Grade: C plus

Digger review: There Will Be Floods

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Cruise in Digger

The cat seems unwell. Fluffy white felines have long had a place in cinema—it’s been over six decades since Ernst Stavro Blofeld sinisterly stroked the coat of his pet kitty while threatening James Bond—but this little furball isn’t bright-eyed or cuddly. It’s a wheezing, whimpering creature, skin stretched over its bones, incapable of moving or eating on its own. Its strongest display of activity is the yowl it emits when a thermometer enters its anus, but otherwise it lacks the energy to even mewl. Weak and exhausted, it’s waiting for a benevolent executioner to put it out of its misery. The longer Digger goes on, the more likely you are to yearn for a similar act of mercy.

Or maybe not. Digger, the latest misbegotten epic from Alejandro G. Iñárritu, isn’t an especially appealing movie. It’s long, overdetermined, and—as with all of its maker’s films—self-indulgent. But it is also monumentally ambitious, and it unfolds with a level of stylistic bravado that tunes some of its more discordant notes back into harmony. (Speaking of music, the jittery, often insufferable score is by Cosmo Sheldrake.) If it’s a debacle, at least it’s one for the ages. Read More

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The Uprising review: Rebel Goon, a Child of Shire

Jeremy BeckReviews
Andrew Garfield in The Uprising

The plot of The Uprising, Paul Greengrass’ intermittently absorbing, broadly turgid new epic, revolves around death and taxes. This is only fitting, given that the movie substantiates another of life’s inalienable certainties: Greengrass’ inability to craft a coherent action sequence. It’s been a decade since the English filmmaker’s work was widely viewable in American theaters—News of the World was a COVID-19 casualty, while 22 July and The Lost Bus have long since vanished into the streaming abyss—but that hasn’t sapped him of his, er, restless energy. The Uprising is his most quintessentially Greengrassian film since his catastrophic Jason Bourne: hectic, dour, unapologetically bludgeoning. There’s a late fight scene where two muscle-bound men attempt to drown each other in foul-smelling mud—a visual that often approximates the act of watching Greengrass’ movies.

Actually, that’s unfair. Greengrass’ agitated style isn’t to my taste, but it hasn’t stopped him from making some pretty good motion pictures (emphasis on “motion”). His first two Bourne sequels were admirably punchy actioners that balanced their propulsive momentum with streamlined storytelling, while his best film, Captain Phillips, benefitted from its contained setting, forcing him to channel his jittery instincts into dramatic tension. The Uprising, set in England in 1381, is a more sprawling piece of historical fiction—it purports to chronicle the Peasants’ Revolt in the wake of the plague—but there are times when it manages, however briefly, to sit still. Read More

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The Dog Stars review: His Bark Is Worse Than His Blight

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jacob Elordi and his Belgian Malinois in The Dog Stars

It’s been five years since Ridley Scott made a good movie (The Last Duel), but that hasn’t stopped him from trying. Undaunted by age, the 88-year-old Briton keeps cranking out handsome, nobly ambitious period pieces: a biopic of a fashion designer (House of Gucci), a military epic about a tyrant (Napoleon), a long-awaited return to the Colosseum (Gladiator II). (IMDb currently assigns Scott to eight upcoming titles in varying stages of development.) Now he’s back (to the future!) with The Dog Stars, a somber post-apocalyptic thriller that’s temporally different from his recent work, but qualitatively similar. It occasionally approximates an interesting movie, yet it’s ultimately forgettable.

To the extent The Dog Stars resonates at all, it does so metatextually. Based on novel by Peter Heller (the screenwriter is Mark L. Smith, whose uneven résumé includes Twisters and The Revenant; Christopher Wilkinson receives a “writer” credit), the film takes place in a depopulated landscape whose remnants of civilization—dilapidated buildings swarmed by vines, highways littered with rusty cars—will appear familiar to viewers of dystopian fiction. But while the movie is appropriately spare with backstory—a virus spread, and people died—its fanciful premise is nonetheless unsettling, given that here in reality, our nation’s top health official is a worm-infested eugenicist whose mission is to eradicate vaccines. Earlier in August, the “sex purge” concept of One Night Only seemed less ridiculous than it otherwise might have; three weeks later, Scott’s vision of a world ravaged by a pandemic plays eerily like prophecy. Imaginary futures feel less distant than they used to. Read More

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Supergirl review: Flaring at the Sun

Jeremy BeckReviews
Milly Alcock and Matthias Schoenaerts in Supergirl

It takes all of 15 seconds for Supergirl, the latest comic-book jaunt in the reimagined DC Universe (not to be confused with the DC Extended Universe—that’s deader than Ezra Miller’s career), to announce its tonal intentions. As the guitars of a Sleigh Bells song churn on the soundtrack, a white dog with floppy ears careens through a ramshackle interior, settles atop a newspaper whose headline proclaims the exploits of Superman, and urinates all over the front page. The message is plain: The Man of Steel’s cousin is too hip, too fun, to be fettered by wholesomeness or optimism.

At least, that’s the idea. But while Supergirl, which was directed by Craig Gillespie from a script by Ana Nogueira, operates with a sheen of irreverence—the pop-punk needle drops, the eye-rolling insouciance, the slow-motion beatdowns—it isn’t truly rebellious. After all, it’s a cautiously designed would-be blockbuster, the second venture in producer James Gunn’s ongoing refurbishment of prized intellectual property, following the smash hit that was Superman (which Gunn wrote and directed himself). This means that, as much as Supergirl presents itself as arch and quippy, it must also fulfill the usual commercial imperatives: fitting into a carefully constructed mythology, supplying uplifting themes, and taking care not to actually offend anyone (well, aside from the misogynistic trolls who perceive the very existence of a female-centered superhero flick as an assault on their values). And this solemn, grudging duty places the movie squarely in conflict with its main character. Read More

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Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu review: A Blaster and an Apprentice

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from The Mandalorian and Grogu, featuring both title characters

A long time ago, in a galaxy not far away, there was a swashbuckling sci-fi/Western TV series whose snappy writing and charismatic actors eventually inspired a bona fide big-screen adventure. But enough about Firefly. Here we have The Mandalorian and Grogu, the latest product in the Disney empire’s content-generation machine. It’s been seven years since the last Star Wars movie (the unduly maligned Rise of Skywalker), during which time the Mouse House has glutted your streaming queue with all manner of Sithian spin-offs. These offshoots varied in quality—Andor was quite good, The Book of Boba Fett was pretty bad, I forget everything that happened in Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka—but they all fulfilled their mission of sating fans’ appetites for intergalactic mayhem and Force-laden profundity. The Mandalorian was the first of these, and also the most successful according to certain commercial metrics, so it’s been plucked from the outer rim of television and holo-projected into the multiplex, where Disney hopes that the universe’s deadliest bounty hunter and his loveable little green friend will restore the franchise to its prior cinematic glory.

It’s a dubious bet. But when I tell you that The Mandalorian and Grogu is my least favorite Star Wars film to date, it’s both an expression of my disappointment and an acknowledgement of my advancing age. This world that once filled me with excitement and joy—the blue-tinted rushes through hyperspace, the exotic lightsaber duels, the premonitions that someone has a bad feeling about this—now seems chilly and mercenary. Did I grow up, or did the movies bog down? Read More

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