Grade: B plus

A Quiet Place Part II: Hush Growing Children, Don’t Lose Your Nerve

Jeremy BeckReviews
Emily Blunt in A Quiet Place Part II

The traffic light works. That’s how we know, even before the appearance of a freighted title card (“Day 1”), that the opening scene takes place during the era has become colloquially known, during our collective struggle with COVID-19, as the Before Times. (Remember, even movies that were made before the pandemic are totally still about the pandemic.) So even though the small town’s main square seems oddly deserted, the signal’s automatic flickering from green to yellow to red instantly communicates an attitude of relative safety. Yet at the same time, the introduction’s formal composition—the smoothness of the camera, the emptiness of the streets, the chaotic footage glimpsed on a news broadcast—articulates an undeniable sense of Damoclean danger. The apocalypse may not have arrived yet, but it’s surely on the way.

This expertly staged opening sequence, which builds from needling anxiety to clammy tension before erupting into all-out mayhem, confirms John Krasinski’s considerable skill as a director. He’s only made a handful of features, but here he again evinces a talent for conveying information and atmosphere through canny visual details. When he supplies a simple shot of a timid boy wincing in panic as a fastball buzzes past him during a Little League game, he isn’t watching a sport; he’s defining a character. Read More

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Nomadland: Movin’ On Out, Again and Again

Jeremy BeckReviews
Frances McDormand in Chloé Zhao's Nomadland

An ambitious cinematic tone poem that seeks to stand as tall as the stately redwoods it rapturously depicts, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland pays homage to a number of distinctly American wonders: the crashing waves of the Pacific; the rocky palaces of the Badlands; Frances McDormand’s face. With soft-blue ice chips for eyes and hard lines creasing the corners of her mouth, the two-time Oscar winner has the chiseled look of an artifact excavated from one of the film’s historical preserves. But there’s nothing antiquated about McDormand’s performance, which is clipped and unsentimental, but also open and brimming with feeling. She’s the main attraction of this mostly lovely, occasionally frustrating movie, which doesn’t so much tell a story as communicate an experience.

That was more or less true of Zhao’s prior film, The Rider, which deployed non-professional actors to refract the gauzy mythology of the cowboy through the cold prism of modernity. I was somewhat immune to The Rider’s low-key charms; it often felt more like a vibe than a movie. Nomadland operates in a similar vein, but Zhao’s filmmaking has grown more expressive. Soundtracked by gentle compositions from the pianist Ludovico Einaudi, her camera greedily contemplates the vastness of the American frontier, discovering landscapes both beautiful and desolate. The country captured in this picture looks like a gorgeous place to visit and a hard place to live. Read More

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New Streamers: Judas and the Black Messiah, Saint Maud, and The Little Things

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jared Leto in The Little Things; Morfydd Clark in Saint Maud; Daniel Kaluuya in Judas and the Black Messiah

Ordinarily, early February is a cinematic dumping ground. But among the million other things that the COVID-19 pandemic affected, it caused the Oscars to expand their eligibility window by two months, meaning that some high-profile titles just landed on your favorite streaming services. Let’s take a quick run through this past weekend’s newest releases.

Judas and the Black Messiah (HBO Max). The second feature from Shaka King, Judas and the Black Messiah is a contemporary political text that’s also a classical spy thriller. It tells the story of Bill O’Neal (a very fine Lakeith Stanfield), the small-time car thief who became a big-league FBI informant in the late ’60s and infiltrated the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, led by Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya). It isn’t subtle about its allegiance; you don’t need a degree in Christian theology to discern which character corresponds to which half of the title. Read More

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Streaming Roundup: Hillbilly Elegy, Happiest Season, Run

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Sarah Paulson in "Run"; Kristen Stewart in "Happiest Season"; Amy Adams in "Hillbilly Elegy"

To paraphrase a seven-time Oscar nominee: There are bad terminators—like, say, the COVID-19 pandemic—and there are good terminators—like the streaming services that keep pumping out new movies. Let’s focus on the good, shall we? Here’s a quick look at three recent releases:

Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix). Early in Hillbilly Elegy, Ron Howard’s diverting and facile adaptation of J.D. Vance’s memoir, a promising student at Yale Law attends a soirée, hoping to impress firm recruiters. He’s a smart and sympathetic kid, but he’s quickly overwhelmed by the trappings of luxury—calling his girlfriend in a panic, he asks, “Why are there so many fucking forks?”—and his charm offensive stalls. Then someone refers to West Virginians as rednecks, he bristles in response, and suddenly an evening of schmoozing has disintegrated into a sullen and awkward standoff between rich and poor. Read More

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Streaming Roundup: Borat 2, His House, On the Rocks, Rebecca, and The Witches

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Sope Dirisu in "His House"; Maria Bakalova in "Borat 2"; Anne Hathaway in "The Witches"; Lily James in "Rebecca"; and Bill Murray in "On the Rocks"

Not long ago, the United States was rocked by a seismic event—one that historians will be grappling with for generations, and one that threatens to further divide an already polarized nation. I’m talking, of course, about the new Sofia Coppola movie.

OK, OK, settle down. The 2020 presidential election may be unprecedented in a variety of ways—voter turnout, disinformation campaigns, whispered implications of an outright coup—but even it couldn’t derail the movies, which keep getting made and released. We here at the Manifesto have been a bit busy of late obsessively tracking every electoral development doing important confidential work, so let’s catch up with some capsule looks at five recent streaming titles. Read More

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