Thriller Archives - Page 27 of 27

Maps to the Stars: Where Satire Meets Schlock

March 6, 2015April 28, 2021 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

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

March 2, 2015June 28, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews

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

The Best Movies of 2013, #3: Gravity

December 17, 2014March 4, 2021 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

The Best Movies of 2013, #5: Captain Phillips

December 15, 2014March 4, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

Paul Greengrass can’t sit still. From his two hyperactive entries in the Bourne franchise, to his nervy September 11 dramatization United 93, to his unappreciated Iraq War docudrama Green Zone, the filmmaker’s work is characterized most of all by a roving impatience, with frantic cutting and jittery handheld camerawork. It’s a kinetic approach that sacrifices cleanliness for liveliness, but if it often gets your blood pumping, it can occasionally feel jumbled and chaotic, as though the ravenous director is struggling to sate his appetite to cover as much spatial territory as possible. Yet Greengrass’ restlessness makes him ideally suited to make Captain Phillips, his gripping fact-based account of the war of wills and wits between an American merchantman and the Somali pirates who hijack his ship. Because the film transpires in a bare minimum of cramped locations—first Phillips’ lone freighter stranded in the vast ocean, then a tiny lifeboat floating even more helplessly amid the waves—it is necessarily claustrophobic. But rather than being hamstrung by such a constrained space, Greengrass finds himself liberated. Unable to overextend himself in terms of breadth, he opts instead for depth, continuously amping up the energy even though there is nowhere for his camera to go. Watching the movie, you won’t be able to escape either.

In one of the least showy and most powerful performances of his career, Tom Hanks plays the titular sailor as a brusque, inherently competent commander, a man who instinctively knows every nook and cranny of his vessel, the Maersk Alabama, even if he’s less adept at ingratiating himself with his crew. His assignment is to shepherd the Maersk and its unspecified cargo around the Horn of Africa. It’s a routine job, and Phillips’ terse professionalism—immediately upon stepping aboard, he instructs his first mate to tighten some of the ship’s security mechanisms without offering so much as a greeting—creates the impression that he’s prepared for anything. He’s not.

The Best Movies of 2013, #10: Stoker

December 8, 2014March 4, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

[Note: The Manifesto has reviewed 89 different 2013 releases up to this point. Some were bad, some were good; some reached for greatness and failed, others didn’t reach at all. In short, it was another year at the movies. To that end, this review constitutes the beginning of our countdown of the year’s 10 best.]

On its face, Stoker, the first English-language effort from the Korean auteur Park Chan-wook, is vulgar to the point of childishness. Its plot traffics in incest and murder. Its central characters are a lecherous uncle, an unhinged mother, and a depraved daughter. It is, without doubt, lurid, tawdry, and obscene. Yet it is also—at least for viewers who admire bold and authoritative filmmaking—provocative, debonair, and sexy. It is pulp entertainment dressed up as high art. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. Either way, it’s spellbinding. Read More