Grade: B plus

Inside Out 2: She’s Crossed That Loving Feeling

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Inside Out 2

Could Pixar be growing up? The idea seems odd; from the moment Woody and Buzz debated flying versus “falling with style,” the animation laureate has exhibited a fully formed sensibility—a rich blend of buoyant imagination and piercing insight, conveyed via painstaking computerized craft. But because Disney’s most celebrated cartoon arm remains a commercial enterprise, many of their works still center on wide-eyed children and (more directly) their anxious parents. In recent years, however, the studio has gently expanded its heroes’ ages and preoccupations, telling stories about childless adults (Soul), lovestruck twentysomethings (Elemental), awkward high schoolers (Onward), and angsty kids straddling adolescence (Luca, Turning Red). Now comes Inside Out 2, a movie about a 13-year-old grappling with the chilling prospect (perceived or actual) that her actions in the present will determine the course of her future. It might not be a coming-of-age story in all respects—the notion of sexual attraction stays safely outside its youthful boundaries—but it’s not for nothing that it features a literal alarm blaring the arrival of one of life’s most horrifying rites of passage: puberty.

Creatively speaking, Inside Out 2 attempts to accomplish a similar sort of maturation, expanding the original’s vibrantly detailed universe and complicating its themes. At the same time, it suffers from a certain, inevitable stasis. The first Inside Out, which landed on this critic’s list of the best movies of the 2010s, was remarkable above all for its conceptual innovation—its vision of emotions as anthropomorphized beings that guide our thoughts and behavior while collaborating and bickering in the fashion of a workplace sitcom. Inside Out 2, by virtue of being a sequel, can’t hope to replicate that sense of unprecedented wonder. Instead, it builds upon its predecessor with intelligence and variety, even as it traffics in a degree of repetition that is slightly dispiriting. Read More

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Hit Man: Murder for Liar

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adria Arjona and Glen Powell in Hit Man

Last year, Netflix released David Fincher’s The Killer, a fit between director and subject matter that was so hand-in-glove perfect, it practically felt like a self-portrait. Now the streaming giant is “distributing” (to your TV set, if not to your local theater) Richard Linklater’s Hit Man—a less obvious match. Linklater’s career is sufficiently long (his first feature came in 1990) that he can’t be pigeonholed into a single genre, but his best-known works—Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy, Boyhood—are talky, leisurely dramedies that contemplate the passage of time with relaxed, unforced intimacy. He’s an ambler, not a sprinter. This is the guy to make a movie about an undercover faux assassin?

Turns out, the pairing—like Linklater’s cozy, fluid dialogue—is natural and smooth. That’s partly because Gary Johnson, the New Orleans philosophy professor whose real-life exploits entrapping solicitors of murder were previously chronicled by Skip Hollandsworth in a Texas Monthly article, is less a killer than a bullshitter; he outfoxes his quarry rather than overpowering them. But it’s also because Linklater has wielded his gift for capturing the idiosyncrasies of human connection—the freewheeling conversations, the swirling emotions, the physical attraction—and retrofitted it into a crime-adjacent thriller that’s more concerned with pleasure than violence. The result is a movie that’s consistently enjoyable and even a little suspenseful. Read More

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Dune, Part Two: Getting the Sand Back Together

Jeremy BeckReviews
Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya in Dune: Part Two

We know by now about the Sand Walk—that syncopated stroll across the desert whose arrhythmia helps you avoid detection from those monstrous worms. The irony of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was that, despite its nominal exoticism, it delivered exactly what you anticipated: eye-popping visuals, grandiloquent design, and sonorous performances, all in the service of a predictable story that vacillated between diverting and tedious. You could be forgiven for expecting its sequel to provide more of the same; Dune was a critical and commercial hit, after all, and Hollywood tends not to mess with success. Yet the intervening years spent wandering the sands seem to have inspired Villeneuve, resulting in a richer and more thought-provoking follow-up. The happy surprise of Dune: Part Two isn’t that it’s good. It’s that it’s interesting.

Some of this may be a natural consequence of the source material; Villeneuve and his co-writer, Jon Spaihts, continue their adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, which I’ve never read but which presumably grows in complexity as it progresses. Still, regardless of the underlying inspiration, Dune 2 (or 2une, if you prefer) operates with a level of nuance that its predecessor lacked. The characters in the first movie were largely ciphers, secondary to the colossal world-building that preoccupied Villeneuve’s attention. They now feel like fully rounded people: emotionally fraught, yes, but also persuasively motivated and—in a note that’s unusual for blockbuster cinema—morally grey. Read More

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The Zone of Interest: Heart of Gas

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sandra Hüller in The Zone of Interest

The music speaks the truth. Strip away The Zone of Interest’s first few minutes—a grim overture in which Mica Levi’s doomy, dissonant score aches and seethes against a black screen—and you might suspect that you’ve stumbled into a gentle movie of bucolic bliss. The first image we see is that of a happy-looking family lounging lazily in a meadow. As a stream gurgles nearby, the children traipse along a dirt path, the sun glinting down on their golden hair. Their parents seem entirely relaxed, suggesting a life of comfort and security. Perhaps they’re on vacation, or maybe just enjoying a weekend picnic. Even after they return to their home, a cozy cottage with a carefully tended garden and a small in-ground pool, it takes some time before you pick up on the curious nature of their surroundings: the razor wire atop the large wall in the background, the smoke billowing from distant chimneys, the muffled echoes of gunfire and screams.

Adapted by Jonathan Glazer from a novel by Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest is decidedly a movie about the Holocaust. But it is also not a Holocaust picture—at least, not in the way the subgenre has traditionally been understood. There are no ghastly scenes of extermination, no heroic feats of endurance and survival, no condemnatory speeches, no comeuppance or catharsis. There is simply the pervasive aroma of death, and the people willfully oblivious to its stench. Read More

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May December: It’s a Generational Fling

Jeremy BeckReviews
Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in May December

When we first meet Gracie and Joe, the married couple who constitute two-thirds of the unstable triangle that makes up Todd Haynes’ May December, they seem to be living an enviable fantasy of domestic bliss. Hosting that most idyllic of pastimes, the backyard barbecue, they share a passing kiss before busying themselves with their duties; Joe (Charles Melton) gets to work on the grill, while Gracie (Julianne Moore) bustles in the kitchen. The weather is sunny, the guests are smiling, and the mood is relaxed. But then Gracie opens the refrigerator door, and the music swells ominously as she makes a cataclysmic discovery: “We don’t have enough hot dogs.”

This is a very funny scene, even as it telegraphs Haynes’ bold, borderline-perverse intentions. With this movie, he is taking the meager lives of three pitiful people and imbuing them with the sweep of classic melodrama. Yet he is also doing the opposite: tackling subject matter that is fundamentally vulgar and investing it with extraordinary grace and sensitivity. May December traffics in illicit affairs and tawdry desires, which it heightens with extravagant skill and unapologetic grandeur. But where its bones are theatrical, its heart is achingly sincere. Read More

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