Thriller

Ex Machina: Of Gods and Men, and Their Beautiful Machines

Jeremy BeckReviews
Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac in Alex Garland's "Ex Machina"

“Deus ex machina,” the literary term used to describe the contrived resolution of a complicated plot, translates as “God from the machine”. You might think, given that the title of Alex Garland’s arresting, deeply promising directorial debut is merely Ex Machina (sans “deus”), that there are no gods to be found here, only hubristic men and their miraculous machines. You’d be right, but only from a literal perspective. The two characters at the center of Ex Machina may be men, but they act like gods (one even proclaims himself as such), and while they play different parts—one fancies himself the benevolent savior, the other the impassive creator—they each seek to manipulate the fates of others. They soon learn that playing God comes with a cost.

Of course, they themselves are behaving at the whim of their own maker. Every director is the god of his own movie, and Garland hurls a Zeus-like thunderbolt in the film’s very first scene. His camera opens with a close-up of Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson, nicely cast and effectively blank), with rivulets of electronic-blue light dancing across his face as though constructing a topographical map. An email with the subject “Staff lottery: WINNER” flashes across his computer screen, his cell phone blows up with congratulatory messages, and then without a word he’s off, flying via helicopter over the frigid lands of Norway. Garland conveys a reel’s worth of exposition in a few silent seconds, and this extraordinary economy demonstrates that Ex Machina isn’t interested in second place. It wants to be great, and it mostly is. Read More

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’71: Behind Blurred Enemy Lines

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jack O'Connell runs for his life in "'71"

There is scarcely a glimpse of true color to be seen in ’71, apart from the occasional piercing pop of Jack O’Connell’s sky-blue eyes. Yann Demange’s fumbling, gripping tale of a soldier trapped behind enemy lines, it takes place in a washed-out landscape of grimy greys, dirty browns, and burnt-out fire-orange. Unfortunately, that sense of abiding murkiness extends to Gregory Burke’s screenplay, which assembles a motley bunch of Irish gangsters and does little to differentiate them. But even if ’71‘s storytelling is muddled, its execution is consistently riveting. Directing his first feature, Demange has made a pulse-pounding thriller that demonstrates a bone-deep understanding of filmmaking suspense. It’s scary to think of what he could do with a more attentive script.

The latter two-thirds of ’71 are imbued with a feverish, exhausting tension, but it begins as something far different: a touchingly humane platoon picture. O’Connell stars as Gary Hook, a young private in the British Army who’s going through the usual grueling training regimen, running great distances with a rifle slung across his back before crawling through the mud. But his commanding officers, rather than peppering him with the typical accusations of worthlessness (think Full Metal Jacket), preach loudly and encouragingly about the virtues of teamwork. “Help each other!” one CO barks as Hook and his comrades attempt to scale a mock wall. It’s a seemingly straightforward command that ’71, as it descends deeper into desperation, distorts and refracts with chilling ambiguity. Read More

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Maps to the Stars: Where Satire Meets Schlock

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Wasikowska and Julianne Moore in David Cronenberg's "Maps to the Stars"

David Cronenberg is a profoundly talented filmmaker, and he’s never made a normal film. But originality isn’t itself a good, and as gifted as Cronenberg may be, his ability to heighten the natural language of cinema—to create movies saturated with intrigue and weirdness—can work both ways. When he starts with a strong premise and an intelligent screenplay, he can make operatic marvels like The Fly, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises. But give him a leaky script and false characters, and his instinctive intensity will only magnify the material’s flaws, resulting in stultifying dreck like Crash, Spider, or Cosmopolis. It’s this innate capacity for augmentation—for blowing up a picture to gargantuan size—that makes Cronenberg perhaps the worst possible choice to make Maps to the Stars, a half-baked Hollywood satire that gradually morphs into a tacky horror movie. With a less capable director, Maps to the Stars would have been little more than a harmless bore. Under Cronenberg’s lurid stewardship, it’s a fascinating atrocity.

