Grade: B minus

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: Role-Playing Maims

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophia Lillis, Justice Smith, Chris Pine, and Michelle Rodriguez in Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The key to a successful Dungeons & Dragons campaign, as I understand it—my knowledge derives not from personal experience, but from pop-cultural representations in shows like Stranger Things, Freaks and Geeks, and Community—is the careful blend of imagination, collaboration, and luck. Honor Among Thieves, the new wannabe D&D franchise-starter directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley (who also wrote the screenplay with Michael Gilio), possesses each of these qualities in moderate measure, as though it’s distributing a maximum allotment of points across various attributes. It’s mildly creative, a little fortunate (in the current environment, a non-superhero fantasy epic feels positively refreshing), and boisterously cooperative. It is the last of these traits which rescues it from the crowded bucket of corporatized slop, turning yet another soulless IP extension into a passable diversion.

If that sounds like faint praise, remember that we’re talking about a big-screen adaptation of a fucking board game. Yet the pleasure of RPGs lies in their facility for assembling friends around a table (Daley got his acting start playing one of the nerdy gamers on Freaks and Geeks), so it’s fitting that this Dungeons & Dragons functions as an ensemble heist picture. Sure, there are presumed easter eggs in the form of fancy artifacts, mighty creatures, powerful enchantments, and exotic locations. (As the title promises, we begin in a dungeon before eventually meeting multiple dragons.) But most important, there is a motley gang of roguish outlaws, banding together to accomplish a common purpose. Read More

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Quick Hits: Scream VI, Cocaine Bear, Creed III, Magic Mike 3, and Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan in Creed III; Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear; Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in Scream VI; Emma Mackey in Emily; Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance

Between the Oscars, our TV rankings, and our list of the year’s best movies, it’s been a busy past month here at MovieManifesto. As a result, while I was able to write a few proper reviews of new movies (the new Shyamalan, the new Ant-Man), I neglected to make time for a bunch of additional 2023 films. That changes now! Well, sort of. Unlike Lydia Tár, I can’t stop time, so I’m unable to carve out enough space for full reviews. Instead, we’re firing off some quick-and-dirty capsules, checking in on five recent releases. Let’s get to it.

Scream VI. The clever double-act of the Scream pictures—the platonic ideal established by the first installment and never quite equaled since—is that they’re movies about scary movies and are also, well, scary movies. In the prior episode, Scream (which should have been called Scream 5, but never mind), new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett satisfied one and only one side of that equation, cleverly skewering the toxic fandom that attends modern discourse but failing to serve up memorable carnage. Now returning with Scream VI, the pair have essentially flipped the script. The meta ideas bandied about here are a little less trenchant, but the nuts-and-bolts execution—and executions—is first-class. Read More

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Knock at the Cabin: Whoever Wins, They Choose

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dave Bautista, Abby Quinn, and Nikki Amuka-Bird in Knock at the Cabin

In one of the many tense sequences in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, a young woman implores a housemate to shut the door before a malevolent force breaks through: “Don’t let them in!” That same pleading desperation permeates the opening scenes of Knock at the Cabin, Shyamalan’s new thriller, which finds a vacationing family—an adorable seven-year-old named Wen (Kristen Cui) and her two fathers, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Spoiler Alert’s Ben Aldridge)—under sudden assault from a quartet of armed, menacing invaders. But where The Village cultivated a tone of suffocating suspense (what will happen?), the mood here is instead one of clammy inevitability. The trespassers break through the cabin’s fortifications with minimal resistance, quickly tying up our heroes and establishing that the movie will not unfold as a typical home-invasion yarn. Sure, you may briefly wonder whether the victims will use their collective guile to escape (did someone just mention Chekhov’s gun?), but mostly you ponder why the intruders are there and—once you learn that answer—whether there is any legitimacy to their stated purpose.

