Grade: B

At the Movies in 2022, Concept Is King

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Ana de Armas in Deep Water, Sandra Bullock in The Lost City, Daisy Edgar-Jones in Fresh, Mark Rylance in The Outfit, Mia Goth in X

When it comes to modern movies, there are now two Americas. The first is a land of franchise dominance and corporate hegemony, where superhero flicks and sequels rule the multiplex. Even for fans of costumed entertainment—and I generally count myself among their number—surveying the box-office landscape can yield a dispiriting and homogenous view. The 10 highest-grossing films of 2019 were all based on existing IP, with seven hailing from the Walt Disney Company and an eighth (Spider-Man: Far from Home) that’s fully enmeshed within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, i.e., the Mouse House’s flagship franchise; zoom out to the top 15, and only two pictures (Us and Knives Out) were truly original creations. The COVID-19 pandemic aggressively accelerated this trend, and while cautious audiences may finally be returning to theaters, they only really pack the place for familiar properties. The mushrooming sprawl of these four-quadrant productions—competently made, ruthlessly merchandised, exceedingly familiar, rigorously safe—has inspired many industry experts to lament the death of cinema.

Maybe they’re right. After all, as the collective conception of a box-office hit perpetually narrows in scope and variety, it’s difficult to imagine studios routinely green-lighting risky original projects. And yet! I am once again compelled to repel these dire predictions, because there lurks beneath this marketplace of non-ideas a second America—one where original movies keep getting made, and in different shapes, sizes, and styles. Last month alone saw the release of at least five new films that are noteworthy for their strangeness, their pluck, their originality. Forget recycled superhero stories; these are movies with genuine concepts. Read More

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KIMI: Uneasy Listening

Jeremy BeckReviews
Zoë Kravitz in KIMI

Steven Soderbergh routinely turns his camera into a bullhorn, using the crispness of his images (which he photographs himself, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) to voice his displeasure with the ugliness of modern society. His latest picture, KIMI, gestures toward any number of topical themes: the physical and emotional aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dystopian possibilities of the encroaching surveillance state, the venality and brutality of the corporate aristocracy. Yet despite glimpses of social-justice protests and hints of conspiratorial malfeasance, KIMI isn’t really a message movie. It is instead a lean and efficient thriller: 89 precisely calibrated minutes of setup, tension, and payoff.

The economy is often one of Soderbergh’s narrative preoccupations, but drop the article, and it becomes one of his artistic strengths. It’s a gift shared by KIMI’s hero, Angela (Zoë Kravitz), an adept computer programmer who spends her work-from-home days scrolling through audio streams and slicing her way through lines of code. In essence, she’s an interpreter for KIMI, the Echo-like smart device that Angela is paid to make even smarter, updating its software to recognize that “peckerwood” is an insult and “ME!” is a Taylor Swift song. Sleek and tastefully designed, KIMI is shaped like an eggshell-white cone, and she’s all ears; whenever you say her name, her base glows neon-pink and she cheerfully announces, “I’m here.” (Her soothing voice, supplied by Betsy Brantley, is virtually indistinguishable from Siri or Alexa.) Her purpose is service, and her persistent monitoring of her environment—she is, quite simply, always listening—is merely a method of continually enhancing her performance. Surely there are no downsides to this sort of thing. Read More

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The Matrix Resurrections: One Skill Makes It Larger, Other Thrills Feel Small

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keanu Reeves in The Matrix Resurrections

The white rabbit keeps hopping along in The Matrix Resurrections, the trippy, stimulating, overcaffeinated sequel from Lana Wachowski. It’s a dizzying movie, coursing with energy and teeming with ideas. It’s also kind of a mess; it struggles to wrangle its colliding philosophies into a coherent narrative, and it lacks the spirited visual imagination of its predecessors. But even if it’s a mess, it is very much somebody’s mess. Much like with her prior feature, Jupiter Ascending, which Wachowski made with her sister Lilly, the mistakes of The Matrix Resurrections are errors of commission; they are the consequences of an artist desperately trying to channel her fusillade of thoughts and emotions onto the screen. The blunders on display here are at least failures of personality rather than anonymity.

