Grade: C

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

Read more

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

Read more

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

Read more

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania: A Bug’s Strife

Jeremy BeckReviews
Paul Rudd and Jonathan Majors in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

The implicit assumption underlying the Marvel Cinematic Universe—the notion meant to infuse it with relatability and heft as well as imagination and excitement—is that its movies (and TV shows) take place in our own world. A fantastical version of our world, sure, but ours nonetheless; for every talking raccoon, purple titan, and junkyard planet, there’s a Los Angeles mansion, a Queens tenement, and an Oakland basketball court. The idea is that, while the narratives feature costumed superheroes and magic weapons, the characters’ behaviors and desires remain rooted in recognizable human experience. Sokovia may not be a real county, but the Washington Monument is at least a real building.

What’s potentially interesting about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania—the third movie centering on Paul Rudd and Evangeline Lilly as the titular insects (he’s the ant, she’s the wasp), and the gazillionth 31st big-screen installment in the MCU’s history (not to mention the first of Phase Five, whatever that means)—is that the vast majority of its action doesn’t take place on Earth at all. It doesn’t take place in outer space either, or on any other faraway planet. It instead mostly transpires in the Quantum Realm, a microscopic land full of alien life forms, misshapen creatures, and animate vegetables. And so, unbound by the usual obligation to chain his fanciful hijinks to the deadweight of realism, the director Peyton Reed (working with the screenwriter Jeff Loveness) appears to have stumbled into the rarest of opportunities: the chance to a make a mass-market superhero movie that’s genuinely weird. Read More

Read more

Jurassic World Dominion: Hash of the Titans

Jeremy BeckReviews
The cast of Jurassic World Dominion

You remember Ellie Sattler, right? She was one of the visitors to the original Jurassic Park, the one whose open-mouthed awe gave way to gasps of horror when she discovered that Samuel L. Jackson’s reassuring hand was attached to nothing more than a bloody stump. Everyone’s favorite paleobotanist, Sattler is back in Jurassic World Dominion, at one point hunching down to peek at a cuddly-looking computer-generated baby critter and murmuring, in a reverent tone, “You never get used to it.”

Don’t you, though? The failed bet of this heaving, sporadically entertaining movie, which was directed by Colin Trevorrow from a script he wrote with Emily Carmichael, is that our collective fascination with prehistoric beasts hasn’t dimmed in the 29 years since Steven Spielberg terrified audiences with a few well-placed shots of CGI and a rippling puddle of water. Technology has progressed dramatically in the intervening three decades, and Dominion renders its terrible lizards with impressive and expensive-looking detail, if not much tangible weight. What is missing, beyond the inimitable gifts of Spielberg himself, is the sense of wonder. This is now the sixth Jurassic feature, not to mention the umpteenth strain in the commercially hegemonic species that is the box-office-conquering blockbuster, the kind whose cinematic DNA is spliced with elaborate effects and cardboard characters. We have, indeed, gotten used to it. Read More

Read more