Grade: C plus

Bring Her Back: Foster, It’s Australian for Fear

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sally Hawkins and Jonah Wren Phillips in Bring Her Back

For two guys who cut their teeth making YouTube videos, Danny and Michael Philippou are curiously retro when it comes to horror iconography. Their first feature, the indie hit Talk to Me, fashioned its inciting instrument as a large ceramic hand, one that facilitated spiritual possession through the nigh-quaint process of physical connection. Their follow-up, Bring Her Back, opens with grainy VHS footage depicting an enigmatic ritual whose significance won’t be established until some time later. The movie features a fair number of scares, but the biggest jolt for this Xennial was remembering just how frustrating it was to futz with the tracking setting on a VCR.

This doesn’t mean the Philippous are classicists. But they aren’t exactly modernists either; their skills and shortcomings could easily belong in any era of horror filmmaking. Bring Her Back confirms their talents as purveyors of mood, taking place in an unsettling surreality where the vibes are always off and your danger sensor is constantly on. As a piece of evocative atmosphere, it’s quite creepy. As a work of dramatic storytelling, it’s stillborn. Read More

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The Accountant 2: In Autism’s Life, No Second Tax

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jon Bernthal and Ben Affleck in The Accountant 2

The Accountant 2 could’ve been a pretty good movie, if it weren’t a sequel to The Accountant. It’s best suited as a hangout picture, sporting playful dialogue, a light comic touch, and a pair of appealing performances. Yet because this emergent franchise made its bones as a hot-blooded crime yarn, it subjugates its mild-mannered strengths in favor byzantine plotting and stale gunplay. It’s guilty of genre evasion.

Yet the Hollywood IP machine cranks on, and there are worse figures to resuscitate than Christian Wolff, the autistic genius and assassin who first appeared on screen nine years ago in the hunky, bespectacled form of Ben Affleck. The decade away hasn’t improved Christian’s social skills: When we first catch up with him, he’s the eye of a speed-dating hurricane, only we learn that single ladies are throwing themselves at him because he hacked the app’s algorithm; once he opens his mouth and starts rambling about appreciating assets, their excitement quickly curdles into dismay. Read More

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The Monkey: Toy to the World, the Sword Is Come

Jeremy BeckReviews
Theo James in The Monkey

Longlegs may have cemented Osgood Perkins’ stature in the horror community, but his twisted sensibility has been fully formed ever since his debut feature, The Blackcoat’s Daughter. In both of those films, as well as the two that came in between (Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing Whose Title Is Too Long), Perkins flaunted his gifts as a skilled purveyor of heebie-jeebies, wielding slick camerawork and atonal rhythms to keep viewers on edge and off balance. You might think that venturing into the realm of Stephen King would only elevate the director’s midnight-madness credentials, but The Monkey, which Perkins has adapted from a King short story, is his least scary movie thus far. There is, however, a reason for its relative lack of terror. Quite simply: It’s a comedy.

Specifically, The Monkey deploys countless variations of a single joke. It posits, not without cause, that the spectacle of watching human beings die on screen can be funny as well as tragic. This is undeniably in poor taste, which is part of what makes it amusing. Perkins, channeling his bloodletting instincts in a direction that’s silly rather than spooky, commits to his premise with innovative gusto. People don’t just die in this movie; they are shot, stabbed, dismembered, decapitated, electrocuted, immolated, trampled by horses, and engulfed by a swarm of bees. It’s your worst nightmare, unless you’re a coroner who loves your work. Read More

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Y2K: Millennium Ugh

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, and Julian Dennison in Y2K

Being unpopular in high school can feel like the end of the world. Your parents are embarrassing. Your best friend is a loser. The cool kids either bully you or ignore you. The girl you have a crush on barely knows you exist. And sentient computers have hatched a conspiracy to enslave the human race.

That the last of these items feels concordant with its predecessors is the central joke of Y2K, Kyle Mooney’s occasionally inspired, ultimately tedious new horror comedy. For Eli (Jaeden Martell, one of those anodyne actors who seems destined to play teenagers into his 30s), every day feels like its own miniature apocalypse—a perpetual ritual of awkwardness and humiliation. That’s an exaggeration, of course; his parents (Alicia Silverstone and Tim Heidecker) are sweet and supportive (how mortifying!), and he has plenty of fun playing videogames and goofing around with his closest pal, Danny (a solid Julian Dennison). But Eli still feels anxious and unfulfilled, especially because Laura (Rachel Zegler), the hot brainiac whom he sweatily flirts with online, seems more interested in older, more muscular dudes. So when his humdrum Friday night turns into a chaotic free-for-all full of death and dismemberment, he’s more than ready to save the day and get the girl. Read More

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Gladiator II: And the Rome of the Slave

Jeremy BeckReviews
Paul Mescal and Pedro Pascal in Gladiator II

One of the more memorable lines of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator was its hero’s insistence that what we do in life echoes in eternity. Maybe not, but it definitely echoes in sequels. Gladiator II, Scott’s quarter-century-later follow-up to the Best Picture winner of 2000, takes great pains to (strength and) honor its predecessor—not just by recalling dialogue or by repeating themes (the screenplay is by David Scarpa), but by crafting a story that latches onto the original’s skeleton like a necromantic barnacle. The result is less a mighty statue than a wispy hologram, aiming to resemble its predecessor but struggling to acquire its weight or texture.

The concept of diminishing returns in Hollywood is hardly new, and besides, it seems unfair to ding Scott and Scarpa for modeling so faithfully off of their existing blueprint. After all, what is a sequel but a continuation? Still, in its early going, Gladiator II threatens to develop its own personality, hinting toward narrative independence, if not stylistic novelty. Sure, the first time we see Hanno (Paul Mescal), he’s tending crops on his farm, a symbol of classical masculinity that inevitably recalls Russell Crowe’s Maximus dreaming of golden fields of swaying wheat. But any thoughts of gladiatorial combat or imperial destiny are far from Hanno’s mind; a legionnaire living in the humble province of Numidia, his more pressing concern is the advancing Roman army, led by a brilliant and ruthless general named Acacius (Pedro Pascal). Read More

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