Grade: B Archives - Page 6 of 24

The Menu: Till Chef Do Us Part

November 23, 2022November 23, 2022 Jeremy BeckReviews

Nobody technically eats the rich in The Menu, even if a few splinters of bone marrow make their way onto some dinner plates. But the movie, which was directed by Mark Mylod from a script by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, plainly has an appetite for first-world destruction. This makes it a familiar dish—a sizzling satire of upper-crust vulgarity whose recent forebears include the hide-and-seek thriller Ready or Not and the yachting misadventure Triangle of Sadness. Yet while The Menu may be rooted in a recognizable recipe, it nevertheless mixes its customary ingredients with shrewdness and flair. It doesn’t introduce new flavors to your palette, but it’s plenty tasty all the same.

If these metaphors seem indecent, just wait until you meet the movie’s characters. The opening act introduces a coterie of pompous oafs, all of whom have paid an outrageous fee to travel by boat and dine at an exclusive island restaurant called Hawthorn. They include a pretentious food critic (Janet McTeer) and her sycophantic editor (Paul Adelstein), a has-been actor (John Leguizamo) and his exasperated assistant (Aimee Carrero), three insufferable finance bros (Rob Yang, Mark St. Cyr, and Arturo Castro) who surely would’ve founded FTX if only they’d had the chance, an elderly couple (Reed Birney and Judith Light) who are among the establishment’s most loyal regulars, and a foodie named Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) who slurps oysters with the zeal of a child opening Christmas gifts. Fatted lambs who just may be buying a ticket for their own proverbial slaughter, these snobs carry themselves with an air of entitlement that instantly make them unsympathetic—creatures of obscene privilege and even greater self-regard. Read More

Violent Femmes: The Woman King, Pearl, and God’s Country

September 23, 2022September 23, 2022 Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews

Viola Davis in The Woman King, Mia Goth in Pearl, and Thandiwe Newton in God's Country

Women are fighting back. Well, at least at the movies. Women aren’t a monolith on screen or off, but this past weekend’s new theatrical releases were striking for how they centralized female characters, and how they placed them in varying postures of defiance. At the cinema, the fairer sex is through with unfairness.

The most ambitious of these movies, The Woman King, is also the most conventional. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from a script by Dana Stevens, it’s an old-fashioned historical epic, in the vein of Spartacus or (for a more recent vintage) Gladiator. And when it comes to women fighting, its depiction is quite literal: It tells the story of the Agojie, a troop of female soldiers for the Dahomey kingdom in nineteenth-century West Africa. Led by the fearsome Nanisca (a reliable Viola Davis), they wage war against a rival empire—not out of territorial bloodlust, but out of desire to prevent their citizens from being conscripted into slavery. Read More

Barbarian: Scare-bnb

September 16, 2022September 16, 2022 Jeremy BeckReviews

He’s a really nice guy. That’s what you need to understand, and what serves as the human foundation for the hellish nightmare that follows. When Tess (Georgina Campbell), an attractive young documentarian interviewing for a job in Detroit, arrives at her Airbnb in the dead of night only to find it already occupied by a well-built man named Keith, you might think that she should dive back into her SUV and burn rubber. She contemplates that very course of action herself; she isn’t stupid, and the last thing she wants to do is star in a horror movie. But Keith is—and I can’t stress this enough—a really nice guy, and so Tess swallows hard and crosses the threshold from the porch into the house, and the terrible events that follow are set in relentless motion.

Written and directed by Zach Cregger, Barbarian is one of those twisty pictures where virtually any plot detail arguably qualifies as a spoiler. But the title alone, which appears on screen in a creepy elongated typeface as cockroaches skitter across its letters, at the least confirms that it isn’t a romantic comedy. That might be news to Tess and Keith, whose flung-together-by circumstance pairing—turns out the incompetent property-management company double-booked the rental—could qualify, in a different cinematic universe, as a meet-cute. In addition to possessing broad shoulders and a square jaw, Keith is uncommonly courteous and perceptive. He offers Tess the lone bedroom without hesitation, throwing in a self-deprecating crack about his square upbringing. When she doesn’t drink the tea he makes for her, he recognizes her suspicions and volunteers to open a bottle of wine in front of her, negating the possibility that he’s doing anything indecent. He’s even familiar with the little-seen jazz documentary that Tess finds formative. He’s Prince fucking Charming. Read More

Top Gun: Maverick: Bruising Altitude

June 3, 2022September 20, 2022 Jeremy BeckReviews

Ah, the ’80s: that glorious decade of unvarnished patriotism, jubilant synth music, and pop-culture cheese. As artifacts of this ancient era go, Tony Scott’s Top Gun has aged more poorly than most; it now plays as a silly, occasionally diverting genre exercise that doubles as a military recruitment ad, and while it entertains as a tribute to the glistening machismo of Tom Cruise, it also suffers from thin characters and a profoundly stupid story. So when I tell you that Top Gun: Maverick, the 36-years-in-the-making follow-up directed by Joseph Kosinski (from a script credited to Ehren Kruger, Eric Warren Singer, and Christopher McQuarrie), improves on its predecessor in every conceivable way, what I really mean is, it’s not bad.

Honestly, that assessment is perhaps unfair to Kosinski and Cruise, who have approached this legacy assignment with a canny combination of reverence, intelligence, and playfulness. Not content with merely avoiding stupidity, Maverick is often genuinely smart. Its character dynamics are sharp, its plot makes structural (if not geopolitical) sense, and its action is mostly engaging and occasionally electrifying. It’s a pretty good movie that also wrestles with the obligation of being a Top Gun sequel. Read More

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness: Have Hag, Will Travel

May 13, 2022May 13, 2022 Jeremy BeckReviews

Benedict Cumberbatch in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

In one of the many memorable moments in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, an enraged Willem Dafoe murders a subordinate scientist who stubbornly insists that they need to take a dangerous chemical concoction “back to formula.” Things may not have turned out well for that underling, but in the two decades since Spider-Man’s release, it’s clear that his cold-blooded logic—the insistence on safety and reliability at the expense of risk and creativity—has earned the last laugh. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, now 14 years and 28 films and several zillion dollars into its reign as the planet’s most ruthless profit-generating machine, is undeniably a product of formula. It is a carefully balanced equation, a recursive system scrupulously designed to serve its fans, perpetuate its merchandise, and—on occasion—make some pretty decent movies. The challenge for any director working within this rigorously controlled franchise is whether they can smuggle their own sensibility—their own spiky and distinctive flourishes—into an enterprise that, by its very nature, flattens personal art into corporate entertainment.

So I am pleased and maybe a little bit to surprised to report that Raimi, the man who created the original Spider-Man trilogy and is arguably (albeit inadvertently) responsible for our current state of cinematic homogeneity, has risen to this challenge with élan and aplomb. To be sure, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Raimi’s first feature in nine long years, is decidedly an MCU production. There are callbacks and cameos and teases and terminological mouthfuls and stale jokes and weightless scenes of computer-generated spectacle. But when he isn’t dutifully hitting these franchise marks, Raimi is sprinkling the margins and filling in the cracks with his own playful, eccentric touches. If the movie isn’t quite a Sam Raimi classic, it at least exhibits glimmers of classic Sam Raimi. Read More