Period Piece

Getting Personal: The Banshees of Inisherin, Armageddon Time, and Aftersun

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin, Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal in Aftersun, Banks Repeta and Anthony Hopkins in Armageddon Time

Today marks the long-awaited arrival of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, an enormous blockbuster that will make gobs of money, thereby rescuing the box office from its “post-summer slump.” But just because recent releases haven’t been financially successful doesn’t mean they haven’t been interesting. This past weekend featured modest expansions of three small-scale movies that collectively scraped together less than $3 million, which is less than Wakanda Forever will earn in an hour. There’s nothing inherently venerable about independent films, but these three pictures have more in common than modest budgets; they’re also all notably personal in their storytelling, with original screenplays written by their director. If Black Panther is the antidote for Hollywood’s commercial doldrums, these movies provide a valuable reminder that contemporary cinema consists of more than franchises and superheroes.

It doesn’t get much more personal than Armageddon Time, James Gray’s autobiographical depiction of his childhood in Queens in 1980. (In this, Gray gets a jump on Steven Spielberg, whose Arizona-set self-reflection, The Fabelmans, hits select cities today and will go nationwide the day before Thanksgiving.) Gray casts the fresh-faced, soft-featured Banks Repeta (recently in The Devil All the Time and The Black Phone) in the role of young James Gray Paul Graff, an aspiring artist whose idle classroom drawings exhibit greater skill than your typical 12-year-old doodle. Maybe someday he’ll grow up to be a talented filmmaker. Who can say? Read More

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Amsterdam: Dutch Ado About Nothing

Jeremy BeckReviews
Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington in Amsterdam

Throughout Amsterdam, things break: an ugly teapot, a bird’s egg, a man’s optic nerve, a loveless marriage. Yet because it’s the work of David O. Russell, the movie views such destruction not with sadness but with opportunity. A grinning carny barker whose attractions are warped and trampled human feelings, Russell savors goofy misfits, with their thwarted dreams and foiled scams. He likes to break things—and people—apart so that he can put them back together.

He doesn’t always succeed. Russell’s career is wildly uneven, not to mention polarizing; survey critics, and you’re unlikely to find consensus on his three best films. (For the record, they are Three Kings, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle.) Amsterdam, Russell’s first feature in seven years, showcases the director at his best and worst; it’s full of vibrant verve and stylish flair and ragged writing and quite a bit of nonsense. (His last picture, Joy, was similarly bumpy, suggesting that he’s grown consistently inconsistent.) In fact, the main characters here repeatedly improvise what they call “a nonsense song,” coming together to warble an off-key melody accompanied by incomprehensible lyrics, and it works handily as metaphor for the movie itself: meandering and patchy, yet oddly charming and full of life. Read More

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Don’t Worry Darling: Fall of the Wilde

Jeremy BeckReviews
Florence Pugh and Harry Styles in Don't Worry Darling

As the glamorous host of the glamorous party saunters down from his lofty perch on the glamorous balcony to grace the awestruck guests with his glamorous presence, he asks a rhetorical question: “What is the enemy of progress?” A member of the audience immediately replies, with Pavlovian instinct, “Chaos.” This may be accurate in certain industries—our host nods in approval—but when it comes to movies, it’s rarely the case. The true enemy of artistic progress is order, or at least pernicious forms of it—safety, predictability, complacency. Chaos, by contrast, is often the harbinger of innovation. It’s difficult to produce great art without first making a mess.

And Don’t Worry Darling, the second film directed by Olivia Wilde (from a script by Katie Silberman), is undoubtedly a mess. Its tone is overheated, its themes are muddled, and its plotting is ridiculous. But it nonetheless exhibits a brazen level of ambition—a visual and narrative boldness which vacillates between audacity and inanity—that’s commendable despite its gaps in logic. It may be chaotic, but at least it’s memorable. Read More

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Violent Femmes: The Woman King, Pearl, and God’s Country

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Viola Davis in The Woman King, Mia Goth in Pearl, and Thandiwe Newton in God's Country

Women are fighting back. Well, at least at the movies. Women aren’t a monolith on screen or off, but this past weekend’s new theatrical releases were striking for how they centralized female characters, and how they placed them in varying postures of defiance. At the cinema, the fairer sex is through with unfairness.

The most ambitious of these movies, The Woman King, is also the most conventional. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from a script by Dana Stevens, it’s an old-fashioned historical epic, in the vein of Spartacus or (for a more recent vintage) Gladiator. And when it comes to women fighting, its depiction is quite literal: It tells the story of the Agojie, a troop of female soldiers for the Dahomey kingdom in nineteenth-century West Africa. Led by the fearsome Nanisca (a reliable Viola Davis), they wage war against a rival empire—not out of territorial bloodlust, but out of desire to prevent their citizens from being conscripted into slavery. Read More

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Bullet Train, Prey, and Action Silly and Serious

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Brad Pitt in Bullet Train, Amber Midthunder in Prey

I take movies seriously, but how seriously should movies take themselves? One of the saws about modern blockbusters is that they’re meant to be dumb fun—that they’re designed to function as a respite from the harshness of reality, and that they grant viewers the blessed opportunity to “turn your brain off.” Setting aside the wisdom of deactivating your central nervous system, I acknowledge that films which operate primarily as pleasure dispensers carry a certain appeal, though it’s debatable whether they need to be dumb—or to neglect more pesky, brainy attributes like plot, theme, and character—in order to be enjoyable. The phrase “it doesn’t take itself too seriously” is generally considered a compliment, implying not that the picture in question is foolish, but that it’s unpretentious.

But is this a sliding scale? That is, when it comes to action—the genre most typically cited by Brain-Off enthusiasts—do movies necessarily trade seriousness for satisfaction? Or can a film’s sincerity instead indicate its level of artistic commitment, suggesting that it approaches its crowd-pleasing task with formal rigor and genuine care? These are false dichotomies, but this past weekend nevertheless presented an intriguing contrast, featuring two new action flicks that occupy opposite ends of this theoretical spectrum. One takes its blockbuster imperative deadly seriously; the other treats seriousness akin to a disease. Read More

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