Grade: B plus

Thanksgiving Roundup: Encanto and House of Gucci

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Stephanie Beatriz in Encanto; Lady Gaga in House of Gucci

The double feature is a long-defunct relic of moviegoing, but lately I’ve done my best to revive the concept in my writing, if only to give myself the excuse to review as many films as possible. But while I’ve previously managed to contort unrelated movies into purportedly similar shapes—Dune and The French Dispatch are both made by obsessive world-building auteurs, King Richard and Tick Tick Boom both contemplate tortured geniuses, Malignant and The Card Counter both go for broke, etc.—this Thanksgiving’s pair of high-profile releases presents a more daunting challenge. How to possibly unify Encanto, the cheery new animated musical from Disney, with House of Gucci, Ridley Scott’s sordid fact-based saga of opulence, betrayal, and murder? I could argue that both films center on crumbling dynasties who cling to their power through deceit and corruption, but let’s not kid ourselves—not when one of them is geared toward kids and the other toward creeps. Instead, let’s focus on their qualitative differences, because one of these movies is quite good and the other one isn’t.

Conceptually speaking, Encanto isn’t anything special. Directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard (Zootopia) from a script Bush wrote with co-director Charise Castro Smith, it’s another of Disney’s misfit-kid pictures, centering on a plucky heroine who, despite her wholesome spirit and positive attitude, is unsure of her place in the world and within her family. Of course, world and family are essentially the same thing for Mirabel (voiced by Stephanie Beatriz), who technically isn’t a princess in the same way Moana technically wasn’t a princess. She’s nonetheless the granddaughter of Alma (María Cecilia Botero), the benevolent matriarch who rules over her brood, the Madrigal family, with what might be called generous rigidity; everyone is happy, so long as—and perhaps because—everyone abides by Alma’s decree. There is even something vaguely feudal about the Madrigals’ elevated position; they’re basically aristocratic leaders of a humble South American village, one whose welfare hinges on the noble class’ prosperity and munificence. Read More

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Last Night in Soho: Going Back, Going Blonde, Going Bonkers

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in Last Night in Soho

Remember the Swinging Sixties? That blissful English era of artistic revolution, high hedonism, and rampant sexism? At least, I think that’s what it involved; I wasn’t alive at the time, but I’ve consumed enough cultural artifacts from the period to approximate the woozy sensations of decadence and discovery. So has Edgar Wright, a voracious student of 20th-century pop culture whose movies tend to function as tributes to his dilettantish obsessions, as well as advertisements for the breadth of his own taste; his prior film, Baby Driver, was less a heist thriller than a feature-length playlist of classic tunes with vibrant visual accompaniment. Wright’s new feature, Last Night in Soho, initially scans as an ode to the lascivious London of yesteryear, a passionate homage to the pristine past that doubles as a sour lament for the degraded present. But there is more going on here than you might suspect—more ideas, more innovation, more mistakes.

“I like the old stuff better,” says Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), an aspiring fashion designer newly arrived in London from the country. It’s a valid preference—the music that pours through her Beats by Dre headphones includes hits by The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, and Peter & Gordon—that nonetheless carries dubious implications. Nostalgia can be simplistic as well as seductive, and many a filmmaker has fallen prone to romanticizing the gauzy bygone days without grappling with their dark marks and complications. This time around, Wright is smarter than that; Last Night in Soho is simultaneously an appreciation and a reckoning. It conjures a hypnotic veil of old-world glamour, then vigorously pierces it to reveal the rot festering underneath. Read More

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Titane: Extra-Vehicular Activities

Jeremy BeckReviews
Agathe Rousselle in Titane

Car trouble gets a remodel in Titane, the blistering new thriller from the French provocateur Julia Ducournau. If you think the dudes from the Fast & Furious flicks are into vehicles, wait until you meet Alexia, a woman with a metal plate wedged into her head and a screw loose in her brain. The plate was installed during her childhood (the screw has presumably been loose since birth), after she inspired a crash by distracting her father while cooing “vroom-vroom” from the backseat; far from holding a grudge, as soon as she’s released from the hospital, she plants an adoring smooch on the sedan’s window. Flash forward 20-odd years, and her affections for automotives have, shall we say, matured, even if her moral compass continues pointing straight toward a black hole.

Ducournau’s first feature was Raw, and if you saw it, you haven’t forgotten it, especially the scene where a hungry teenage girl nibbled on her sister’s severed finger. Her follow-up bears a number of similarities, many of them appellative; Garance Marillier, who previously starred in Raw as that ravenous limb-muncher, returns here in a smaller role again playing someone named Justine, while other key characters are once more called Alexia and Adrien. More substantively, both films interrogate femininity in a masculine world, and the chaos that results when women start pushing past the guardrails that polite society has erected for them. Read More

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Malignant, The Card Counter, and Movies Going All-In

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter; Annabelle Wallis in Malignant

Last Sunday, the critic Walter Chaw tweeted that, because more than 90% of the new movies he watches are “pretty much the same”, he’s more likely to appreciate a film that “just cocks an arm and swings for all it’s worth”. I might quibble with the mathematical accuracy of his first statement, but despite the mixed metaphor, I’m inclined to agree with his second; even when they fail, ambitious movies tend to be more memorable than their cautious counterparts. Chaw presumably had a specific picture in mind, but this past weekend provided multiple titles that refused to play by multiplex rules. One is far better than the other, but both succeed in upending expectations and carving out their own atypical territory.

At the outset—and, in fact, for the majority of its running time—James Wan’s Malignant isn’t especially novel. Despite stemming from a nominally original screenplay by Akela Cooper, it’s another haunted-house chiller that would fit snugly inside the Conjuring cinematic universe that Wan created back in 2013. Its heroine, Madison (Annabelle Wallis, best known to me as Grace on Peaky Blinders), is plagued by visions of a malevolent spirit called Gabriel, one of those shadowy creatures who’s never quite in focus but who looks a bit like the skeleton-masked bank robbers from The Town, only blacker and nastier. In addition to somehow speaking through electronic devices like a demonic Siri, Gabriel seems to be a burgeoning serial killer, and Madison—in an arresting manipulation of the image—periodically finds her mind transported to the sites of his murders, forced to watch his grisly wet work like a helpless, paralyzed bystander. Read More

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Luca: Summer Loving, Glazed by the Past

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Pixar's Luca

Luca is a shape-shifting sea monster, and Luca itself is something of a transformer. It is by turns (and sometimes all at once) a coming-of-age story, an underdog sports movie, an ode to canonical Italian cinema, and a heartfelt fable of tolerance. That it ably fulfills all of these roles without succumbing to chaos or incongruity is a testament to the dexterity of its storytelling and the fluidity of its construction. It doesn’t so much offer something for everyone as it provides everything for someones—namely, for those audiences who hunger for art that is simultaneously funny, kinetic, sweet, and affirming.

It is not—and with every new Pixar release, the conversation tends to focus on what it isn’t rather than what it is—terribly imaginative. Small in scale and gentle in heart, Luca lacks the bold ingenuity that has (ahem) animated some of the studio’s more impressive recent works: the metaphysical philosophizing of Soul, the existential angst of Toy Story 4, the triumphant razzle-dazzle of Incredibles 2, the anthropomorphized emotions of Inside Out. But not every Pixar picture can be expected to stretch or redefine an entire genre, and besides, lamenting Luca’s familiarity risks diminishing some of its considerable charm. Here is a playful, gorgeous, heart-warming adventure that tells its tender story with craft and conviction. That it occasionally resembles other movies seems a small price to pay. Read More

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