Thriller

A Quiet Place: Staying Alive, with Mouths Shut and Eyes Open

Jeremy BeckReviews
John Krasinski and Noah Jupe in "A Quiet Place"

We begin with a stark title card: “Day 89.” A family prowls through a deserted pharmacy, the mother scanning labels on vials while the kids amble through the aisles and pluck goodies from the shelves. It’s a familiar scene to fans of apocalyptic fiction, the dusty sills and sparse surroundings recalling similarly ominous openings from movies like 28 Days Later and I Am Legend. The key difference here is that the characters, plainly well-versed in this foreboding new normal, take special care not to make any noise whatsoever. Yet before long, a mistake is made, a sound is blared, and in the blink of an eye and the rustle of some leaves, a life is taken.

And with this brief and riveting and ghastly cold open, A Quiet Place announces itself as an expertly conceived and executed horror film, perhaps the best of its kind since It Follows. Combining a knockout premise—stop, hey, what’s that sound?—with white-knuckle set pieces and a bracing degree of economy, the movie both elevates your pulse and digs under your skin. It’s scary, sure, but not so scary that it prevents you from admiring it as a polished, fiendishly inventive piece of pulp art. Read More

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Unsane: One Blew Into the Cuckoo’s Nest

Jeremy BeckReviews
Claire Foy in Steven Soderbergh's iPhone experiment "Unsane"

A daub of acid on an exposed nerve, Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane is a charmingly nasty piece of work, full of rich colors and garish shocks. It’s a proudly ridiculous B movie, one with little sense and lots of blood. Soderbergh has made far better films—just last year, he delivered Logan Lucky, a spry and surprisingly tender heist picture—but it’s still exciting to watch him dispense with any semblance of sensitivity and just slather on the gory carnage.

With the exception of the Ocean’s Eleven movies, no two Soderbergh productions are alike. Yet his restless career has followed something of a pattern, toggling between quirky, experimental features (Full Frontal, Bubble, Che) and more brusque genre fare (Haywire, Contagion, Side Effects). Unsane may be his first film that falls into both camps. In terms of plot, it’s pure pulp, a grisly tale of violence and murder. But while Soderbergh typically flaunts his smooth craftsmanship when making mainstream material, Unsane is different, carrying none of the elegant polish that heightens the Ocean’s films. Instead, it looks cheap and DIY, almost as though it was shot on an iPhone. Which, of course, it was. Read More

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Annihilation: Sights to See, But Beware of Monsters, and Humans

Jeremy BeckReviews
Natalie Portman & Co. head into the unknown in "Annihilation"

It’s called “the Shimmer”. A kind of holographic hemisphere, it is a translucent dome of shape-shifting light and iridescent color, steadily encroaching across an unspecified swath of lightly forested land. Nobody knows where it came from, and nobody knows what it is or why it exists. All anyone knows is that once you step inside it, you never come out.

This is the tantalizing setup of Annihilation, Alex Garland’s consistently stunning, occasionally baffling thriller. A film of beguiling beauty and nightmarish horror, it is first and foremost the product of an auteur with a distinctive vision. In Ex Machina, Garland showcased a talent for taking recognizable cinematic patterns and twisting them into distorted shapes that bled with a disquieting intensity. Here, he makes that metaphorical gift literal; in Annihilation, bodies mangle and mutate, contorting into indescribable forms that blur traditional lines—between flora and fauna, between human and animal, between earthly and otherworldly. Yet it’s all so gorgeously done that it presents an intriguing contradiction. Rarely has a movie simultaneously seemed so lovely and so demented. Read More

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Thoroughbreds: Horsing Around, with Mai Tais and Murder

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy and Olivia Cooke in "Thoroughbreds"

It is an exhilarating feeling, watching the work of a first-time director who operates with absolute confidence, with an imperceptible clarity of vision. As someone who’s only been going to the movies for a few decades, I’ve felt that sensation just a handful of times—during personality-fueled debuts like Brick, Being John Malkovich, and Michael Clayton—but I like to imagine that the cinephiles of yesteryear experienced something similar when they wandered into the theater and settled themselves for a screening of The Maltese Falcon or The 400 Blows or Blood Simple. I felt stirrings of it watching Thoroughbreds, the bold and provocative first feature from writer-director Cory Finley. I have no idea where Finley’s career will take him; maybe he’ll ascend, maybe he’ll flame out. I do know that with this impossibly gripping movie, he’s made one hell of an entrance.

Speaking of entrances, Thoroughbreds begins with a doozy, a short and sharp cold open that instantly announces its seriousness of intent as well as its formal rigor. We open with a direct shot of a horse, its alien snout practically poking through the screen, before turning to the face of a teenage girl, regarding the animal with a mixture of curiosity and indifference. The lighting is dark, the mood eerie, so by the time the camera reveals a large, glittering knife, our nerves are already on edge. Read More

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Red Sparrow: Can You Trust Anyone? Nyet!

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jennifer Lawrence as a Russian spy in "Red Sparrow"

In the deeply silly and agreeably entertaining Red Sparrow, Jennifer Lawrence plays a Russian ballerina who transforms into a devious and lethal spy. If you think that sounds like a stretch, you’ve never seen Lawrence act. Having previously applied her prodigious talents to a number of American Everywomen—housewives and mothers, travelers and strivers—here she dons an ushanka and a Russki accent, soldiering forward in a chilly, vodka-soaked Europe. It’s a ridiculous part, but Lawrence is just too damned good to let it go to waste. She initially plays it big and bold—savoring every morsel of Russian diction and leaning into every absurd revelation—only to sneak up on you with her intelligence and vast feeling. All good actors can play well-written roles convincingly; here, Lawrence turns an outrageous conceit into a real character.

That’s more than I can say for Red Sparrow, an implausible thriller that, despite a capable cast and a tone of deadly self-seriousness, struggles to transcend its narrative shortcomings. But while the movie has significant problems—it is too long, too scattered, and too convoluted—it is never less than watchable. Star power can go a long way, and so can sleaze. Read More

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