Streaming Release

Wolfs: Spurn After Reading

Jeremy BeckReviews
Brad Pitt and George Clooney in Wolfs

The first time we hear George Clooney’s voice in Wolfs, he’s on the other end of the phone, speaking in a clipped, measured tone that instantly conveys a sense of authority. A woman (Amy Ryan) has gotten herself into a spot of trouble—there’s a half-naked dead man in her hotel room, though he’s definitely “not a prostitute”—and she’s calling the mysterious number that somebody once gave her for existential emergencies. The man who answers is cool, confident, reassuring—the best in the business. When he arrives in person, hands shielded in blue latex gloves and ready to make her problem magically disappear, he insists that she’s found the right guy: “There’s nobody who can do what I do.”

The central joke of Wolfs is that exactly one other person can do what he does—and that person is played by Brad Pitt. It’s been 16 years since one of Hollywood’s most glamorous bromances shared the screen, when (spoiler alert) Clooney blasted a hole in Pitt’s head midway through Burn After Reading. Since then, they’ve both had solid careers independently—securing Oscar nominations (Up in the Air and The Descendants for Clooney, Moneyball and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for Pitt), headlining hits (Gravity and Ticket to Paradise, World War Z and Bullet Train), and appearing in a range of original pictures (Tomorrowland and Hail Caesar, Ad Astra and Babylon) that managed to exist outside the industry’s perpetual franchise machine. The promise of Wolfs is that it reunites these two A-listers—among the last vestiges of a bygone era when the audience’s level of interest in a new movie was directly correlated to the names on the marquee—and allows them to reignite the chic chemistry that once powered the Ocean’s films. Read More

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Rebel Ridge: Duck the Police

Jeremy BeckReviews
Don Johnson and Aaron Pierre in Rebel Ridge

Up until now, Jeremy Saulnier has been something of an “Imagine if” filmmaker. Whether centering on a hapless schmo embroiled in a deadly noir (Blue Ruin) or a punk-rock band trapped by bloodthirsty Nazis (Green Room), his movies have thrust ordinary people into impossible situations, forcing you to contemplate how you might respond in such drastic scenarios. With Rebel Ridge, he attempts to heighten both sides of his unbalanced equation while retaining the same fundamental sense of helplessness. The hero here is the opposite of an everyman; he’s smart, determined, and physically gifted. But he’s still the underdog, because the foe he’s facing is no less than the very institution of American policing.

The chief pleasure of Rebel Ridge is how it packages its big ideas—about racism, class entrenchment, and state-sanctioned violence—into a story that’s small-scale and tidy. Well, initially; as the film progresses, its thematic ambitions grow broader, which has the paradoxical effect of diminishing its boldness. Still, even if Saulnier isn’t always in full control of his thornier ideas, he remains in complete command of his immediate environment. As a polemic, Rebel Ridge is provocative but also uneven; as an action movie, it’s terrific. Read More

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Hit Man: Murder for Liar

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adria Arjona and Glen Powell in Hit Man

Last year, Netflix released David Fincher’s The Killer, a fit between director and subject matter that was so hand-in-glove perfect, it practically felt like a self-portrait. Now the streaming giant is “distributing” (to your TV set, if not to your local theater) Richard Linklater’s Hit Man—a less obvious match. Linklater’s career is sufficiently long (his first feature came in 1990) that he can’t be pigeonholed into a single genre, but his best-known works—Dazed and Confused, the Before trilogy, Boyhood—are talky, leisurely dramedies that contemplate the passage of time with relaxed, unforced intimacy. He’s an ambler, not a sprinter. This is the guy to make a movie about an undercover faux assassin?

Turns out, the pairing—like Linklater’s cozy, fluid dialogue—is natural and smooth. That’s partly because Gary Johnson, the New Orleans philosophy professor whose real-life exploits entrapping solicitors of murder were previously chronicled by Skip Hollandsworth in a Texas Monthly article, is less a killer than a bullshitter; he outfoxes his quarry rather than overpowering them. But it’s also because Linklater has wielded his gift for capturing the idiosyncrasies of human connection—the freewheeling conversations, the swirling emotions, the physical attraction—and retrofitted it into a crime-adjacent thriller that’s more concerned with pleasure than violence. The result is a movie that’s consistently enjoyable and even a little suspenseful. Read More

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Society of the Snow: The Hunger Shames

Jeremy BeckReviews
A scene from Society of the Snow

The movies love an impossibly true story—and if you aren’t familiar with the ultimate fate of the passengers of Uruguayan Air Force flight 571, you should probably stop reading now. If you are acquainted with this chilling saga of disaster, despair, and endurance—in which the survivors of a plane crash spent 72 days marooned in the Andes before being rescued—it might be because you’ve seen Alive, the 1993 feature directed by Frank Marshall. That decidedly American production, which was distributed by Disney, starred Ethan Hawke and Josh Hamilton as two of many white dudes cast as Uruguayan rugby players. Now, in a reclamation of sorts, comes Society of the Snow, a more culturally accurate recreation of the 1972 ordeal suffered by the Old Christians rugby team and other unfortunate travelers.

In a way, this operates as an inversion for J.A. Bayona, the Spanish filmmaker whose diverse credits include Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and The Orphanage (his first and best), and who previously revisited real-world tragedy and triumph with The Impossible. That movie, inspired by the plight of a Spanish woman during the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, made the controversial decision to tell its story primarily through the lens of three white UK actors. Here, Bayona seems to have inoculated himself against any accusations regarding representation; the men who play the ill-fated athletes all hail from Uruguay or Argentina, and none of them possesses a recognizable name that could be leveraged for marketing purposes. Their relative anonymity is in keeping with the picture overall—both for the heartfelt homage it pays to its real-life counterparts, and for the struggle it exhibits when attempting to turn torchbearers of agony into distinct characters. Read More

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May December: It’s a Generational Fling

Jeremy BeckReviews
Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore in May December

When we first meet Gracie and Joe, the married couple who constitute two-thirds of the unstable triangle that makes up Todd Haynes’ May December, they seem to be living an enviable fantasy of domestic bliss. Hosting that most idyllic of pastimes, the backyard barbecue, they share a passing kiss before busying themselves with their duties; Joe (Charles Melton) gets to work on the grill, while Gracie (Julianne Moore) bustles in the kitchen. The weather is sunny, the guests are smiling, and the mood is relaxed. But then Gracie opens the refrigerator door, and the music swells ominously as she makes a cataclysmic discovery: “We don’t have enough hot dogs.”

This is a very funny scene, even as it telegraphs Haynes’ bold, borderline-perverse intentions. With this movie, he is taking the meager lives of three pitiful people and imbuing them with the sweep of classic melodrama. Yet he is also doing the opposite: tackling subject matter that is fundamentally vulgar and investing it with extraordinary grace and sensitivity. May December traffics in illicit affairs and tawdry desires, which it heightens with extravagant skill and unapologetic grandeur. But where its bones are theatrical, its heart is achingly sincere. Read More

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