Grade: C

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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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

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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

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F9: The Fast Saga: Love Motion No. 9, Now with Magnets

Jeremy BeckReviews
Vin Diesel and John Cena in F9: The Fast Saga

The Fast and Furious movies are rarely funny—what passes for comedy typically involves shrieks from Tyrese Gibson, followed by pained reaction shots from Ludacris—but at least one moment in F9: The Fast Saga made me laugh. Describing the logistics of an impending piece of preposterous derring-do, Tej (Ludacris) calmly declares, “As long as we obey the laws of physics, we’ll be fine.” To quote Frances McDormand in Almost Famous: funny joke! It’s been two decades since this nominal saga began with a B-movie production of underground street racers hijacking trucks full of DVD players; as the installments have grown increasingly expensive and elaborate, their interest in physical plausibility has correspondingly waned to the point of vanishment. Over the course of F9’s long and loud 145 minutes, cars don’t just zoom down roads and across bridges and into the occasional wall; no, they leap off cliffs and crash through department stores and even careen through outer space. Forget physics—the only law this movie is interested in obeying is the law of the sequel.

This isn’t necessarily a complaint. While there’s something to be said for cinematic action that’s rooted in real-world corporeality, films that use convincing special effects to distort and exaggerate reality carry their own outsize appeal. My issue with the maniacal chaos of F9, which was directed by Justin Lin (helming his fifth entry in the franchise, and first since Fast & Furious 6), isn’t that it’s unrealistic but that it’s unexciting. No one could possibly accuse this movie of lacking energy or noise, but it rarely executes its vehicular mayhem with wit or distinction. It’s less an issue of credibility than anonymity; the film’s defining aesthetic personality is no more inventive than Cars Go Vroom. Read More

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Things Heard & Seen: The Ghostest with the Mostest

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amanda Seyfried in Things Heard & Seen

Every horror movie is a metaphor. Things don’t just go bump in the night for no reason; they carry messages and meaning, whether about racial injustice or domestic abuse or romantic incompatibility. The genre is an amplifier, designed to imbue figurative predicaments with literal and physical force. Things Heard & Seen, the new horror-lite picture from Netflix, proffers any number of tribulations for allegorical fodder: the peril of being trapped in a loveless marriage; the trauma of suffering from an eating disorder; the fear of being dislocated from the city to the country; the questionable wisdom of hiring a hunky, piano-playing townie to do your yardwork.

As that scattered litany of problems indicates, Things Heard & Seen is not an especially trenchant or provocative work. But it’s hardly terrible, seeing as it probes its central relationship with honesty and sobriety. Still, it’s easy to wish that this vague, slippery movie were a bit scarier, and that it cared more about its leading lady. Read More

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