Grade: B plus

Star Trek Beyond: Deep in Space, a Crew Bands Together

Jeremy BeckReviews
Simon Pegg, Sofia Boutella, and Chris Pine in "Star Trek Beyond"

“Things have started to feel a little episodic,” Jim Kirk confesses at the beginning of Star Trek Beyond, the fleet and fun third installment of the rebooted Star Trek franchise. He’s musing about his role overseeing the increasingly routine voyages of the Starship Enterprise, but it doesn’t require a doctorate in meta to connect his observations to the other vehicle he’s piloting, namely the Star Trek franchise itself. Kirk’s opening voiceover articulates the central challenge that every studio-sanctioned cinematic series faces: How do you continue serving your fans but prevent the proceedings from growing stale? Can you deliver something more without just providing more of the same?

Star Trek Beyond—directed by Fast & Furious veteran Justin Lin, taking the reins from J.J. Abrams (who has since migrated to a different galaxy)—doesn’t entirely solve this paradox, but it does thread the needle about as well as a big-budget three-quel can. Light and lively, with a refreshing focus on character and a blessed scarcity of mind-numbing spectacle, it’s a satisfying continuation, one that cannily plays up the franchise’s strengths (interpersonal dynamics, cheeky comedy) while minimizing its weaknesses (lack of stakes, weightless space battles). It may be just another episode in the adventures of the Enterprise crew, but it’s a damn good episode. Read More

Read more

The Shallows: The Bold Babe and the Sea

Jeremy BeckReviews
Blake Lively takes on a shark in "The Shallows"

Water, water is everywhere in The Shallows, and there isn’t a drop to drink, though that’s due less to its salt than its color. Not long into this lean, mean thriller from Jaume Collet-Serra, the tranquil blue of the sea’s waves gets stained with blood, and a peaceful getaway transforms into a harrowing struggle of survival. It never becomes anything more than that, but that’s part of its charm. The Shallows may lack the towering ambition of Gravity or the scrupulous minimalism of All Is Lost, but its gritty flair and appealing star nevertheless make it a worthy entrant in the “man vs. nature” canon. At the very least, it will have you thinking twice the next time you consider wading into the water.

Not that The Shallows‘ opening act is particularly frightening; in fact, if you ignore the scary tone-setting prologue, it’s positively idyllic. Our protagonist is Nancy (a revelatory Blake Lively), a medical student journeying to a secluded Mexican beach that her mother once told her about. It’s as advertised, with golden sand leading into a majestic gulf whose giant waves render this isolated inlet a surfer’s paradise. Read More

Read more

Captain America: Civil War—Dissension in the Superhero Ranks

Jeremy BeckReviews
A host of heroes charges the field in "Captain America: Civil War"

Early in Captain America: Civil War, a character called Vision (Paul Bettany) muses on his brethren’s tendency to antagonize. “Conflict breeds catastrophe,” he gloomily intones. Maybe so. But at the movies, conflict is the engine of drama. Yet while the Marvel Cinematic Universe comprises films that feature plenty of fighting, they’re largely lacking in genuine excitement. The Avengers sequel had its Whedonesque charms, but it ultimately amounted to a bunch of costumed warriors trading blows with an army of faceless flying robots. Ditto for Iron Man 3, except there, the robots were the good guys. Ant-Man was fitfully funny, but it was still an absurd movie about a dude who talked to bugs. Thor? Please.

The recent exception to this institutional lethargy—setting aside the terrific Guardians of the Galaxy, which was literally a universe removed from the rest of the MCU—was Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Directed by Anthony and Joe Russo, it was less a superhero movie than a paranoid thriller, and its stripped-down quality lent it a rare spark of intrigue. Now the Russos are back with Civil War, a far more unwieldy but no less thoughtful superhero extravaganza. Like all Marvel movies, it’s large and loud, with special effects and action sequences galore, but it nonetheless feels rooted in its characters rather than its gee-whiz battle scenes. Every comic-book film has combat; Civil War has actual conflict. Read More

Read more

Green Room: Beware of Dog and Neo-Nazis

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anton Yelchin, Joe Cole, and Alia Shawkat, trapped in "Green Room"

“When you take it all virtual, you lose the texture,” Pat says early in Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s lean, nasty, uncompromising new thriller. Pat, played by the squirrelly actor Anton Yelchin, is speaking about his band’s grass-roots approach to music, but he’s also serving as a mouthpiece for his writer-director. A roughneck at heart, Saulnier doesn’t so much defy cinema’s technological advances—like most low-budget filmmakers, he shoots in digital, a relatively newfangled technique—but exploits them to make movies that are primal and proudly unpolished. His previous feature, Blue Ruin, embraced a popular genre (the revenge picture) while simultaneously upending that genre’s conventions, but it was most noticeable for its atmosphere, a queasy aura of sweat, grime, and helpless panic. Now he brings us Green Room, a terror film about a handful of people locked in a tiny space, desperate to escape. Its setup is familiar, but its execution is marvelously visceral. The result is both exhilarating and oddly strangulating—you cannot help but enjoy this movie’s assaultive body blows, even as its hands begin to tighten around your neck.

Pat is the bassist for the Ain’t Rights, a punk-rock four-piece also featuring lead singer Tiger (Callum Turner), guitarist Sam (Alia Shawkat, miles from her iconic role on Arrested Development), and drummer Reece (Joe Cole, from the BBC’s Peaky Blinders). They’re touring the Pacific Northwest, though “touring” is a generous term for their ritual, which consists of scrounging for gigs at sparsely populated clubs and siphoning gas from parked cars to keep their rundown van moving. After plowing through a particularly humiliating performance that nets them six bucks apiece, they get wind of another opportunity outside nearby Portland, which they accept eagerly. When they arrive at the venue—a backwoods bar just east of nowhere—they discover that they’ve been mislabeled “The Aren’t Rights” and, more disconcertingly, that the place is populated by skinheads and is adorned with Nazi paraphernalia. Being iconoclasts, they settle on a special number for the opening song of their set: a cover of Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off!”. Read More

Read more

Everybody Wants Some!!: College Ballplayers, Hazed and Amused

Jeremy BeckReviews
Blake Jenner, Glen Powell, Temple Baker, and Tyler Hoechlin in Richard Linklater's "Everybody Wants Some!!"

Ah, college. Remember your freshman year, when all you did was guzzle beer, smoke pot, and bang hot girls? Sadly, neither do I. But whether Everybody Wants Some!!—the fun, effortless, secretly sweet new film from cinema’s slacker emeritus, Richard Linklater—is a clandestine autobiography of its director’s misspent youth or a fantasy of testosterone-laced revelry, it doesn’t much matter. This movie is such a relaxed pleasure, jocks and nerds alike will find its embrace to be irresistible. It’s wreathed in a halcyon glow, but it never dreams of suggesting that the past was better. That would constitute a judgment, and there’s none of that here.

There isn’t all that of much of anything, unless you count warmth, intelligence, and continuous humor. This absence of substance—not to be confused with illicit substances, which flow freely—comes as no surprise. Linklater has made a career out of what might be called epic minimalism, compressing grand, sweeping stories into spare, economical packages. Three years ago, he delivered Before Midnight, the concluding chapter of a trilogy that somehow traced the entire trajectory of a single (and singular) relationship by way of three seemingly mundane single-day episodes. Then he gave us Boyhood, the outrageously ambitious account of a child’s maturation, filmed in discrete stages over the span of a dozen years. One of the remarkable things about Boyhood was that it was defiantly unremarkable, eschewing typical story beats in favor of quiet character moments and thoughtful exploration. Read More

Read more