Romance

Labor Day roundup: Onslaught, Fall 2: Deadpoint, The Sun Never Sets, and Finding Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adria Arjona in Onslaught; Harriet Slater in Fall 2: Deadpoint; Dakota Fanning in The Sun Never Sets; Angourie Rice in Finding Emily

Hollywood generally dismisses Labor Day Weekend as a dead zone—a dumping ground for thinly marketed fare that studios forgot to release in January. In its history, the holiday has hosted exactly one smash hit (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), while only two other films (The Equalizer 3 and Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake) have ever topped $20M for the Friday-Sunday window. This year was no different—the highest-grossing new release was By Any Means, which pulled in just $7.5M, and which I skipped on account of it starring Mark Wahlberg—but the September slate nonetheless provided a range of odd and diverse pictures. Only one is, y’know, good, but two others are at least worth seeing, and all four are conceptually worthwhile.

Onslaught. The only thing worse than the screenplay in Onslaught is the hairstyling. Adria Arjona, one of the most desirable women in the world, is afflicted with a tangled mane, suggesting that her survivalist heroine devoted all of her budget turning her mobile home into a roving armory and thus can’t afford a comb. Drew Starkey, the handsome actor who has recently engaged in steamy on-screen romances with both Daniel Craig (in Queer) and Anya Taylor-Joy (on TV’s Lucky), sports a blond mohawk that he appears to have trimmed with a cleaver. And Dan Stevens, who embodied aesthetic male perfection in I’m Your Man, is fitted with a frightening bald cap framed by tufts of white follicles. The movie places a handful of ordinary citizens in a nightmarish situation, desperate for deliverance, but what they truly need is less a savior than a barber. Read More

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The Dog Stars review: His Bark Is Worse Than His Blight

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jacob Elordi and his Belgian Malinois in The Dog Stars

It’s been five years since Ridley Scott made a good movie (The Last Duel), but that hasn’t stopped him from trying. Undaunted by age, the 88-year-old Briton keeps cranking out handsome, nobly ambitious period pieces: a biopic of a fashion designer (House of Gucci), a military epic about a tyrant (Napoleon), a long-awaited return to the Colosseum (Gladiator II). (IMDb currently assigns Scott to eight upcoming titles in varying stages of development.) Now he’s back (to the future!) with The Dog Stars, a somber post-apocalyptic thriller that’s temporally different from his recent work, but qualitatively similar. It occasionally approximates an interesting movie, yet it’s ultimately forgettable.

To the extent The Dog Stars resonates at all, it does so metatextually. Based on novel by Peter Heller (the screenwriter is Mark L. Smith, whose uneven résumé includes Twisters and The Revenant; Christopher Wilkinson receives a “writer” credit), the film takes place in a depopulated landscape whose remnants of civilization—dilapidated buildings swarmed by vines, highways littered with rusty cars—will appear familiar to viewers of dystopian fiction. But while the movie is appropriately spare with backstory—a virus spread, and people died—its fanciful premise is nonetheless unsettling, given that here in reality, our nation’s top health official is a worm-infested eugenicist whose mission is to eradicate vaccines. Earlier in August, the “sex purge” concept of One Night Only seemed less ridiculous than it otherwise might have; three weeks later, Scott’s vision of a world ravaged by a pandemic plays eerily like prophecy. Imaginary futures feel less distant than they used to. Read More

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One Night Only review: Sex, Love, and Uncontrollable Purges

Jeremy BeckReviews
Monica Barbaro and Callum Turner in One Night Only

Earlier this summer, the Trump administration issued new grant criteria, stating that nonprofits seeking federal funding to help prevent teen pregnancy must counsel adolescents about “family stability” and “marriage prior to childbearing.” It then revoked the grant of an agency called Fact Forward, presumably for the sin of teaching teenagers about proper condom use. So the premise of One Night Only—which takes place in an alternate America where premarital sex has been outlawed, with the exception of a single evening per year—seems less preposterous than it might have a decade ago. The movie is set three years in the future, but it may as well take place in a realm of perpetual Project 2025.

You might perceive this scenario—the U.S. government wielding its power as a surveillance state to curtail the bodily autonomy of its citizens, in part by branding trackers onto people’s wrists—as the backbone of a harrowing piece of dystopian fiction. But Will Gluck, directing from a script by Travis Braun, has no interest in exploring the troubling sociopolitical ramifications of this conceit. Instead, he has molded the idea into a lighter, more frivolous creature (those trackers take the form of colored animal tattoos, how cute!), one whose shape is classically familiar but whose appearance on the big screen is vanishingly rare. He’s made a romantic comedy. Read More

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Crime Pays in the Indie Thrillers Tuner and Carolina Caroline

Jeremy BeckReviews
Leo Woodall in Tuner; Kyle Gallner and Samara Weaving in Carolina Caroline

One of the pleasures of moviegoing is vicarious excitement—the thrill of experiencing something you can’t possibly attain in real life. I am not a professional athlete, an ingenious detective, or a vampire slayer, but cinema brings me closer to such larger-than-life heroes, even if it can also shade them with relatable humanity.

This is particularly true when it comes to crime—especially theft. As a rule-abiding office drone who hesitates before lifting extra paperclips from the supply closet, I’m personally unacquainted with chases and shootouts and scores, so I have a weakness for movies about robbers scheming to pull a heist. The past few weeks saw two independent pictures featuring blue-collar characters who discover a latent aptitude for stealing, a talent that brings them both prosperity and danger. If neither made a peep at the box office, well, maybe that’s because they’re still eluding society’s dragnet. Read More

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The Drama review: To Have and to Scold

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama

It’s a classic meet-cute. He spies her in a coffee shop reading a book. He has to talk to her, so he quickly googles the novel and approaches her with some canned, cheesy material about how much it spoke to him. He keeps stumbling over his words, panicking when she refuses to engage, only for her to startle and remove an unseen AirPod from her left ear. “I’m deaf in this one,” she explains, and he starts to melt, realizing she didn’t hear a damn thing he said, but then she throws him an unexpected lifeline: “Do you want to start again?”

This is the delightful opening scene of The Drama, a bewitching and provocative movie that initially unfolds as a storybook romantic comedy. Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are the perfect couple: smart, attractive, blessed with verbal and physical chemistry. Their courtship checks all of the boxes, in particular a magical first kiss that would be the envy of Jane Austen. It’s now the week of their wedding, and we learn the details of their fairy-tale engagement as Charlie runs a draft of his speech past his best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), who’s so moved he starts crying. Everything is so light and sweet and charming, you wonder if Kristoffer Borgli, the film’s writer and director, somehow got the title wrong. He didn’t. Read More

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