Grade: B

Love Lies Bleeding: Her Body Is a Rage

Jeremy BeckReviews
Katy O'Brian and Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding

The MPA advisement for Love Lies Bleeding informs viewers that the film is rated R “for violence and grisly images, sexual content, nudity, language throughout, and drug use.” Setting aside that certain sickos (who me?) might perceive this notice as an inducement rather than a warning, one vice that the agency declines to mention is smoking—perhaps because the movie itself condemns such behavior. Early on, a woman named Lou pushes play on a portable cassette recorder (the year is 1989); as she half-listens to a health official drone on about the dangers of nicotine addiction, she aimlessly puffs on a cigarette. The obvious conflict between her brain and her body is amusing, even if her inability to quit quickly becomes the least of her problems.

Lou is played by Kristen Stewart, who supplies the kind of earthy, hard-bitten performance that has become the actor’s specialty post-superstardom. Stewart’s naturalism makes her an intriguing match with Rose Glass, the promising writer-director whose first feature, Saint Maud, was a raw nerve of a horror movie, observing a pious caretaker’s descent into madness with unsettling chops. In Love Lies Bleeding, Stewart’s effortless plausibility draws you inside Lou’s orbit and makes you root for her, even as Glass sets about upending her meager circumstances with exuberant chaos. Read More

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American Fiction: By Book or by Crook

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction

Writing is a task infected with misery and failure: an endless cycle of staring at a blank screen, deleting reams of gibberish, and questioning your life choices. (Am I speaking hypothetically? Reader, I am not.) So it was with a mixture of envy and disbelief that I watched Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), better known for obvious reasons as Monk, sit at his desk and confidently compose an entire novel in what appeared to be a single night. What’s his next trick, building Rome?

Not that Monk is an especially successful artist. The flailing hero of American Fiction, Monk is a mythological scholar whose fearsome intellect has failed to translate into financial security or critical renown. (When he appears at a book panel, he scratches a missing vowel onto the placard that misspelled his name.) His latest text, a meticulous analysis of Aeschylus’ The Persians, hasn’t attracted the slightest nibble from publishers, given that it’s miles removed from the zeitgeist. “They want a Black book,” explains his agent, Arthur (John Ortiz). Monk’s frustrated response—“I’m Black, and it’s my book”—betrays not only his stubbornness, but his woeful ignorance of consumer demand. Read More

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Eileen: That Pretty Red Mess

Jeremy BeckReviews
Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway in Eileen

Smoke gets in more than just your eyes in Eileen; it fills up your lungs and seeps into your pores. Directed by William Oldroyd from a script by Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh (adapting the latter’s novel), this sly and engrossing psychological thriller wields fog like a haunted-house barker, cloaking its characters and vehicles in clouds of swirling vapor. Seductive imagery aside, the omnipresent haze is a fitting device for a movie that obscures its intentions, priming you for a queasy study of obsession before pivoting into a nightmare of a different sort.

This isn’t to imply that Eileen, in its bold strokes, is especially novel or even surprising. Its titular heroine, played with supple intensity by Thomasin McKenzie, is a familiar type: a loner whose existence is so mundane, she can scarcely give voice to her repressed desires. Eileen works at a juvenile detention center in Nowheresville, Massachusetts, where she mindlessly frisks female visitors and shuffles inmates through corridors. On her evening commute, she stops by the liquor store; when she arrives home at her ramshackle house, she places the fresh bottles at the feet of her drunken father (Shea Whigham), collecting the day’s empties without comment. She’s less a wallflower than a smear of taupe. Read More

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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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