Speaking of personality: What makes us who we are? That was just one of countless questions posed and pondered by the first Matrix, the crown jewel of the cinematic treasure trove that was 1999. A bolt from the green-tinted blue, it was an electrifying fusion of brains and brawn that made a sizable swath of viewers question their own existence (not that I have anyone in mind), even as it attacked their nerve centers with eye-popping effects and kinetic fight scenes. The ensuing episodes, Reloaded and Revolutions, were less intellectually mind-scraping but were nevertheless heroic achievements in their own right; the jaw-dropping freeway chase in Reloaded remains the gold standard in contemporary action filmmaking, and it’s just one of a dozen-odd invigorating set pieces spread across the two sequels. So the standard challenge which attends any attempt at resuscitating a moribund franchise—the need to revivify a long-dormant universe in a way that both integrates the prior installments and upstages them—is especially perilous in this case. Read More

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King Richard, Tick Tick Boom, and the Tortured Genius

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Andrew Garfield in Tick Tick Boom; Will Smith in King Richard

Success stories can’t be simple. Presumably, many gifted artists and athletes achieve their goals through little more than the straightforward combination of labor and talent, without facing any daunting challenges or making any personal sacrifices. But who wants to watch a movie about them? Drama requires conflict, which is why rousing tales of ultimate success must contain moments of intervening failure. (Pictures about sustained failure are far more rare, give or take an Inside Llewyn Davis.) Last week featured the premiere of two fact-based films about obsessive geniuses: Warner Brothers’ King Richard, about the father of Venus and Serena Williams, and Netflix’s Tick, Tick… Boom, about the early struggles of the creator of Rent. One teeters perilously on the border of hagiography, while the other is largely enjoyable on its own artistic terms, but both are steeped in the cinematic wellspring of toil, triumph, anguish, and redemption.

Technically, King Richard isn’t so much the story of a genius as that of the man behind the genius(es), though I’m sure if you posed that framing to Richard Williams, he’d dismiss the distinction as one without a difference. Whether this on-screen version of Richard, incarnated by Will Smith with twinkly charm and bottomless gumption, represents a drastic departure from the actual man is a debate best left to historians and biographers. What matters here is whether this Richard is the suitable protagonist of a predictable, rags-to-riches sports picture—whether he is sufficiently separable from the countless coaches and motivators who have preceded him in the illustrious screen tradition of drilling, aggravating, and speechifying. Read More

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Belfast: The Troubles of Growing Up, Like and Unlike Everyone Else

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, Jude Hill, and Judi Dench in Belfast

The opening scene of Belfast, the new film from Kenneth Branagh, announces the movie as both a narrow slice-of-life comedy and a more ambitious historical drama. Following some trivial narration from Judi Dench, the wan colors shift into crisp black-and-white, and the camera glides along a street in Northern Ireland, revealing a homey, intimate neighborhood. (A title card informs us that the date is August 1969.) The mood is relaxed and cheerful; children are kicking a ball around, adults are yammering idly, and everyone seems to know everybody’s name. Yet as nine-year-old Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill) traverses the road and spars good-naturedly with some shopkeepers, this peaceful idyll is shattered by the sudden arrival of armed hooligans. As they snarl threats and smash windows, the camera pivots around Buddy, spinning faster and faster, underlining his vulnerability and panic. What was once bliss has been replaced by terror.

Roughly based on Branagh’s own childhood, Belfast is a noble, enjoyable, not entirely successful attempt to document both sides of this formative coin. It seeks to frame the traditional hallmarks of the coming-of-age picture—the fledgling romances, the quixotically striving parents, the classroom grievances, the petty illegalities—against the backdrop of social unrest and religious conflict. That it struggles to fuse these disparate halves into a cohesive whole is due less to tonal inconsistency than cinematic execution, or maybe priorities. Over the course of a long and uneven career, Branagh has proved himself capable of working on a large scale—I remain a fan of his straitlaced Hamlet, while the operatic thriller Dead Again is arguably his best work—but here, whether because of lack of interest or inadequate filmmaking chops, he fails to invest the movie’s ostensibly sweeping commentary with much energy or clarity. He’s more committed to evoking the particular pleasures and predicaments of his youth with loving detail and misty-eyed nostalgia. Read More

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