Grade: B plus

The Royal Hotel: Do You Come from a Small-Town Blunder

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jessica Henwick and Julia Garner in The Royal Hotel

Finalizing the paperwork, the interviewer asks a throwaway, borderline-rhetorical question: “Are you OK with receiving a little male attention?” The two young women sitting across from her exchange a smirk. “I think we can handle that,” one of them responds with a twinkle in her eye. The forms are stamped, the directions are provided, and without ceremony our heroines accept their offer of temporary employment—a comfy gig that gradually turns into a fraught, transformative odyssey.

This is the innocuous, loaded opening of Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel, and while the movie’s gradual shift from road-trip hangout to claustrophobic reckoning is dramatic, it doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise—not if you’ve seen Green’s first feature, The Assistant. That film transpired over a single dreary day in the Manhattan office of a Hollywood studio, where an ambitious gofer busied about her dull and dispiriting work in an atmosphere thick with complicity and abuse. Aside from a single tête-à-tête with an HR manager, nothing really happened in The Assistant, but Green nonetheless turned her protagonist’s sober, shameful routine into a trenchant commentary on feminine helplessness and male power. Comparatively speaking, The Royal Hotel represents a significant logistical expansion; it spans two weeks rather than 24 hours, it visits multiple locations, and it features a number of incidents which, when tied together, resemble something akin to a plot. But the two pictures share a fully formed sensibility—a yin-yang anxiety of impotence and rage. Read More

Read more

Landscape with Invisible Hand: Grave New World

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kylie Rogers and Asante Blackk in Landscape with Invisible Hand

Cory Finley won’t repeat himself. You couldn’t have blamed him, following his electrifying debut of Thoroughbreds, if he’d chosen to keep making razor-sharp thrillers his whole career. Instead he pivoted to docudrama with Bad Education, telling the fact-based story of a different sort of sociopath who preyed on people not with poison and knives but with smiles and scams. His new movie, Landscape with Invisible Hand, is also partially set in the classroom, but the malfeasance it chronicles is far stranger than garden-variety embezzlement. Early on, an English teacher informs his students that his “microscopic salary” has nevertheless been deemed too onerous for the new administration. He then strolls into the courtyard and, with minimal fanfare, puts a gun in his mouth and splatters his brains all over the concrete. Bad education, indeed.

It’s a jolting introduction, one which signals that the ensuing picture won’t conform to the sanitized standards of the young-adult playbook. But the oddness of Landscape with Invisible Hand is apparent even earlier. Its very first scene finds a young aspiring painter named Adam Campbell (Asante Blackk, from This Is Us) sketching a vista of the bright blue sky, only for his view to become clouded when a gigantic flying saucer rolls overhead. That might seem alarming, but Adam reacts with resigned annoyance—“Find someplace else to park!”—and we immediately realize that we’re watching a piece of dystopian fiction. But where many alien-invasion films traffic in terror and violence, this one is characterized by drudgery and disenchantment. Read More

Read more

Barbie: Once in a Keneration

Jeremy BeckReviews
Simu Liu, Margot Robbie, and Ryan Gosling in Barbie

Greta Gerwig likes a challenge. After her smashing debut of Lady Bird, which revitalized the hoary coming-of-age picture (and which this critic deemed one of the best movies of the prior decade), she pivoted to Little Women, a story that’s been adapted so many times, it was hard to imagine anyone breathing new life into it. Yet by leveraging her own ingenuity and craft (not to mention Saoirse Ronan’s eyes), she succeeded, transforming a well-trod literary classic into an urgently modern depiction of female fraternity. Now she turns to Barbie, which presents an even greater adaptive difficulty. After all, here is a live-action summer blockbuster that is based—as its cheeky, 2001-referencing cold open freely acknowledges—on a fucking doll.

Barbie is my least favorite of Gerwig’s three features as a (solo) director to date. But to judge her latest effort purely against the magnificence of her prior accomplishments would be, to quote a blond icon from a different generation, way harsh. If she hasn’t maintained her own level of excellence, she has nevertheless demolished any reasonable set of expectations for what a Mattel-inspired movie could be. Barbie is a fleet and entertaining romp—a gorgeously designed film that buzzes with energy and wit, even as it also makes room for some genuine ideas. Read More

Read more

In the Chamber Dramas “Reality” and “Sanctuary,” Women Fight the Power

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Sydney Sweeney in Reality; Margaret Qualley in Sanctuary

If television can have bottle episodes, can cinema have bottle movies? It probably isn’t worth the taxonomic trouble, given that TV critics routinely rant about how the term is misused. (Traditionally, “bottle episode” describes an installment that’s shot on a single set with no guest stars; it’s gained favor of late as a stylistic departure, but its primary motivation used to be financial rather than artistic.) Still, the minimalist concept—confined location, small cast—isn’t unique to television; plenty of feature films deploy a similar chamber-drama format, attempting to turn their modest mise-en-scène into showcases for narrative suspense and psychological complexity.

Last month saw the release of two such pictures—Reality, a fact-based docudrama about intelligence analyst Reality Winner, and Sanctuary, a two-hander about a sex worker and her wealthy client—both of which feature women trying to claim a measure of agency within a patriarchal structure. In one, the power dynamics are patently lopsided from the start; in the other, they’re the fulcrum of an ever-shifting battleground. Read More

Read more

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: What a Spangled Web We Weave

Jeremy BeckReviews
Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

It’s cinematic law that sequels need to be bigger, which presents a daunting challenge for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Its predecessor, the spry and snazzy Into the Spider-Verse, was awfully big to begin with, taking a familiar superhero origin story—this one centering on Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), an affable Brooklyn teenager who receives that famous radioactive insect bite—and then bombarding the screen with many more Spider-Men (well, actually Spider-People… OK, technically Spider-Animals) who arrived from different realms in the multiverse. It was a whole lot of movie, as noteworthy for its energetic style—busy, boisterous animation that evoked the splash panels of comic books without devolving into pastiche—as for its hectic, cluttered narrative. How could a follow-up one-up such vibrant maximalism?

Quite cleverly, as it turns out. Fueled by a powerful cocktail of joy and ambition, Across the Spider-Verse steers into the multiversal skid, embracing its own storytelling paradoxes with delirious abandon. It’s a dizzying and at times exhausting movie, and it doesn’t entirely evade the trap of saturation that foils many blockbusters; as the latter Avengers pictures proved, more superheroes doesn’t always equate to more fun. But the filmmakers here—the credited directors are Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers (from Soul), and Justin K. Thompson, while the screenwriters are Dave Callaham and the ubiquitous team of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (makers of The LEGO Movie)—have located the sweet spot between playfulness and gravity. It isn’t that Across the Spider-Verse refuses to take itself seriously; it’s that it seriously commits to itself as a work of childlike invention and artistic imagination. Read More

Read more