The movie begins as a disorienting blur, introducing us to its major players and forcing us to discern their connections ourselves. We meet Agatha (Mia Wasikowska), a burn victim clad in a black dress and matching elbow-length gloves, who arrives in Los Angeles and immediately hires a chauffeur, Jerome (Robert Pattinson, who headlined Cosmopolis), to whisk her to the homes of various celebrities. Then, we’re suddenly inside one of those homes, where 13-year-old Benjie (The Killing‘s Evan Bird), a Justin Bieber-like child star, speaks lewdly with his mother, Christina (Olivia Williams). His father, Stafford (John Cusack), appears briefly and babbles about Tibet, then disappears to engage in a bizarre training session—an apparent combination of massage and hypnotherapy—with Havana (Julianne Moore), a hysterical actress with severe mommy issues. Read More

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Focus: Will Smith and Margot Robbie Are Light as Air, But the Plot Is All Fumes

Jeremy BeckReviews
Will Smith and Margot Robbie in "Focus"

A breezy, sexy, ultimately empty crime caper, Focus is a victim of its own sleight of hand. It is so intent on hoodwinking its audience and disguising its characters’ motivations that it doesn’t entertain so much as tease, constantly taunting us with one version of events before yanking out the rug again and again. It’s the kind of movie where nothing is what it seems. That does make things unpredictable, since no viewer could possibly anticipate Focus‘ sudden twists and hairpin curves. But following this movie’s labyrinthine structure becomes less a tantalizing task of puzzling things out than a tedious exercise of wait-and-see. When you’re constantly on guard for the next big surprise, nothing is truly surprising.

Here’s the good news: For its first 40 minutes or so, Focus is a blast. The ageless Will Smith stars as Nicky, an inveterate con man who decides to tutor Jess, a fledgling pickpocket played by the fast-emerging Margot Robbie (last seen heating up the screen in The Wolf of Wall Street and set to appear next summer as Jane in Warner’s Tarzan reboot). They make a pretty pair, he with his relaxed handsomeness, she with the pale blue eyes and curves that need no introduction. Their difference in years may consternate some viewers—at 46, Smith is nearly twice the age of the 24-year-old Robbie, and his goatee now betrays the slightest whispers of grey—but his charisma hasn’t waned, and it’s easy to buy the mutual attraction that quickly leads them tumbling into bed. It’s a romance that operates on surface appeal rather than real heat, which proves problematic once Focus tethers its twist-and-turn plot to the notion that Nicky, typically such a cool customer, has fallen desperately in love. Read More

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The Best Movies of 2013, #3: Gravity

Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

“Life in space is impossible,” the opening crawl announces in Gravity. And so it is. Beyond the confines of our atmosphere, there is—as the crawl also succinctly informs us—no oxygen, no sound, no air pressure. Astronauts who brave the pitiless environment of space must take meticulous precautions just to survive; one mistake means death. It is for this reason that space is an ideal setting for a horror movie (such as one that sports perhaps the most famous tagline in all of movies). And true to form, Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón’s stunning depiction of one woman’s battle against the void, is consistently terrifying, with dread pervading it at all times. It places its protagonist in certain doom and watches her scrap and claw just for the opportunity to breathe air and set foot on land. It is spare, harsh, and ruthless. Yet it is also exquisitely beautiful, astonishing viewers with its formal command and visual audacity. As a piece of storytelling, Gravity is merciless. As a work of cinema, it is rapturous.

Its magnificent, extended opening shot instantly establishes this twisted duality. Gravity takes place almost entirely in the black, inky void of space, and as Cuarón’s camera—operated by six-time Oscar nominee Emmanuel Lubezki, who also shot Cuarón’s sublime Children of Men—glides toward a speck of an object, it immediately evokes the gargantuan, oppressive nature of the universe. Yet the camera does indeed glide, and there’s a breathtaking gentleness to its graceful swoop as it gradually homes in on that speck and reveals it to be a telescope and a pair of floating astronauts. These are Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), but the camera doesn’t settle on them; instead, it continues to rove, circling the gleaming telescope and looking back toward the stars. It’s an opening that’s equal parts horror setup and majestic opera, silently conveying the characters’ precarious situation yet also marveling at their fluid movements and their ability to exist in this cold, forbidding world. Read More

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