Grade: C

The Lion King: I Just Can’t Wait to Be Pointlessly Remade

Jeremy BeckReviews
This is a lion in the movie "The Lion King".

In the new Lion King, the circle of life soothes us all, but especially the Walt Disney Company’s shareholders. Made a quarter-century after the original enchanted audiences with its blend of Shakespeare, music, and fart jokes, this remake takes pains to follow the unwinding path that Carmen Twillie sang about all those years ago. Yet rather than traversing a harmonious circle, this Lion King progresses in a straight line, one pointed squarely back toward the past. In our present era of Disney dominance, everything new is old again.

Directed by Jon Favreau, and taking place in the increasingly populous cinematic netherworld that lies between animation and live action, this new Lion King aspires to remind nostalgic viewers of its predecessor as bluntly and repeatedly as possible. But it is notably different in one respect: It’s longer. Favreau’s version clocks in at 118 minutes, a full half hour greater than the hand-drawn classic. You might think that Favreau and his screenwriter, Jeff Nathanson (whose odd career includes three Spielberg movies, plus a bunch of inferior sequels), would use this additional time to meaningfully expand the film’s universe, perhaps by dynamizing its action or supplementing its story. But while there are a couple of new songs—and while the shot-for-shot concerns that sprang up last year prove unfounded—none of the added material carries any spark of originality. Favreau hasn’t made a movie so much as a museum artifact—a weird, faded echo of a time gone by. Read More

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Dark Phoenix: Rise from the Ashes, or Just Burn It Down?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sophie Turner as Jean Grey in "Dark Phoenix"

To paraphrase Patrick McGoohan’s line from Braveheart, the trouble with superhero movies is that they’re full of superheroes. On the flat pages of comic books, readers can rely on their imagination, translating two-dimensional splash panels into vibrant, kinetic action in their mind’s eye. But on film, the crude literalism of the screen requires directors to convey often ambiguous powers—psychic energy, beams of light, metaphysical toil—in blunt cinematic language. The result tends to be a strange sensation of detachment, as though you’re watching stage actors pantomime their performances in an early rehearsal, knowing that the production flourishes will be locked in by opening night.

Jean Grey, whose malevolent alter ego gives the film Dark Phoenix its name, presents an especially formidable challenge in this regard. She wields her mutant abilities, which in the comic-book lexicon carry fancy terms like astral projection and telekinesis, not via any visible external method but through internal concentration. She can practically rip the world apart with her mind, but how do you articulate that process with any spatial coherence or physical weight? Read More

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Long Shot: Love and Laughs on the Campaign Trail

Jeremy BeckReviews
Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron in "Long Shot".

A romantic fantasy in more ways than one, Long Shot is a beauty-and-the-beast love story that simultaneously aspires to work as a thorny quasi-satire of contemporary politics. It aims not only to tell a crowd-pleasing tale of sweetness and levity, but also to impart a valuable message to the American electorate. This is a laudable idea, one with a rich cinematic history; Aaron Sorkin fans will fondly remember The American President, while film enthusiasts of a different generation may recall Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But to borrow language from the political realm, Long Shot is a smoke-and-mirrors candidate, spouting handsome rhetoric but skimping on actual, meaningful substance. When the pairing of Seth Rogen and Charlize Theron is one of the more credible ideas on screen, you have perpetrated a fraud on the moviegoing public.

Have I gone too far? Maybe. If you approach Long Shot while wearing a certain set of blinders—if you ignore its poisonous ideas and its philosophical sloppiness—you may perceive it as a harmless little rom-com, a passably diverting use of two hours. The acting is quite good, not only from the leads but also the supporting cast, in particular June Diane Raphael as a dubious staffer and O’Shea Jackson Jr. as a loyal confidant. The script, by Dan Sterling (The Interview) and Liz Hannah (The Post), isn’t nearly as hilarious as it thinks it is, but it features its share of clever lines, while the direction, by Jonathan Levine (50/50), includes the occasional visual flourish amid the forgettable point-and-shoot mundanity. Theron gets to do a spit take and simulate rolling on molly, while Rogen, best known for his verbal dexterity, receives an opportunity to showcase his gifts as a physical comedian. It is an avowed cinematic truth that watching a man fall down a flight of stairs is always funny, as is seeing him spurt bodily fluids in unintended places. Read More

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Velvet Buzzsaw: Killer Painting. What’s It Worth?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rene Russo and Jake Gyllenhaal in "Velvet Buzzsaw"

The emperor’s clothes get ripped to shreds in Velvet Buzzsaw, an asinine satire of the modern art scene that paints its targets and its characters in crude, bloody strokes. Written and directed by Dan Gilroy (and distributed by Netflix), it imagines a world full of rubes and sharks, a corrupt ecosystem in which artists, dealers, and critics conspire and compete in their feverish efforts to defraud you, the guileless consumer. It’s a tale of sickly glamour; most of the people we meet in this ugly little movie are extremely wealthy, though their morals are as bankrupt as Gilroy’s themes.

As a satire, Velvet Buzzsaw is profoundly idiotic, but as a halfway-intentional comedy, it is not without its diversions. Chief among those is Jake Gyllenhaal, who in Gilroy’s Nightcrawler delivered the performance of his career as a gaunt, wild-eyed videographer who crept from TV newsrooms into your nightmares. His work here is less unsettling but no less entertaining, full of rococo flourishes that underline his zany commitment. His mania holds your attention even as the film around him burns to the ground. Read More

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Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald: Setting the Magical Table, One Spell at a Time

Jeremy BeckReviews
Katherine Waterson and Eddie Redmayne in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"

There is plenty of spell-casting and wand-waving in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, the second in a planned five-film series from director David Yates and writer J.K. Rowling. Whether there is much genuine magic is another matter. On occasion, Yates’ visual flair and Rowling’s boundless imagination combine to show you something truly wonderful and dazzling: winged horses pulling a carriage through lashing rain; a lionlike creature with wide eyes and a whirling pink tail storming through Paris; a circle of brilliant-blue flames walling off an army of advancing soldiers. Most of the time, however, the magic on display is of a more earthbound sort, akin to a charlatan’s rudimentary illusions. The Crimes of Grindelwald is very loud and busy, but its noise and energy seem designed to distract you from what’s really happening. It’s the classic shell game writ large and in CGI; focus on the blurs of motion and the blasts of sound, and you can’t see the movie’s fundamental emptiness.

Among the many achievements of Rowling’s Harry Potter novels (and their filmed adaptations) was their deft balance between—to borrow terms from TV criticism—the episodic and the serialized; each told a compelling story with a discrete dilemma and a particular villain while also continually developing the central characters and steadily progressing toward an ultimate, good-vs.-evil showdown. The Crimes of Grindelwald, by contrast, seems entirely invested in setting the table for future installments, cautiously arranging chess pieces without moving them anywhere interesting. Following a reasonably suspenseful, somewhat indiscernible prologue in which the dastardly Gellert Grindelwald (Johnny Depp, perfectly fine) escapes from the custody of magical law enforcement in the night sky amid a thunderstorm, the movie begins with Grindelwald poised to topple the social wizarding order. It ends in pretty much the same place. The meaty stuff, it appears, will be served later; this is just a lengthy appetizer. Read More

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