Grade: B

Saltburn: Brother, Can You Spare a Crime?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Barry Keoghan and Archie Madekwe in Saltburn

“Eat the rich” is generally meant as a metaphor, but in Saltburn, the new psychodrama from Emerald Fennell, it verges on becoming literal. Midway through the movie, during one of the many pivot points in its kinked narrative, a young man coos that he intends to devour his female quarry before burying his face between her legs. Shortly thereafter, we see him sinking into a bathtub, blood dripping down his chin, like a vampire crawling into his coffin after a fresh kill.

This is among the movie’s plentiful striking images that are designed to induce a gasp of horror or a shudder of pleasure. Saltburn’s plot may traffic in ghastly occurrences—deception, suicide, murder, undercooked eggs—but it primarily operates as a work of provocation. If you find yourself clucking your tongue at its tactlessness or wincing at its indecency, you are simply playing your part as the appalled observer. To paraphrase a popular line that tends to circulate on social media, the obscenity is the point. Read More

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Dumb Money: The Smarts of the Deal

Jeremy BeckReviews
Paul Dano in Dumb Money

Pitching her coworker on the viability of a specific stock she heard about on YouTube, a middle-class nurse named Jenny (America Ferrera) argues that the bandana-clad weirdo she saw promoting the investment is unusually trustworthy: “You can see his whole balance sheet!” Jenny may not have scrutinized the data displayed in that Excel file, but in her view, its mere disclosure is a signal of expertise and a gesture of transparency. The actual numbers are irrelevant; what matters is what the nerd says about them.

Writ large, this didactic illustration functions as an apt metaphor for the entire stock market, in which tangible value is inextricably tangled with theoretical perception. Shares of stock aren’t worth anything in the literal sense; their value derives from a manufactured number—a figure whose calculation appears at the end of a byzantine maze of trades, estimations, and symbols—which we have all accepted to carry meaning. No movie has better illuminated this capitalist fiction than J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call, in which Jeremy Irons says of our financial system, “It’s just money, it’s made up.” Dumb Money, the new docudrama from Craig Gillespie, is not so insightful or incisive, but it does persuasively recognize the absurd whims and fateful caprices that catapult some investors into fortune and plunge others into poverty. Read More

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Passages: Weird Sex But OK

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adèle Exarchopoulos and Franz Rogowski in Passages

It takes less than a minute before we learn that Tomas, the antihero at the center of Ira Sachs’ Passages, is an asshole. He’s directing a movie (also called Passages), and he’s unhappy with how his lead actor is walking down a flight of stairs. Frustrated that the performer keeps swinging his arms, Tomas offers up a piece of criticism that is less than constructive: “Why do you keep fucking up?”

He might be better served asking that question of himself. But then, self-reflection is a foreign practice to the modern narcissist (even if narcissism’s classical etymology is rooted in literal self-reflection). An absorbing portrait of a consummate jerk, Passages is a whirlwind journey of desire and destruction. It has already received notoriety for its sex scenes, which are vigorous and persuasive if not quite pornographic. But it is even more shocking—more raw—as a study of gluttonous appetite and thoughtless cruelty. The callous behavior it displays is recognizably human and also utterly monstrous. Read More

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Theater Camp: The Woe Must Go On

Jeremy BeckReviews
Molly Gordon and Ben Platt in Theater Camp

We always mock theater kids, but what about theater grown-ups? Surely these hopeless children—these dorks who walk around quoting Rent and hogging spotlights and mystifying everyone outside their own tragic clique—weren’t born as social misfits. Someone made them this way.

Theater Camp, the spry and winning new comedy directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, gently considers the guileless monsters responsible for our ongoing national nightmare of dramaturgical enthusiasm. It posits, with persuasive clarity and disturbing specificity, that passion for the performing arts is an inherited phenomenon—a disease passed down not through genetic material but via seasonal exhortations from the similarly afflicted. You know the saying: Those who can’t get into Juilliard teach how to obsess about getting into Juilliard. Read More

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Quick Hits: No Hard Feelings; Elemental; Extraction 2

Jeremy BeckReviews
Chris Hemsworth in Extraction 2; Leah Lewis in Elemental; Jennifer Lawrence in No Hard Feelings

No Hard Feelings. Like most movie stars, Jennifer Lawrence tends to play the hero. She’s showcased plenty of range in her leading roles—as a resourceful vagrant (Winter’s Bone), as an intrepid messiah (the Hunger Games pictures), as a striving innovator (the underrated Joy), as a frantic parent (mother!)—but she invariably lays claim to your sympathy, wielding a winning combination of innocence and resolve. So what’s intriguing about No Hard Feelings, the new comedy from Gene Stupnitsky (Good Boys), is that it finds Lawrence playing a woman who’s selfish, vengeful, and kind of mean. Her character, Maddie, isn’t exactly a villain, but the closest she gets to traditional heroism comes when she’s outracing the cops who are primed to suspend her license, all while a teenager is clinging to the hood of her car.

Maddie’s acrimony isn’t entirely without cause. She’s behind on the property taxes for her beloved Montauk home, and her primary source of income (driving for Uber) vaporizes after her ex-boyfriend, scorned from her prior ghosting, repos her car. She also resents the seasonal influx of wealthy tourists and the creep of gentrification they represent. But Maddie’s bitterness runs deeper than circumstantial irritation, and the trick of Lawrence’s performance is that she has the courage to make the character unlikable while simultaneously depicting her as a figure of nigh-mythical desirability. Read More

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