Ever the economical storyteller, Shyamalan answers the first of those questions in a matter of minutes. (Even he isn’t as efficient as the film’s trailer, which naturally divulges the entire plot.) The housebreakers—led by gentle-giant Leonard (a very fine Dave Bautista), who’s joined by the fretful Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), the timid Adriane (Abby Quinn), and the surly Redmond (Rupert Grint, currently starring on the Shyamalan-produced Servant)—behave according to a peculiar, seemingly contradictory code. On the one hand, they are obviously threatening, with their crude weapons (mallets, picks) and their grim determination. Yet despite their forcible entry and disturbing fervor, they insist—with apparent honesty—that they aren’t there to hurt anyone. Rather, they solemnly inform their captives that unless the family sacrifices one of its own, the world will end. And to prove the truth of their purported prophecy, they will ritualistically kill one of their own until the prisoners—watching helplessly, and goosed by ensuing television reports of global bedlam—resolve to make an impossible choice. Read More

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Women Talking: Hide and Speak

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ben Whishaw, Rooney Mara, and Claire Foy in Women Talking

If you think the title of Women Talking is bluntly descriptive, wait until you hear the perspective of Neitje (Liv McNeil). Fifteen years old and perpetually frustrated, she takes stock of the surrounding proceedings—a nonstop parade of feminine discourse and verbiage—and groans, “This is so boring!” It’s a wry meta moment that also (ahem) speaks to the unenviable difficulties facing Sarah Polley, the gifted and empathetic director who has chosen, for her first feature in a decade, to adapt the popular novel by Miriam Toews. That title is no lie; this is a dialogue-driven movie with limited action (the catalyzing incidents occur offscreen) and minimal plot. The challenge for Polley, who also wrote the screenplay with Toews, is to invest what’s primarily a verbal exercise with cinematic verve and dramatic urgency.

If she doesn’t exactly succeed, she has at least answered Neitje’s complaint with guile and skill. Women Talking is hardly kinetic, but it’s paced briskly enough to stave off accusations of sluggishness. If anything, some of Polley’s editing techniques—rather than deploying typical flashbacks, she frequently inserts random, lightning-quick cuts to prior brutalities (blood smeared on walls, bruises dotting legs)—are too abrasive to be boring. These moments tend to be more distracting than disquieting, and they don’t so much jolt the story to life as disrupt its fluid rhythms. Still, Polley evades point-and-shoot banality, and some of the film’s artistic choices—the desaturated color scheme that looks like the camera is fighting through a scrim, the rippling guitar-plucked score from Hildur Guðnadóttir, the ominous overhead shot of wagons pushing past onlookers in white straw hats—lend double meaning to an early title card that reads, “What follows is an act of female imagination.” Read More

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Amsterdam: Dutch Ado About Nothing

Jeremy BeckReviews
Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington in Amsterdam

Throughout Amsterdam, things break: an ugly teapot, a bird’s egg, a man’s optic nerve, a loveless marriage. Yet because it’s the work of David O. Russell, the movie views such destruction not with sadness but with opportunity. A grinning carny barker whose attractions are warped and trampled human feelings, Russell savors goofy misfits, with their thwarted dreams and foiled scams. He likes to break things—and people—apart so that he can put them back together.

He doesn’t always succeed. Russell’s career is wildly uneven, not to mention polarizing; survey critics, and you’re unlikely to find consensus on his three best films. (For the record, they are Three Kings, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle.) Amsterdam, Russell’s first feature in seven years, showcases the director at his best and worst; it’s full of vibrant verve and stylish flair and ragged writing and quite a bit of nonsense. (His last picture, Joy, was similarly bumpy, suggesting that he’s grown consistently inconsistent.) In fact, the main characters here repeatedly improvise what they call “a nonsense song,” coming together to warble an off-key melody accompanied by incomprehensible lyrics, and it works handily as metaphor for the movie itself: meandering and patchy, yet oddly charming and full of life. Read More

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