Grade: B plus

First Man: Making History, One Small Step at a Time

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Gosling shoots for the moon in "First Man".

Just how crazy did you have to be to become an astronaut? These guys clearly must have had a screw loose, because so did their spaceships. At one point in Damien Chazelle’s First Man, as intrepid explorers are piling into a bucket of bolts that’s designed to blast them into the stratosphere, the crew struggles to fasten somebody’s seat belt. The solution: “Anybody got a Swiss Army knife?” That’s right, these are multi-million-dollar missions spearheaded by the country’s greatest minds, yet somehow they’re repairing their vehicles with trinkets from your 10-year-old’s tool kit.

That scene is a blackly comic moment, but it also illuminates the forces that drive First Man’s characters, and its maker. Chazelle’s Whiplash was a bracing portrait of single-minded obsession in the pursuit of perfection; his follow-up, La La Land, was simply perfect, but it also involved artists who dreamed of glory and self-fulfillment. Yet where those movies were taut and intimate, First Man operates on a grand scale, seeking to compress nine years of scientific exploration into two-plus hours of white-knuckle adventure. It’s a monumental undertaking, and for the first time, you can see Chazelle strain, laboring to deliver the epic goods. But he remains a prodigiously gifted filmmaker, and even if First Man lacks the effortless fluidity of his prior works, it also routinely serves up sequences and images that are, literally and figuratively, out of this world. Read More

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Colette: Carnal Explorations, with a Parisian Gloss

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keira Knightley in "Colette"

Early in Colette, the entrepreneur Henry Gauthier-Villars—better known as Willy, his nom de plume—lays out his plan to publish a wildly popular novel. He conceives of an epic work that’s both refined and ribald, literate enough to appeal to highbrows but sufficiently tawdry to intrigue “the unwashed masses”. Then he pauses, musing, “Maybe it’s the other way around.”

He might be onto something. The issue endemic to many period pieces—this one opens in 1892 and spans roughly 15 years—is a surfeit of gentility, and a corresponding lack of vulgarity, like a catered dinner party with no spice and no impudent conversation. Colette plainly has the handsomeness part of the equation down pat, sporting a luxuriant score, ravishing costumes, and fluid camerawork. What surprises and enchants about this movie, which was directed by Wash Westmoreland from a script he wrote with Richard Glatzer (his late husband) and Rebecca Lenkiewicz, is how breezily entertaining it is. Colette is elegant, yes, but it is also funny, sexy, angry, and even a little bit naughty. To paraphrase Gordon Gekko: Gauche is good. Read More

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Juliet, Naked: London Calling, Washed-Up Rock Star Emailing

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rose Byrne and Ethan Hawke in "Juliet, Naked"

If High Fidelity was a lovingly critical look at the maniacal behaviors of fandom—the all-consuming need to know as much as possible about popular artists, and to lord your superior tastes and knowledge over other worshippers of your ilk—Juliet, Naked is about the crippling consequences of artistry itself. Adapted, like High Fidelity, from a novel by Nick Hornby, it stars Ethan Hawke as Tucker Crowe, a has-been musician who a quarter-century ago released a beloved alt-rock album and then suddenly vanished from the public eye. Now he lives in his ex-wife’s garage in Upstate New York, barely knows four of the five children he fathered via four different women, and shuffles through grocery stores looking for cereal and gardening supplies. He’s like the ghost of Jeff Buckley crossed with the Dude from The Big Lebowski, if the Dude still collected royalty checks.

If that sounds like the recipe for a punishing study of squandered talent, never fear. Directed by TV veteran Jesse Peretz (Nurse Jackie, Girls) from a script by Evgenia Peretz (the director’s sister), Jim Taylor, and Tamara Jenkins, Juliet, Naked is a spry and largely delightful romantic comedy, a welcome summer breeze of warm humor and enveloping gentleness. It’s more of a curio than a landmark, which means it’s unlikely to be pored over for decades by the collectors and fanatics who populate Hornby’s works. But its disarming lightness should not be mistaken for insubstantiality. There’s craft in telling a story that’s decidedly pleasurable but doesn’t churn its sweetness into froth. Read More

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Ant-Man and the Wasp: Still Small, But with Big Upgrades

Jeremy BeckReviews
Evangeline Lilly and Paul Rudd in Marvel's "Ant-Man and the Wasp"

When we last left the Marvel Cinematic Universe (all of two months ago!), its foundations had been shaken to their cosmic core. The ending of Avengers: Infinity War carried with it cataclysmic consequences for virtually every member of the MCU, though noticeably absent (or maybe not that noticeably) was Scott Lang, the affable thief better known in comic-book lore as Ant-Man. Perhaps he was busy promoting his own movie. Regardless, in light of Infinity War’s devastating conclusion, it was fair to wonder if Ant-Man and the Wasp—the sequel to the passably entertaining, entirely unmemorable Ant-Man—would feel trivial by comparison. In one sense, it does; after all, no galaxies are threatened in this film, whose kill count is in the single digits rather than the billions. But in another, more important sense, Ant-Man and the Wasp is a significant achievement, because it features a key quality that Infinity War largely lacked. Quite simply: It’s fun.

I don’t want to frame Ant-Man and the Wasp as the antithesis of Infinity War, because it’s still a Marvel movie, with all of the pleasures and obligations that entails. (You’ll never believe this, but Stan Lee has a cameo.) But the differences between the two are nevertheless noteworthy. Where the third official Avengers crossover was absolutely massive—a sprawling undertaking that spanned multiple planets and comprised several dozen heroes and villains—this bug-centric sequel feels insular, with a narrow focus that spares only a handful of glances toward the broader MCU. (Most notable of these is the mid-credits stinger, which elicited gasps at my screening.) And where the tone of Infinity War was grave to the point of lugubriousness, Ant-Man and the Wasp is breezy and jovial. Nobody here is worried about saving the world; they just want to spend time with their families. Read More

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Hereditary: Pall in the Family

Jeremy BeckReviews
Toni Collette is terrorized and terrifying in "Hereditary"

She just had to be a miniaturist. Hereditary, the impressive and excessive and frequently electrifying debut feature from Ari Aster, would have been scary enough if its besieged heroine had worked as a lawyer or a teacher or a writer. But no, the recently orphaned Annie (Toni Collette) is a conceptual artist who specializes in designing tiny panoramas, and there’s something extra-creepy about the way she uses paint and glue to manufacture ornately detailed dollhouses. Maybe it’s the notion of a powerful creator exercising absolute dominion over her realm, not unlike a movie director domineering his helpless audience. It seems more than just a fancy flourish that Hereditary opens in an abandoned attic, the camera slowly rotating from a sunlit window to the shadowy interior, then gradually pushing in on one such minuscule dollhouse bedroom; one invisible special effect later, and that facsimile has become the film’s actual environment, with a man striding through the door to wake his son. It soon becomes clear that this movie, with its countless shrieks and shocks, is itself an artfully assembled prison. You cannot escape from it; you can only hold on for dear life, as Aster buffets you where he may.

That may not sound like your idea of a good time, but for cineastes, Hereditary is essential viewing purely as a matter of formal technique. The horror genre is so durable in part because of its mutability—any political point or allegorical tribute achieves more force when appearing in the guise of zombies or ghosts—but it also draws talented craftsmen with an innate command of cinematic grammar. And while Hereditary is not without its flaws—most notably a third-act tilt into absurdity—Aster’s abilities cannot be in dispute. He wields the camera with elegant precision rather than brute force, favoring silky and captivating long takes as opposed to vulgar jump cuts. His directing is always controlled, even when his writing is utterly bonkers. Read More

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