Grade: B

Puzzle: Falling to Pieces, and Putting Them Together

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kelly Macdonald searches for meaning in "Puzzle"

In one of the few lyrical stretches of Puzzle, Marc Turtletaub’s sensitive and sad new drama, Agnes (the perpetually unappreciated Kelly Macdonald) rides a New York subway car while a blind man stands in the center and sings “Ave Maria” in a plaintive falsetto. Not long after, Agnes is served tea by a woman named Maria, and she points out the oddity that the namesake of Schubert’s piece is now providing her with a beverage. Her tea-drinking companion is unmoved, dismissing the parallel as an act of mere randomness that carries no cosmic significance. Agnes remains unconvinced: “It has to mean something.”

Does it, though? Given the sheer size of the universe, I’m inclined to agree with her partner and hesitate to ascribe any meaning to such an apparent coincidence. But it’s hard to blame Agnes, seeing as her own, private search for meaning is the animating force behind Puzzle, a movie about a seemingly stock figure who suddenly resolves to discover more of herself, and of the world. It’s also hard not to turn the question around and aim it at Puzzle itself. This is an unusually gentle and well-observed film, with a peculiar attention to its central characters and their rhythmic dynamics, but what does it really mean? Read More

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BlacKkKlansman: For the Boys in Blue, Black Man Dons White Robe

Jeremy BeckReviews
John David Washington goes undercover in Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman"

During an interlude of rare tranquility in BlacKkKlansman, undercover detective Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) and his sorta-girlfriend, Patrice (Laura Harrier, from Spider-Man: Homecoming), stroll through a serene wooded area, highlighted by a bubbling stream and colorful foliage. They’re talking, as fledgling lovers tend to do, about their favorite films, and Ron asks Patrice whether she prefers Super Fly or Shaft. Patrice, the president of the Black Student Union at Colorado College, is adamant. “Shaft,” she answers decisively, explaining that she has no use for something like Super Fly, which perpetuates the stereotype of black men as pimps and thugs. Taken aback by the severity of her criticism, Ron urges Patrice to relax. After all, he says in protest, “it’s just a movie!”

That sort of dismissive, laissez-faire hand-waving—the fallacious notion that art should simply be absorbed rather than analyzed, contextualized, and debated—has never and will never apply to the motion pictures of Spike Lee. For more than three decades now, the director has made all manner of “joints”—war epics and crime thrillers, sweeping period biopics and intimate family dramas, good movies and bad ones—but all of them share a purpose that goes beyond entertainment (though they are often entertaining). Lee is one of America’s most proudly political filmmakers, using his work not just to provide audiences with a few hours of diverting pleasure but to educate, instigate, preach, and rattle. BlacKkKlansman, which tells the story of Ron’s infiltration of the Ku Klux Klan in 1972 Colorado, fits squarely within this lineage. It is by turns a suspenseful police procedural, a powerful piece of agitprop, and a ferocious indictment of a reeling nation that, in its maker’s view, continues to neglect and suppress its black citizenry. It is not just a movie. Read More

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Sorry to Bother You: Climbing the Corporate Ladder, Leave Your Blackness on the Ground Floor

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lakeith Stanfield and Tessa Thompson in "Sorry to Bother You"

A sizzling satire that’s overflowing with invention and ideas, Sorry to Bother You takes place in an America that is both entirely apart from our present reality and a disturbing reflection of it. Set in Oakland, it conceives of a land where prisons have become lifelong labor camps, where riot police attack striking workers with clubs, and where the biggest hit on TV is a moronic show called “I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me!” Here I should clarify that this movie is a work of fiction, not a documentary.

Oh who am I kidding? Sorry to Bother You, the debut of writer-director Boots Riley, is such an extreme and provocative piece of work that nobody will confuse it with the intimately pitched, naturalistic dramas of Ken Loach or the Dardennes. But like those socially conscious filmmakers, Riley has something to say, and he’s saying it loud; excessiveness is his chosen cinematic language as well one of his foibles. Whether you hail Sorry to Bother You as a masterpiece or dismiss it as a mishmash—I’m inclined to think it’s a bit of both—you will likely agree that it’s a lot. Read More

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First Reformed: Still Preaching, But Is Anyone Listening?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ethan Hawke as a plagued preacher in "First Reformed"

Ethan Hawke has always had a crease in his face, a thin vertical line running from the center of his forehead to the bridge of his nose. But this crinkle somehow looks more pronounced in First Reformed, as though the weight of the world has been pushing in on his features and flattening the surrounding skin. Hawke is a naturally garrulous presence—recall his motormouthed writer of Richard Linklater’s Before movies, as well as his cool dad of Boyhood—which makes him a curious choice to play Reverend Toller, a solitary preacher haunted by internal demons. But just as Hawke’s career has slowly illuminated the considerable talent behind the folksy Texas charm (he’s recently done some of his best work in low-profile films like Predestination and 10,000 Saints), First Reformed gradually reveals itself as a different creature, a more subtle beast, than it first appears. What starts as a sober character study eventually transforms, almost miraculously, into… something else.

To say too much would risk spoiling the story’s surprises, but it’s important to note that the story is surprising, and that it smartly leverages our expectations against us. As you settle in to First Reformed and absorb its particular aesthetic and narrative qualities—its cramped aspect ratio, its grey palette, its solemn and solitary voiceover—you are likely to deduce that the movie will unfold as an attentive but familiar exploration of its complicated, grief-stricken hero. Your assumption will not be entirely wrong; to the last, First Reformed commits completely to its mission of understanding what makes Reverend Toller tick. But Paul Schrader, the iconoclast who wrote and directed this movie and whose name will be forever linked with his script for Taxi Driver, is not interested in making a gentle prestige picture. He goes for the throat as well as the soul. Read More

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Solo: A Star Wars Story: Getting Cocky, Even as a Pup

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alden Ehrenreich is a young hero in "Solo: A Star Wars Story"

There’s a quick shot in Solo: A Star Wars Story of someone in a spacecraft sliding into the copilot’s seat, ready to help guide the ship out of danger. Taken in a vacuum, it’s an unremarkable image, just a basic establishing shot of the type we’ve seen in countless sci-fi films. But while this fun and frisky movie may take place in outer space, it most certainly does not take place in a vacuum. Instead, it is set within the Star Wars mythos, which means that the pilot is a cocksure grifter named Han Solo, the copilot is a gigantic walking carpet called Chewbacca, and the spaceship is none other than the Millennium Motherfucking Falcon. And for viewers of a certain generation, the image of Han and Chewie sitting side by side in the cockpit of one of the fastest ships in the galaxy carries with it a frisson of elation, because we are witnessing not just the usual collaboration of roguish outlaws, but the birth of a partnership that served as a cultural touchstone of our youth.

This is almost unfair. By telling a story about characters I grew up with, Solo is capable of hard-wiring into my lizard brain, remapping my neural pathways and convincing me that it’s a good and meaningful movie simply by reason of its existence. So perhaps the happiest surprise about Solo is that it does not coast along entirely on nostalgia. There is some of that, sure—hey, do those dice look familiar? What’s that adage about Wookiees pulling people’s arms out of their sockets?—but there is also a breezy sense of adventure, along with a winning atmosphere of wonder and discovery. By and large, the film gets by on its own merits; there’s no mystical energy field that controls its destiny. Read More

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