Romance

It Ends with Us: Wild at Start

Jeremy BeckReviews
Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively in It Ends with Us

Multiple times in It Ends with Us, the camera focuses on a crinkly napkin on which Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) has scrawled the numbers one through five in sequence. Lily’s mother (Amy Morton) has tasked her with delivering her father’s eulogy and has advised her to “just say your five favorite things about him,” but because Lily remembers her departed dad less than dearly, the rest of the wrinkled cotton remains blank. Yet when she stands at the funeral podium, Lily still retrieves the napkin from her pocket and glances at it—despite knowing full well that it contains no substantive text—before silently exiting the church.

This is not, strictly speaking, plausible behavior. But it nevertheless serves a purpose, loudly announcing the extent to which Lilly’s daddy issues have paralyzed her. And writ large, It Ends with Us proceeds accordingly to a similar pattern, sacrificing textural realism in the name of dramatic force. As a piece of storytelling, it is often clumsy and unpersuasive. As a work of messaging, it is engaging and even provocative. Read More

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Challengers: Thirst Serve

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mike Faist, Zendaya, and Josh O'Connor in Challengers

One of the first times we see Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) in Challengers, she’s clad only in black lingerie, the camera observing her backside in a manner somewhere between appreciative and exploitative. Empirically, it’s the most skin we see in the movie, yet from the characters’ point of view, it doesn’t represent Tashi at her most alluring. That comes later (really earlier, in the film’s chronology), when two admirers are watching her play tennis at the junior U.S. Open. As she trades ground strokes with an overmatched opponent, they gawk at her combination of power and grace. “Look at that fucking backhand,” one of them whispers, in an awed tone that suggests a repressed teenager who just caught a glimpse of Pamela Anderson in Playboy.

It seems diminishing to characterize Challengers, the riveting and ravishing new picture from Luca Guadagnino, as a sports movie. Sure, it follows the entwined lives of three gifted tennis players, but it’s more about their emotional cravings than their physical exploits. Yet it doesn’t treat tennis as mere window dressing. Instead, it captures the ineffable appeal of sports—the cathartic thrill of competition, the rigor of perfecting one’s craft, the blurry line between passion and professionalism—and binds it to the characters’ omnipresent hunger and vulnerability. There are all sorts of games being played here, and some have nothing to do with rackets. Read More

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Love Lies Bleeding: Her Body Is a Rage

Jeremy BeckReviews
Katy O'Brian and Kristen Stewart in Love Lies Bleeding

The MPA advisement for Love Lies Bleeding informs viewers that the film is rated R “for violence and grisly images, sexual content, nudity, language throughout, and drug use.” Setting aside that certain sickos (who me?) might perceive this notice as an inducement rather than a warning, one vice that the agency declines to mention is smoking—perhaps because the movie itself condemns such behavior. Early on, a woman named Lou pushes play on a portable cassette recorder (the year is 1989); as she half-listens to a health official drone on about the dangers of nicotine addiction, she aimlessly puffs on a cigarette. The obvious conflict between her brain and her body is amusing, even if her inability to quit quickly becomes the least of her problems.

Lou is played by Kristen Stewart, who supplies the kind of earthy, hard-bitten performance that has become the actor’s specialty post-superstardom. Stewart’s naturalism makes her an intriguing match with Rose Glass, the promising writer-director whose first feature, Saint Maud, was a raw nerve of a horror movie, observing a pious caretaker’s descent into madness with unsettling chops. In Love Lies Bleeding, Stewart’s effortless plausibility draws you inside Lou’s orbit and makes you root for her, even as Glass sets about upending her meager circumstances with exuberant chaos. Read More

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Fair Play: Investment Wank

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alden Ehrenreich and Phoebe Dynevor in Fair Play

The power couple at the center of Fair Play both work at a pressure-cooker investment bank, so it’s fitting that the movie opens with its own form of aggressive sales pitch. Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) are cavorting at a wedding, where they sneak into the bathroom for a quickie. Luke performs some moan-inducing cunnilingus, but Emily’s gasps turn from pleasure to shock when she realizes that her menstruation has bloodied both his face and her dress. Yet they recover their poise (“You look like you slaughtered a chicken,” he giggles), then sneak out a back door and race home to their swanky Manhattan apartment, where they enthusiastically finish what they’d started.

The purpose of this introduction is twofold. On a character level, it’s designed to establish Luke and Emily’s mutual passion—an ardor whose strength and durability will be tested as the film unspools. And in terms of style and imagery, it announces its provocative intent—not as a product of pornography (the simulated thrusting and the glimpses of nudity are more coy than explicit), but as a piece of proudly sexed-up entertainment. Here at last, writer-director Chloe Domont proclaims, is an adult movie for adult audiences. Read More

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Landscape with Invisible Hand: Grave New World

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kylie Rogers and Asante Blackk in Landscape with Invisible Hand

Cory Finley won’t repeat himself. You couldn’t have blamed him, following his electrifying debut of Thoroughbreds, if he’d chosen to keep making razor-sharp thrillers his whole career. Instead he pivoted to docudrama with Bad Education, telling the fact-based story of a different sort of sociopath who preyed on people not with poison and knives but with smiles and scams. His new movie, Landscape with Invisible Hand, is also partially set in the classroom, but the malfeasance it chronicles is far stranger than garden-variety embezzlement. Early on, an English teacher informs his students that his “microscopic salary” has nevertheless been deemed too onerous for the new administration. He then strolls into the courtyard and, with minimal fanfare, puts a gun in his mouth and splatters his brains all over the concrete. Bad education, indeed.

It’s a jolting introduction, one which signals that the ensuing picture won’t conform to the sanitized standards of the young-adult playbook. But the oddness of Landscape with Invisible Hand is apparent even earlier. Its very first scene finds a young aspiring painter named Adam Campbell (Asante Blackk, from This Is Us) sketching a vista of the bright blue sky, only for his view to become clouded when a gigantic flying saucer rolls overhead. That might seem alarming, but Adam reacts with resigned annoyance—“Find someplace else to park!”—and we immediately realize that we’re watching a piece of dystopian fiction. But where many alien-invasion films traffic in terror and violence, this one is characterized by drudgery and disenchantment. Read More

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