Grade: C plus

Blue Beetle: Say No to Bugs

Jeremy BeckReviews
Xolo Maridueña in Blue Beetle

It feels reductive to label Blue Beetle “the Latinx superhero movie.” But reduction is now the superhero industrial complex’s specialty. Marvel and DC are technically competitors, but their shared universes have operated in tandem, systematically shrinking the field of blockbuster cinema into a carefully cultivated, self-sustaining formula. The studios haven’t wholly eradicated visual imagination or provocative storytelling—search for a well-made comic-book production, and you need only flip the calendar back three months—but those qualities are now secondary, subservient to the commercial imperatives of franchise continuity and fan service. Artistic personality is no longer a goal, just a potential bonus.

So yes, Blue Beetle is the Latinx superhero movie. And it’s not awful! Contrary to DC’s corporate blueprint, its main attraction isn’t its athletic showmanship, its flashy special effects, or its obligatory world-building. (Superman and the Flash, along with their fictional cities of residence, are notably name-checked, as though the script is contractually preserving the right to let its characters play with the big boys in a future sequel.) It is instead the Reyes family, a tight-knit clan of Mexican-Americans who live in a boisterous Texas enclave within the (similarly fictional) Palmera City. Bustling with activity and affection, the Reyeses are rich in love and poor in everything else. When prodigal son Jaime (Xolo Maridueña), a recent college graduate (“How do I look?” “Like you’re six figures in debt”), returns home in ostensible triumph, he encounters a parade of terrible happenings: He’s at risk of losing his ancestral house (“The landlord tripled the rent”), his father’s long-running body shop is defunct, and his now-unemployed dad (Damián Alcázar) recently suffered a small heart attack. Read More

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Gran Turismo: What’s in a Game?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Archie Madekwe and David Harbour in Gran Turismo

The subtitle “based on a true story” tends to be a vapid marketing ploy—a phony assertion of honesty in a medium grounded in trickery—but in the case of Gran Turismo, you can understand the appellation. The narrative arc of this movie—about a videogame wiz who transformed his joystick-tugging prowess into professional success as a bona fide race-car driver—is so improbable, audiences would deride it as ludicrous if they weren’t assured it actually happened. The screenplay, by Jason Hall (American Sniper) and Zach Baylin (King Richard), has taken considerable liberties with the factual record, but its overall thrust remains accurate: In 2011, a 19-year-old PlayStation guru named Jann Mardenborough pivoted from console to racetrack, winning an academy competition and earning a “drive” on Nissan’s motorsports team.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp, Gran Turismo follows the sports-picture playbook with sturdy competence and comforting predictability. This, naturally, places it in ironic tension with its own central theme: that Jann’s true story is an anti-establishment triumph in which raw talent and radical innovation combine to defeat the mighty powers of orthodoxy and tradition. It’s a racing movie where the number of RPMs is topped only by the volume of cinematic clichés. Read More

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Fast X: Why So Furious?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Vin Diesel in Fast X

Bloat is endemic to all franchises, but the Fast & Furious pictures have a peculiar way of taking on water. For all of their chases and explosions and putative danger, these noisy conflagrations are curiously averse to death, loss, and even long-term conflict; antagonists aren’t defeated but converted into partners—new members of an ever-sprawling family. Fast X, the tidily titled tenth installment, doesn’t attempt to solve this problem, but it does exhibit some meta awareness of it. At one point, a beefy suit named Aimes (Alan Ritchson, from Amazon’s Reacher series), who works for a nebulous government(?) outfit known as The Agency, delivers an expository rundown describing how an erstwhile gang of California street racers gradually shifted from hijacking DVD players to landing on Interpol’s Most Wanted list—all the while turning cops into robbers. It’s a pointless info dump (did you really not know who these guys were before you bought your ticket?), but it also evinces a shiver of discernment. This is our formula, proclaims the screenplay from Dan Mazeau and Justin Lin. These movies have never made any sense—not narratively, not physically, and certainly not emotionally—but at least now they’re owning up to it.

To suggest that Fast X is clever is to travel several suspension bridges too far. All of the saga’s usual flaws—lugubrious characters, limp comedy, outrageous but unconvincing set pieces—remain in place, to the point where the new director, studio journeyman Louis Leterrier (replacing Lin, who departed due to the dreaded “creative differences”), seems to treat them as inherited property. And as was the case with the prior episode, the tedious F9, the franchise continues a misguided attempt to mine its own history—here opening with a recreation of the climactic Rio de Janeiro vault heist from Fast Five, complete with necromantic flashbacks of the late Paul Walker. (If you were concerned the series might actually wrestle with Walker’s death and incorporate it into the story, never fear; a throwaway line that “Mia and Brian are safe” satisfies all interested parties as to their absence, though Jordana Brewster does appear for a short scene of auntly protection.) Read More

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Quick Hits: Scream VI, Cocaine Bear, Creed III, Magic Mike 3, and Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan in Creed III; Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear; Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in Scream VI; Emma Mackey in Emily; Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance

Between the Oscars, our TV rankings, and our list of the year’s best movies, it’s been a busy past month here at MovieManifesto. As a result, while I was able to write a few proper reviews of new movies (the new Shyamalan, the new Ant-Man), I neglected to make time for a bunch of additional 2023 films. That changes now! Well, sort of. Unlike Lydia Tár, I can’t stop time, so I’m unable to carve out enough space for full reviews. Instead, we’re firing off some quick-and-dirty capsules, checking in on five recent releases. Let’s get to it.

Scream VI. The clever double-act of the Scream pictures—the platonic ideal established by the first installment and never quite equaled since—is that they’re movies about scary movies and are also, well, scary movies. In the prior episode, Scream (which should have been called Scream 5, but never mind), new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett satisfied one and only one side of that equation, cleverly skewering the toxic fandom that attends modern discourse but failing to serve up memorable carnage. Now returning with Scream VI, the pair have essentially flipped the script. The meta ideas bandied about here are a little less trenchant, but the nuts-and-bolts execution—and executions—is first-class. Read More

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Infinity Pool: The Excremental Tourist

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alexander Skarsgård in Infinity Pool

If Brandon Cronenberg is anxious about being compared to his father, he’s doing a good job hiding it. His prior feature, the art-house hit Possessor, leveraged the metamorphic gifts of Andrea Riseborough (newly minted Oscar nominee!) for a sordid story of corporeal invasion and existential agony. Now he returns with Infinity Pool, a wild and grimy phantasmagoria full of damaged bodies and deranged images. It may lack the deceptive polish of his pop’s best work, but it rivals him for sheer nastiness.

This is a matter of theme as well as form. In broad terms, Infinity Pool is a crude satire of white privilege and colonialist prerogatives. It’s set in the fictional country of Li Tolqa—filming took place in Croatia and Hungary, but the looming specter of “rainy season” suggests Southeast Asia—which attracts tourists with its opulent resorts and sandy beaches, but which someone ominously describes as “uncivilized.” The movie’s premise, which stirs echoes of last year’s Dual (and also The Prestige), revolves around a particularly perverse kind of black market: When interlopers break the law and find themselves subject to the third-world nation’s draconian justice system, they can evade punishment by paying the authorities (embodied by a louche Thomas Kretschmann) a hefty fee to manufacture a double—a perfect recreation endowed with their memories as well as their appearance—who will then suffer the death sentence in their stead. The only catch (OK fine, there are lots of catches) is that they must bear witness to their doppelganger’s execution. Read More

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