Grade: B

A Quiet Place, Day One: The City That Never Speaks

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joseph Quinn and Lupita Nyong'o in A Quiet Place: Day One

The special thing about the first Quiet Place movie was that it didn’t do anything special. Sure, John Krasinski’s horror hit was cinematically imaginative, but it worked because it stayed small, applying its merciless technique to the fate of one family enduring the crucible of a sonically fraught apocalypse. In retrospect, it’s somewhat miraculous that A Quiet Place Part II fared as well as it did, given that its mild expansion (new people, new locations) inevitably diluted some of its tension. This nascent franchise will continue churning out additional installments so long as they keep making money, but the commercial imperatives of sequel-building—bigger thrills, grander mythology, general moreness—seem incompatible with the original’s white-knuckle intimacy.

A Quiet Place: Day One, from the writer-director Michael Sarnoski (Krasinski receives a story credit), seems to succumb to this contradiction before improbably evading it. In terms of pure suspense, it is the least successful Quiet Place picture thus far. It is also the most humane. Read More

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The Bikeriders: Mad Packs, Fury Rode

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Hardy and Austin Butler in The Bikeriders

Early in his career, the writer-director Jeff Nichols developed a reputation for making movies that felt unlike the work of anyone else. The paranoid thriller Take Shelter, the noirish coming-of-age story Mud, the science-fiction parable Midnight Special—none of these was exceptional, but they all toyed with genre expectations in a manner that made them feel gratifyingly unusual. That changed with Loving, a well-intentioned docudrama that was tender, intelligent, and disappointingly ordinary. Nichols’ latest picture, The Bikeriders, continues this regression toward normalcy in a peculiar way, less by occupying a familiar template than by imitating a specific filmmaker—namely, Martin Scorsese. This movie could easily have been called “Goodfellas: Easy Rider edition.”

There are worse touchstones to copy. Cinematically speaking, The Bikeriders may not venture too far off road, but it at least zooms forward with confidence and texture. It also acquires a sense of melancholy—an elegiac wistfulness—that is both genuinely touching and somewhat dubious. Read More

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I Saw the TV Glow: Long Live the Screen

Jeremy BeckReviews
Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in I Saw the TV Glow

The line that best encapsulates the knotty themes of I Saw the TV Glow isn’t spoken aloud; instead, it’s scrawled across the screen in pink font: “Isabel and Tara are like family to me.” The author of that statement is Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), and the young women she’s referring to aren’t real people (or are they??) but the central characters in The Pink Opaque, her favorite episodic thriller. The notion that Maddy can cherish fictional figures akin to her actual relatives might strike you as ridiculous. For my part, I’ll cop to identifying with her sentiment in a peculiar way, given that 13 years ago on this very website, I celebrated Buffy the Vampire Slayer for its capacity to “make you feel as if you belong” and described watching an episode as the equivalent of “going home.” In other words, I get where she’s coming from.

Buffy, as it happens, is an obvious point of inspiration for The Pink Opaque, with its paranormal investigators, its monster-of-the-week structure, and its claim to a teenage audience in the ’90s (it airs on the “Young Adult Network”). But Jane Schoenbrun, I Saw the TV Glow’s writer and director, is after something more complicated than paying tribute to a childhood staple, even if they toss in a few tasty easter eggs. (One member of Buffy’s beloved Scooby Gang was named Tara; Amber Benson, the actress who played her, cameos here.) They’re more concerned with our relationship with the art that we consume—how it can shape us, bind us, even warp us. In High Fidelity, John Cusack surmised that shared interests are essential when connecting with friends and lovers: “What really matters is what you like, not what you are like.” But what if what you like alters who you are? Read More

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The Fall Guy: Putting the Action Stunt and Center

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt in The Fall Guy

My screening of The Fall Guy was preceded by one of those awkward “Thanks for coming to the theater!” inserts, in which its star (Ryan Gosling) and director (David Leitch) informed the audience that the picture we were about to watch was conceived as a valentine to the stunt community. This, like pretty much everything else in the movie, was an example of overkill, given that its opening scene is a quick-hitting montage of classic stunts (including, if my eyes can be trusted, a glimpse of Leitch’s own Atomic Blonde) while Colt Seavers (Gosling) narrates about stunt performers’ invisible, invaluable contributions to the motion-picture industry. You half-expect the film to pause after each elaborate action sequence so that the doubles can be identified by name and thanked for their service.

So, not subtle. But to a certain sect of nerdy cinephiles (who me?), the themes advanced by The Fall Guy are significant and noble. Much like the most recent Mission: Impossible entry, it mounts an impassioned and convincing argument in favor of tangible, handwoven artistry. The cockamamie plot may manufacture a number of human villains, but the most pernicious force on display here is the blue screen that looms in the background of the film-within-the-film climax. For all its winking modernism, this is essentially a classic movie about good and evil—one where the heroes insist on shooting everything with practical effects while the bad guys proclaim, “We can just fix it in post.” Read More

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Monkey Man: Punch and Broody

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dev Patel in Monkey Man

Did you know that Dev Patel looks good with his shirt off? The actor isn’t widely regarded as a sex symbol, despite some sticky fumblings with women in The Green Knight and the underrated Wedding Guest. Monkey Man, Patel’s feature directorial debut, is primarily a chance for him to demonstrate his filmmaking chops, but it also serves to showcase his well-earned immodesty. With his careless mane of black hair, a square jawline covered by a trimly untrimmed beard, and enough abs to fill a supermarket soda aisle, he’s a matinee idol with the unforced charisma to match. It’s only fair that he spends much of the movie getting his face bloodied to a pulp.

In fact, when Monkey Man opens, Patel’s character routinely receives bone-crunching body blows, and not as a consequence of any vigilantism; it’s just his job. Credited as Kid—though he also goes by the alias Bobby, not to mention the title moniker—he moonlights at an underground Indian boxing club, where he functions as (to borrow from an upcoming release) the designated fall guy, wearing a monkey mask and throwing fights in exchange for a meager cut of the take. (Given that he never seems to win a match, it’s unclear how the house makes any money, but let’s not worry about plausibility.) His earnings are commensurate to his suffering; as explained by the establishment’s oily promoter (a welcome Sharlto Copley), he needs to really wow the crowd with his injuries in order to collect the coveted “bleed bonus.” It isn’t exactly a glamorous lifestyle, but Kid’s pain is a tolerable means to a very specific end. Read More

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