Thriller Archives - Page 14 of 30

KIMI: Uneasy Listening

February 18, 2022February 18, 2022 Jeremy BeckReviews

Steven Soderbergh routinely turns his camera into a bullhorn, using the crispness of his images (which he photographs himself, under the pseudonym Peter Andrews) to voice his displeasure with the ugliness of modern society. His latest picture, KIMI, gestures toward any number of topical themes: the physical and emotional aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic, the dystopian possibilities of the encroaching surveillance state, the venality and brutality of the corporate aristocracy. Yet despite glimpses of social-justice protests and hints of conspiratorial malfeasance, KIMI isn’t really a message movie. It is instead a lean and efficient thriller: 89 precisely calibrated minutes of setup, tension, and payoff.

The economy is often one of Soderbergh’s narrative preoccupations, but drop the article, and it becomes one of his artistic strengths. It’s a gift shared by KIMI’s hero, Angela (Zoë Kravitz), an adept computer programmer who spends her work-from-home days scrolling through audio streams and slicing her way through lines of code. In essence, she’s an interpreter for KIMI, the Echo-like smart device that Angela is paid to make even smarter, updating its software to recognize that “peckerwood” is an insult and “ME!” is a Taylor Swift song. Sleek and tastefully designed, KIMI is shaped like an eggshell-white cone, and she’s all ears; whenever you say her name, her base glows neon-pink and she cheerfully announces, “I’m here.” (Her soothing voice, supplied by Betsy Brantley, is virtually indistinguishable from Siri or Alexa.) Her purpose is service, and her persistent monitoring of her environment—she is, quite simply, always listening—is merely a method of continually enhancing her performance. Surely there are no downsides to this sort of thing. Read More

Scream: The Ghostface That Launched a Thousand Quips

January 21, 2022January 21, 2022 Jeremy BeckReviews

Scream is the fifth movie in the Scream franchise, which launched a quarter-century ago with a movie that was also called Scream. If you find this title repetition annoying, you aren’t alone; the film’s characters agree with you. “It should’ve been called Stab 8, not just Stab,” someone grouses at one point, referring to the series within the series that has apparently suffered from creative drought. This kind of meta commentary can be exhausting, but here it carries an element of sincerity. Despite being a bunch of cheap slasher flicks with no big stars, the Scream pictures have always aspired to a fairly lofty level of ambition, striving to combine playful semiotic analysis with genuine cinematic terror. These movies don’t just want to mock the clichés of classic horror; they also want to be horror classics.

Which this new Scream is not. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the duo behind the similarly sly Ready or Not, it’s more functional than suspenseful, serving up the usual medley of shrieks, spurts, and shocks with formulaic toil. But it’s nevertheless appealing, with solid performances and a witty script (from James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick) whose insights extend beyond the usual canned callbacks and self-referential humor. The movie is predictably stocked with insignificant twists—who’s the real killer? who cares?—but its biggest surprise is that it actually has something to say. Read More

Last Night in Soho: Going Back, Going Blonde, Going Bonkers

November 5, 2021November 5, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews

Remember the Swinging Sixties? That blissful English era of artistic revolution, high hedonism, and rampant sexism? At least, I think that’s what it involved; I wasn’t alive at the time, but I’ve consumed enough cultural artifacts from the period to approximate the woozy sensations of decadence and discovery. So has Edgar Wright, a voracious student of 20th-century pop culture whose movies tend to function as tributes to his dilettantish obsessions, as well as advertisements for the breadth of his own taste; his prior film, Baby Driver, was less a heist thriller than a feature-length playlist of classic tunes with vibrant visual accompaniment. Wright’s new feature, Last Night in Soho, initially scans as an ode to the lascivious London of yesteryear, a passionate homage to the pristine past that doubles as a sour lament for the degraded present. But there is more going on here than you might suspect—more ideas, more innovation, more mistakes.

“I like the old stuff better,” says Ellie (Thomasin McKenzie), an aspiring fashion designer newly arrived in London from the country. It’s a valid preference—the music that pours through her Beats by Dre headphones includes hits by The Kinks, Dusty Springfield, and Peter & Gordon—that nonetheless carries dubious implications. Nostalgia can be simplistic as well as seductive, and many a filmmaker has fallen prone to romanticizing the gauzy bygone days without grappling with their dark marks and complications. This time around, Wright is smarter than that; Last Night in Soho is simultaneously an appreciation and a reckoning. It conjures a hypnotic veil of old-world glamour, then vigorously pierces it to reveal the rot festering underneath. Read More

Titane: Extra-Vehicular Activities

October 8, 2021October 8, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews

Car trouble gets a remodel in Titane, the blistering new thriller from the French provocateur Julia Ducournau. If you think the dudes from the Fast & Furious flicks are into vehicles, wait until you meet Alexia, a woman with a metal plate wedged into her head and a screw loose in her brain. The plate was installed during her childhood (the screw has presumably been loose since birth), after she inspired a crash by distracting her father while cooing “vroom-vroom” from the backseat; far from holding a grudge, as soon as she’s released from the hospital, she plants an adoring smooch on the sedan’s window. Flash forward 20-odd years, and her affections for automotives have, shall we say, matured, even if her moral compass continues pointing straight toward a black hole.

Ducournau’s first feature was Raw, and if you saw it, you haven’t forgotten it, especially the scene where a hungry teenage girl nibbled on her sister’s severed finger. Her follow-up bears a number of similarities, many of them appellative; Garance Marillier, who previously starred in Raw as that ravenous limb-muncher, returns here in a smaller role again playing someone named Justine, while other key characters are once more called Alexia and Adrien. More substantively, both films interrogate femininity in a masculine world, and the chaos that results when women start pushing past the guardrails that polite society has erected for them. Read More

Malignant, The Card Counter, and Movies Going All-In

September 17, 2021December 16, 2021 Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews

Oscar Isaac in The Card Counter; Annabelle Wallis in Malignant

Last Sunday, the critic Walter Chaw tweeted that, because more than 90% of the new movies he watches are “pretty much the same”, he’s more likely to appreciate a film that “just cocks an arm and swings for all it’s worth”. I might quibble with the mathematical accuracy of his first statement, but despite the mixed metaphor, I’m inclined to agree with his second; even when they fail, ambitious movies tend to be more memorable than their cautious counterparts. Chaw presumably had a specific picture in mind, but this past weekend provided multiple titles that refused to play by multiplex rules. One is far better than the other, but both succeed in upending expectations and carving out their own atypical territory.

At the outset—and, in fact, for the majority of its running time—James Wan’s Malignant isn’t especially novel. Despite stemming from a nominally original screenplay by Akela Cooper, it’s another haunted-house chiller that would fit snugly inside the Conjuring cinematic universe that Wan created back in 2013. Its heroine, Madison (Annabelle Wallis, best known to me as Grace on Peaky Blinders), is plagued by visions of a malevolent spirit called Gabriel, one of those shadowy creatures who’s never quite in focus but who looks a bit like the skeleton-masked bank robbers from The Town, only blacker and nastier. In addition to somehow speaking through electronic devices like a demonic Siri, Gabriel seems to be a burgeoning serial killer, and Madison—in an arresting manipulation of the image—periodically finds her mind transported to the sites of his murders, forced to watch his grisly wet work like a helpless, paralyzed bystander. Read More