Grade: C plus

Horizon, an American Saga: To Each His Yellowstone

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kevin Costner in Horizon, an American Saga: Chapter 1

Can Kevin Costner save the movies? He’s certainly willing to try, even if nobody asked him. Horizon: An American Saga is many things—an epic western, a romantic melodrama, a historical reckoning, an ode to classical masculinity—but above all, it is a wager on the sanctity of the theatrical experience. In the 34 years since Costner captured the hearts of viewers (and Oscar voters) with Dances with Wolves, the landscape of American cinema has changed, with much adult-oriented prestige fare migrating from the expansive frontier of the multiplex to the cozier confines of your living room. Costner himself has played a small part in this, having spent five seasons starring on the wildly popular TV series Yellowstone. With Horizon—which Costner not only wrote (with Jon Baird) and directed, but also financed with $38 million of his own money—he aims to unfurl a long-gestating passion project that restores the big screen to its former glory.

So the bitter and abiding irony of Chapter 1, the first of at least four planned installments in the saga (with the second slated for release on August 16 er, we’ll get back to you on that), is that it feels very much like an episode of television. It introduces a large number of characters and sketches out their preliminary circumstances, rarely affording them anything resembling closure. It also cuts across numerous locations, hinting at a potential intersection of disparate subplots but reserving any such linkage for a subsequent entry. And it concludes not with an exclamation point but with an ellipsis—a frenetic, fairly absorbing montage that comprises footage from the already-shot Chapter 2, a technique akin to the “This season on [X]” stingers that wrap up the premiere of your favorite Netflix or Amazon series. This isn’t a movie; this is a pilot. Read More

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MaXXXine: Body Trouble, But Dressed to Thrill

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Goth in MaXXXine

A sweaty and methodical build-up followed by a burst of spurting fluids—am I describing a horror movie, or a porno? The two genres collide in MaXXXine, though without the satisfactory release you might hope for. Sure, there is a bit of bare flesh on display and a good deal of blood, but surprisingly little in the way of tension or excitement. Sexploitation homages shouldn’t feel this neutered.

MaXXXine supplies enough visual style to make it watchable, but it’s still a disappointment, especially when you consider its genealogy. It’s the third consecutive collaboration between writer-director Ti West and actor Mia Goth, who two years ago gave us X, a snappy slasher that subtly interrogated the puritanical attitudes of the skin-flick ’70s while also delivering some humdinger set pieces. They followed that with Pearl, a cheeky prequel which excavated the origins of X’s geriatric villainess and provided Goth (who co-wrote it) with the monologue of a lifetime. MaXXXine flashes forward to the more recent past, bringing back Goth’s now-titular character from X along with a few tedious plot points. Set in 1985, the action has shifted from the clammy farmland of rural Texas to the glitzy neon of the Hollywood Hills, but the thematic preoccupations are similar to those of X. Once again, West is examining retrograde gender norms surrounding sex and cinema, imagining a lurid universe that blurs the line between on-screen indecency and real-world brutality. Read More

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The Watchers: What You See Is What You Fret

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dakota Fanning in The Watchers

Think fast: Can you name a movie directed by someone with the surname Shyamalan where a handful of terrified survivors take shelter in primitive surroundings in the forest, bracing for an invasion of unseen monsters? If you guessed The Village, you’d be right, and also wrong. The Watchers, the debut feature from Ishana Night Shyamalan, conforms to a similar horror template as that 2004 tentpole, one of the most divisive (and best) pictures directed by her father, M. Night. It’s inevitable, in our era of toxic nepo-baby discourse, that the younger Shyamalan’s work will be measured against that of her sire (who serves as producer here), so there’s something admirable about her steering into the skid and inviting the comparison. In tone and style, The Watchers is a decidedly Shyamalan production, featuring a number of qualities—foreboding atmosphere, stiff dialogue, gripping images, hokey mythology—that inevitably evoke the filmmaker who was once infamously dubbed “the next Spielberg.”

It’s slightly disappointing, if hardly devastating, that The Watchers is a flawed movie, struggling to enliven its spooky premise with the requisite eccentricity or suspense. But it isn’t an ignoble effort, and it establishes Shyamalan as a director with a fine eye. She just isn’t always sure where to aim it. Read More

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Sasquatch Sunset, Ungentlemanly Warfare, and the Risk of Originality

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Eiza González in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare; a scene from Sasquatch Sunset

When it comes to intellectual property, cinema doesn’t operate in absolutes. There are great superhero movies and also terrible ones; there are great original movies and also terrible ones. Still, the franchise boom of the 2010s created an uneven playing field that lent a certain luster to smaller-scale films which weren’t rooted in comic books or young-adult literature. In fact, the continued survival of these types of pictures is what makes me confident that the medium isn’t on the verge of collapsing, despite the constant industry doomsaying about A.I. or tax write-offs or Netflix giving Zack Snyder a billion dollars to make seven different versions of an off-brand Star Wars rather than releasing any of its #content in theaters. The movies have been at death’s door ever since their birth over 100 years ago. They just never seem to die.

Currently, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe dwindling in dominance and audiences rewarding more ambitious storytelling like last year’s #Barbenheimer phenomenon, there seems to be an opportunity for studios to pivot away from the IP craze and toward more original movies. But again, the mere fact of a film’s putative originality doesn’t necessarily mean it’s, y’know… good. This past weekend featured two new releases that don’t feature masked heroes, magic wands, or talking animals. At last, real movies for adults! Except, well, suffice it to say that both have their flaws. Read More

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Immaculate: Snacc of All Trades, Master of Nun

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sydney Sweeney in Immaculate

Until she cracked the box-office code with Anyone But You (still in theaters, over three months later!), Sydney Sweeney was best known for her television work: as a tempestuous sexpot on Euphoria, as a privileged troublemaker on The White Lotus, as a mentally unstable cellmate on Sharp Objects. Even as her star ascended and she appeared in more movies, the pandemic and studio hesitation conspired to prevent her from arriving on the actual big screen, as streamers gobbled up solid pictures like Reality and Big Time Adolescence… and also The Voyeurs, a spiky little thriller that dropped on Amazon a few years ago with little fanfare. Strictly speaking, The Voyeurs wasn’t a good movie, but it did showcase Sweeney’s ability to be both exotic and innocent; it also afforded its director, Michael Mohan, the opportunity to ape Brian de Palma. Now, Mohan and Sweeney have reteamed for Immaculate, a horror flick that contemplates a different sort of lusty possession.

As with The Voyeurs, Immaculate isn’t very good, but it isn’t without its guilty pleasures. As a creature of pure genre, it offers a handful of images—a watchful eye peering through a crevice to witness a sacrilegious ritual; a distant figure launching herself from a background tower—that contain a certain elemental power. The opening scene finds a young nun (Simona Tabasco, also from The White Lotus) trying to escape from an Italian convent that might as well be a medieval castle; as she fumbles frantically with the keys at the wrought-iron gate, a quartet of elders inexorably stalk toward her, like four Darth Vaders in habits. There’s no ambiguity or complexity here, just primordial terror. Read More

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