Grade: B

John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum: Still Bloodied, Still Unbroken

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keanu Reeves in "John Wick: Chapter 3--Parabellum"

John Wick isn’t picky. He will kill you with a gun, a knife, a car, a dog, a horse, a library book—the particular weapon doesn’t matter, because he is the weapon. He’s a man who is also a murder machine, precisely calibrated to dispense death as proficiently as possible. There is no malice in his lethality, just as there is no malice when an elephant steps on an insect. He does not kill you because he dislikes you; he kills you because you are in his way.

John Wick: Parabellum, the third chapter in this insane and gloriously operatic franchise, is not quite as efficient as its bearded and besuited namesake. It occasionally suffers from bloat and drag, and it doesn’t always move with absolute purpose. For the most part, though, this is another action triumph, a grand and propulsive movie that understands what it is and what it’s good at. And even when its ostentatious trappings occasionally disappoint, its primal heart keeps beating. Read More

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High Life: Entering the Void, High-Strung and Horny

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson in Claire Denis's "High Life".

The spaceship has a garden. Somewhere, amid the instrument panels and the spartan bunks and the anti-gravity suits, there is a verdant room full of plants, moss, and dirt. It’s as if the astronauts, saddened by the prospect of leaving Earth behind, insisted on bringing a bit of earth along with them.

This contrast—between the personal and the fantastical, between presence and absence, between flowering life and merciless death—is emblematic of High Life, Claire Denis’ strange, frustrating, beguiling new film. Part sci-fi thriller, part philosophical meditation, it is always challenging, often boring, and occasionally mesmerizing. Read More

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Glass: The Supervillains Are Running the Asylum

Jeremy BeckReviews
Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy, and Bruce Willis in M. Night Shyamalan's "Glass".

One of the main characters of M. Night Shyamalan’s Glass suffers from dissociative identity disorder. That illness is not shared by its director. Shyamalan may have his flaws, but he wields his camera with a confidence, a sense of self, that’s unusual in the Hollywood studio system. Good thing, too, because when reduced to its building blocks, Glass is a ridiculous movie, a bizarrely plotted thriller that makes astonishingly little sense. Yet it also flaunts a genuine personality, along with an exhilarating degree of style, that elevate it comfortably above its stupidity. There’s a school of critics who insist that Shyamalan should stop penning his own screenplays, arguing that his shaky writing hampers his gifts as a director. Maybe that’s true, but consider the flip side: How many other filmmakers could have taken this script and turned it into something so effortlessly, indecently entertaining?

An ungainly, tantalizing hybrid of two superior genre movies, Glass positions itself as the climax of a suddenly uncovered cinematic universe. Way back in 2000, Unbreakable—still Shyamalan’s best film—followed the uneasy partnership between David Dunn (Bruce Willis) and Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), with the latter insistently tugging at the former to accept his destiny as a real-life superhero. Separately, Split followed the murderous exploits of Kevin Wendell Crumb (James McAvoy), a Sybil-like serial killer who occasionally transformed into a savage, animal-like entity called The Beast. Shyamalan is often accused of repeating himself, but these two movies weren’t remotely alike in terms of either plot or tone; Unbreakable was a powerful study of obsession, confusion, and self-discovery, whereas Split was a hammy, razor-sharp, predator-versus-prey thriller. Yet the (admittedly delightful) stinger of Split revealed that it in fact occupied the same world as Unbreakable, and from those still-glowing ashes, Glass was born. Read More

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If Beale Street Could Talk: Surges of Passion, Even from Behind Bars

Jeremy BeckReviews
Stephan James and KiKi Layne in "If Beale Street Could Talk"

A movie awash in potent contradictions—intimate vs. operatic, reserved vs. vivacious, hopeful vs. disillusioned, wrongfully accused vs. savagely victimized—If Beale Street Could Talk opens with a quotation from James Baldwin, who wrote the novel upon which the film is based. The selected passage, which discusses “the impossibility and the possibility” (more contradictions!), directs “the reader” to draw certain inferences from what follows. This is a curious instruction, given that what follows is not a book but a movie; we aren’t readers, we’re viewers. It also illuminates the challenge that Barry Jenkins has accepted in choosing to adapt Baldwin’s novel, the tricky task of translating spiky words on a page to the visual language of the screen. In making If Beale Street Could Talk, Jenkins is attempting both to pay homage to one of the 20th century’s most important authors and to imbue that author’s prose with his own distinctly cinematic voice.

Not having read the novel, I can’t speak to the veracity of the on-screen result. What I can say is that, for the most part, this moving-picture version of If Beale Street Could Talk walks the line nicely, capturing Baldwin’s frustration and rage while also functioning as an honest-to-God movie. There are times when Jenkins’ ambitions get the better of him, and when the sheer scope of his undertaking threatens to overwhelm the particular plight of his characters. Yet even when he struggles to corral his myriad ideas into a tidy package (and to be sure, the film’s lack of tidiness is part of its point), Jenkins flaunts a vigorous command of his medium, breathing bold and colorful life into a story that is, in some ways, fairly black-and-white. Read More

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Holiday Gift Bag: Aquaman

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amber Heard and Jason Momoa in "Aquaman"

Aquaman is a fun superhero movie. That is a significant achievement. To be clear, I don’t subscribe to the ideology that modern superheroes are too dark; I admire the solemn gravity of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight films, the melancholic humanity of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man pictures, and even the interplanetary terrorism of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But it’s important to remember that Hollywood’s current (and seemingly inexhaustible) superhero franchise churn stemmed from kids geeking out over comics and playing with toys. Aquaman, directed with energy and vibrancy by James Wan, pays tribute to that spirit of youthful exuberance. It’s a movie about a big merman searching for a giant fork, and it’s a blast. Read More

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