cheesy suspense. He wants to give you goose bumps, not dig under your skin.

It’s a smart decision, if not as smart as casting Isabelle Huppert in the title role. One of the most intuitive actors in the world, Huppert often flashes a steely sternness, a rigidity that she wields to mask her characters’ inner pain and longing. The logline of Greta—elderly immigrant widow befriends bereaved Manhattan twentysomething—feints at a sober exploration of maternal isolation and compassion, and if you enter the film with no knowledge of its premise, you might expect the title character to be another of Huppert’s keenly intelligent, emotionally fraught women. But while she may be quick-witted and determined, Greta is not especially humane. In fact, she isn’t even human, because she’s actually a vampire. Read More

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On the Basis of Sex: Fighting for Equality, Through the Law and Gritted Teeth

Jeremy BeckReviews
Felicity Jones as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in "On the Basis of Sex".

Last year, the documentary RBG attempted to honor the extraordinary life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, charting her path from able young mind to Harvard Law student to U.S. Supreme Court Justice to feminist icon to internet meme. It was a well-intentioned effort that suffered from the usual pitfalls of cinematic hagiography, struggling to compress 85 years of the life of one of the most important legal figures in modern American history into a tidy 98 minutes. On the Basis of Sex, the new Ginsburg biopic from Mimi Leder, takes a narrower approach, homing in on two key periods in its subject’s life: her challenges as one of the few female students at Harvard, and her early labors as a litigator striving for women’s equality. Where RBG’s impact was glancing—to borrow from Supreme Court terminology, it felt more like a syllabus than a full opinion—Leder’s film lands a blow with something resembling force.

If the boxing metaphor seems peculiar, bear in mind that, despite trafficking in bookish disciplines and legal arcana, On the Basis of Sex is essentially a sports movie. Its heroine, played with poise and pluck by Felicity Jones, is the proverbial underdog, fighting to rise through the ranks and topple an entrenched dynasty. Its villains, most notably personified by Sam Waterston as Harvard’s dean of students, are pillars of the establishment, wielding their superior resources—money, power, connections—to extend their unbroken streak of competitive dominance. There are triumphs and setbacks, eager rookies and cagey veterans, strategic coaching maneuvers and breezy montages. There is even a Big Game, with a climactic moment designed to be as suspenseful as the final jump shot in Hoosiers. Read More

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Holiday Gift Bag: Vice

Jeremy BeckReviews
Christian Bale is Dick Cheney in Adam McKay's "Vice"

Adam McKay fancies himself an educator. He may clothe his films in the garb of genre, but only as a way to stealthily impart some wisdom onto unsuspecting audiences. And so, The Other Guys was a dumb buddy-cop comedy that attempted to smuggle in some rhetoric about financial malfeasance; The Big Short more directly addressed the collapse of America’s housing market, but it did so in the guise of a playful procedural, chronicling how a few smart guys got rich while the banks went bankrupt. Now comes Vice, a cheerful comedy that also happens to be a biopic of one of the nation’s most loathsome politicians, Dick Cheney.

You may quarrel with McKay’s politics, but you cannot deny that as a director, he has developed his own signature style. That is not a compliment. Vice, which hectically barrels through four decades of Cheney’s life before slowing its pace slightly during his fateful years in the Bush administration, often seems like a two-hour music video—the ugliest, messiest, least sexy such video ever made. Each shaky shot is held for approximately two seconds, while every scene is constantly interrupted by a barrage of random inserts, whether quick-hitting flashbacks or footage of wildlife metaphorically moving in for the kill. It’s like if a history textbook were animated by Paul Greengrass. Read More

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Bohemian Rhapsody: Thunderbolt and Lightning, Not Very Frightening

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury in "Bohemian Rhapsody"

Sparring with a grumpy studio executive over the direction of his ascendant band, Freddie Mercury insists that Queen’s new record will have operatic overtones, thereby defying the traditional formula of “Do it again, only bigger.” The suit balks. “I like formula,” he retorts, and well he should; formula has made him money. Bohemian Rhapsody, the new middle-of-the-road biopic about Mercury and Queen, frames this studio head as an out-of-touch buffoon, a crass businessman solely interested in profit and utterly lacking in artistic vision; the band, in contrast, is perceived as constantly knocking down barriers and fearlessly reinventing itself.

The juxtaposition is ironic, because while Bohemian Rhapsody may chronicle 15 years in the life of one of rock-and-roll’s seminal musicians, in terms of ambition and execution, it is entirely on the side of the suit. Which is to say: This movie is pure formula. Take a solitary dreamer with starry eyes and a disapproving dad; introduce him to some pleasant and unmemorable fellow aspirants looking for their own big break; show the group coming together to create some of rock’s classic tunes; follow a montage of their success with a reveal of slowly deepening fissures of dissension; mix in some substance abuse and romantic trauma; conclude with a harmonious reunion that reminds everyone of the unsullied joy of making music. Stuff everything in a blender and press “Play”, then wait for the dollars to start pouring out. Read More

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Suspiria: Witchy Women, Dying and Born Again

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dakota Johnson dances her way into Hell in "Suspiria"

Dance is death in Suspiria, Luca Guadagnino’s insane, exasperating, furiously watchable remake of Dario Argento’s 1977 cult classic. The collision of beauty and brutality on stage is hardly novel; Black Swan gave us a feral portrait of a performer who helplessly sacrificed her body and her sanity in the pursuit of artistic perfection. But Suspiria posits ballet as a more malevolent sort of blood sport, where lithe women twirl and leap and crash, all while sinister forces lurk behind the gleaming mirrors and beneath the polished floorboards, eager to feed on the talents of the young. I’m not speaking metaphorically; this really is a movie about a desiccated matriarch who craves to transplant her soul from her own befouled body into the supple flesh of an unsuspecting protégé. And you thought the battles in the Step Up franchise were intense!

Of course, Suspiria is more (or maybe less) than a gonzo supernatural thriller. “I could explain everything to you; I think that would be wrong, though,” an instructor murmurs to an unnerved pupil. I can’t explain much of anything to you, because this movie defies easy description, even as it eagerly courts post-hoc analysis. Suffice it to say that Suspiria seems to be about many things. Perhaps it’s about the intersection of political activism and grass-roots fanaticism, given that it’s set in Germany 1977 and glancingly depicts (by way of news broadcasts and radio snippets) the death knell of the Baader-Meinhof movement. Maybe it’s about femininity and solidarity, seeing as it traces the relationships—the camaraderie, the rivalries, the jealousy and admiration—of a company of female dancers at an elite academy. Maybe it’s about self-discovery; its main character, Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), initially enters the conservatory’s halls with timidity, only to quickly reveal herself as an ambitious and capable dancer with a hunger for stardom. Maybe it’s about the persistence of fascism; how else to explain the extensive subplot about an elderly German man searching for his wife, who’s believed to have vanished decades ago at the Concentration Camps? Or maybe it’s just about a bunch of old women who want to be young again. Read More

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