Thriller

Official Secrets: Blowing the Whistle, and Facing the Consequences

Jeremy BeckReviews
Keira Knightley in "Official Secrets"

Three days before I saw Official Secrets, the Washington Post released a story that provided new details regarding a previously filed whistleblower complaint, which alleged that President Trump had made an improper promise to a foreign leader. The whistleblower, a member of the intelligence community, had felt compelled to take action because he believed that Trump’s conduct rose to the level of an “urgent concern”, which appears to be spook-speak for A Big Fucking Deal.

The aftermath of these explosive revelations is currently unspooling on various media: newspapers and their online affiliates, with their wide range of clickbait headlines and weary fact-checks; Twitter, with its armchair policy experts and viral memes; and—the President’s primary source of information gathering—TV news programs, with their ranty guests and exasperated moderators. The pages of history surrounding these events are currently being written; movies dramatizing them will surely pop up in the ensuing years and decades. In a less insane, more cinematically karmic world, this ongoing furor might have served as serendipitous marketing for Official Secrets, a movie which—if you can believe it—involves a civil servant in an intelligence agency who blows the whistle on her government after discovering that it’s engaged in illegal activity regarding foreign countries. Read More

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Luce: He’s Black and They’re Proud

Jeremy BeckReviews
Kelvin Harrison Jr. in "Luce"

He’s the valedictorian. His teachers often ask him to give inspirational speeches, which he delivers with disarming sincerity. He’s also a star athlete, a sprinter who runs in the upright style of Michael Johnson. And he excels on the debate team, where he presents his lucid arguments with a confidence that never slips into arrogance. His name is Luce, and as the school principal puts it, he is the very definition of a model student.

And Luce, while an imperfect film, feels similarly paradigmatic. Coursing with energy, insight, and relevance, it is exactly the kind of movie that American audiences should be watching right now, as the world burns and cultures clash. Unashamedly provocative, it is designed not to shame but to stimulate, to inspire discussion and reflection. It asks complex questions—about race, sex, drugs, criminal justice, even the platonic conception of the American dream—and then demands that you hunt for the answers. It holds up a mirror to the country and forces you to confront what you see. Read More

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Ready or Not: Here Come the Wealthy Satanists

Jeremy BeckReviews
Samara Weaving in "Ready or Not"

The rich really are different in Ready or Not, a bloody—and bloody-fun—satire of the American aristocracy. Every family has its quirky rituals, but the Le Domas clan—the coterie of smarmy blue bloods depicted here—is so accustomed to disposing of dead bodies, they instinctively toss a coin whenever they encounter a fresh corpse, a literal delegation of heads or tails. And if you think you’ve ever struggled to fit in with your moneyed in-laws, at least your great aunt has never charged at you while wielding a giant battle axe.

That’s just one of many daunting challenges faced by Grace (Samara Weaving), the heroine of this grisly, giddy tale. When the movie opens, she’s steeling herself for a different sort of nightmare: marrying into the Le Domas empire following a whirlwind romance with Alex (City on a Hill’s Mark O’Brien), one of the scions of the famous gaming dynasty. (“We prefer dominion,” he gently corrects her.) And if you strip away the brutal prologue, which finds a five-year-old Alex hiding in a closet while his relatives coolly murder a well-dressed man, the opening act of Ready or Not could perhaps be mistaken for a fish-out-of-water comedy, along with a send-up of the rich and brainless. Read More

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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: To LA, with Love

Jeremy BeckReviews
Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"

During one of the many enjoyably languorous stretches in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a woman buys a ticket to a movie. Told that the price is 75 cents—one of a million quaint signifiers that this film takes place in 1969—she haggles with the ticket taker, asking if she might receive a discount on account of being in the movie. After proving that she is indeed the picture’s third-billed actor—and after posing for a photo next to its poster—she gains free admittance to the theater, where she skittishly sinks into her seat and dons a pair of giant hoop glasses, eyes darting around the crowd in the sweet, vaguely desperate hope that her fellow patrons might appreciate her performance.

The woman is Sharon Tate, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the bold and beautiful and surprisingly moving new film from Quentin Tarantino, is in some ways about her grisly murder at the hands of the Manson Family. But it is also very much not about that. It is, more principally, a movie about its maker’s love of movies. And while, physically speaking, few would confuse Tarantino with Margot Robbie—the actress who here plays Tate with fizzy, wistful adorability—it’s possible to view Tate as a surrogate for the director, a man who takes immense pride in his work and who also craves validation for his craft. Read More

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Us: Meeting the Enemy, and Looking in the Mirror

Jeremy BeckReviews
Lupita Nyong'o in "Us"

Jordan Peele’s Get Out was such a unique and exhilarating blend of images and ideas—a suspenseful horror movie with a pointed political message—that it was easy to tolerate its third-act slide into ordinariness. His follow-up, Us, is not quite as thematically bracing; it feels more like a superlative exemplar of nightmare cinema than a full-on reinvention of the form. But even if Us is more entertaining than extraordinary—and to be clear, it would be deeply unfair to demand that Peele’s encore be equally groundbreaking—it is in some ways a more impressive picture than Get Out, with superior visuals and more consistent follow-through. Minimizing sociopolitical allegory in favor of visceral dread, it finds Peele sharpening his focus and refining his technique. He’s less interested in making you look inward in self-reflection than in forcing you to shut your eyes in fear.

This isn’t to say that Us is altogether silent with respect to race and politics. Its vision of an unseen underclass—a toiling horde of perpetually neglected laborers, à la The Time Machine—isn’t all that far removed from Get Out’s conceit of white aristocrats bidding on black bodies. But the most striking overlap between the two films is their use of the same indelible image: a close-up of a central character’s face, eyes widening in dismay and filling with tears as they perceive the terror of what surrounds them. Read More

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