Grade: C

In a Violent Nature: One Man’s Slash Is Another Man’s Pleasure

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from In a Violent Nature

A campfire tale soaked in bile and blood, In a Violent Nature is a deeply unpleasant experience. This, of course, is the point; written and directed by Chris Nash, the movie is designed to unsettle its audience and subvert our expectations. By this measure, I suppose you could call it a success. But when judged against more traditional metrics—e.g., character development, thematic meaning, entertainment value, being vaguely interesting, etc.—it’s a failure.

Not a poorly made one, though. Making his first feature, Nash adopts a distinctive and coherent visual style, which he implements with considerable (albeit clammy) rigor. Operating within a cramped aspect ratio, his camera moves with a slow, purposeful glide, stalking its victims with deadly purpose. He refuses to use a musical score, instead relying on immersive sound design in which off-screen conversations are barely heard, like whispers in the woods. His technique isn’t found-footage horror—it’s methodical rather than chaotic—but it does fabricate a queasy, you-are-there intimacy. The result is like a Dardenne Brothers movie from hell—a ground-level observation of a supernatural monstrosity. Read More

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Godzilla x Kong, the New Empire: Animal Kingdumb

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire

The tagline for Roland Emmerich’s 1998 version of Godzilla proclaimed, “Size does matter.” Fair enough, but so do scale, weight, and clarity. The computer-generated beasts who rampage through Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire are undeniably large. But as creatures of action cinema, they are paper tigers—ephemeral and insubstantial, lacking in true force. They look like giants and punch like toddlers.

This is something of a problem, because the whole point of an enterprise like Godzilla x Kong is for its titular monsters to haul off and kick ass. Director Adam Wingard, who previously helmed Godzilla vs. Kong (the prior entry in Warner Bros.’ increasingly unwieldy cinematic universe), is no fool; he knows that the audiences flocking to this movie expect it to feature extensive footage of the King of the Monsters and the Eighth Wonder of the World laying waste to assorted animal competitors. He obliges immediately, as the opening scene finds a grey-bearded King Kong sprinting through the jungles and mountains of the Hollow Earth—the subterranean realm where he’s taken up a semi-peaceful existence, away from prying human eyes—as he’s chased by snarling predators that look like a cross between a jackal and an anteater. Kong’s predictable thrashing of these puny foes immediately emblematizes the picture’s failings. The issue isn’t so much that the creatures look fake—the special effects are impressively detailed in terms of color and design—but that the combat carries no tangible impact. It feels like an elaborate WWE routine—all posturing and preening, no real pain. Read More

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Golda: Funny, She Doesn’t Look Shrewish

Jeremy BeckReviews
Helen Mirren in Golda

Was Golda Meir a brilliant stateswoman or a power-hungry extremist? A crusader for justice or an enabler of discrimination? You’ve likely already made up your mind on such matters, and even if you haven’t, Golda is unlikely to inform your opinion. Directed by Guy Nattiv from a script by Nicholas Martin, it is a thin and meager picture, providing little insight into its subject beyond a vague intimation of her tenacity. If it defies Truffaut’s maxim that war movies inevitably glorify battle, it does so by virtue of being boring.

Not bloated, though. To its credit, Golda doesn’t try to contemplate the entirety of its heroine’s life; its 100 minutes contain no flashbacks to her childhood or formative sequences depicting her political ascendancy. Instead, the screenplay adopts what might be called the Lincoln approach, attempting to build a sweeping character study by chronicling a single famous event. That would be the Yom Kippur War of 1973, a 20-day conflict in which Israel reeled from a two-pronged attack initiated by Syria and Egypt. The theory of the movie is that, by showing us Meir’s behavior in the face of this catastrophe—her keen intelligence, her dry wit, her steely resolve—it will turn a narrow slice of history into a rich and evocative portrait. Read More

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: The Tortoises and the Flair

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

The success of the Spider-Verse pictures has ushered in a new style of animation that doesn’t yet have a name. Where the computerized creations of Pixar and its ilk exhibit hyper-realistic detail and punctilious precision, this burgeoning technique is playfully imperfect and openly fantastical. Rather than attempting to mimic the look of live-action cinema, it leans into its artifice, emphasizing its cartoonish quality through blurred edges, exaggerated features, and chaotic motion. The goal is to approximate the childhood experience of reading a comic book—not so much the literal sense of integrating thought bubbles and splash panels, but the more youthful wonderment of entering a world of obvious invention and boundless possibility.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is the latest entrant in this subgenre, and its aesthetic is successful insofar as it’s notable. The movie looks like… well, it looks like something. It’s nowhere near as cleverly designed or rapturously conceived as Across the Spider-Verse; its colors can be muddy, and its action sequences are generally incoherent. But it at least possesses a visual identity—a degree of pictorial flair—that distinguishes it from other animated productions aimed toward younger audiences. It has character. Read More

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Quick Hits: Renfield, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Jeremy BeckReviews
Nicolas Cage in Renfield; Ariela Barer in How to Blow Up a Pipeline

As premises go, “Nicolas Cage plays a campy Count Dracula” is a pretty good one. And Renfield, Chris McKay’s new horror-comedy, eagerly exploits the goofy appeal of its conceit; it slathers one of American cinema’s most (in)famous overactors in revolting makeup, dresses him in baroque wardrobe, and affords him ample opportunity to howl, snarl, and preen. Still, as Cage vehicles go, it’s less unhinged than some of his more maniacal late-period work, and in fact his performance works best when he pretends to modulate his hammy instincts with faux politesse, like a dormant volcano teasing you with the prospect of imminent eruption. When an associate informs Dracula that he was just on his way to see him, the vampire’s smiling response—“Oh, you were on your way”—drips with such performative understanding, you wonder if he feeds on anxiety rather than blood.

That associate, of course, is Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), and the problem with Renfield is that it’s mostly about Renfield. This isn’t the fault of Hoult, a fine actor and capable showboat in his own right. (If you haven’t seen him on Hulu’s The Great, you’re missing one of the small screen’s most marvelous imbeciles.) And it makes strategic sense to keep Cage’s wildness in reserve so that he doesn’t drain the film of its oxygen. But the product that McKay and his screenwriter, Ryan Ridley (fleshing out a Robert Kirkman pitch), have constructed around their stars is too flimsy to support the weight of their talent. It’s an idea in search of a movie. Read More

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