Thriller

The Royal Hotel: Do You Come from a Small-Town Blunder

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jessica Henwick and Julia Garner in The Royal Hotel

Finalizing the paperwork, the interviewer asks a throwaway, borderline-rhetorical question: “Are you OK with receiving a little male attention?” The two young women sitting across from her exchange a smirk. “I think we can handle that,” one of them responds with a twinkle in her eye. The forms are stamped, the directions are provided, and without ceremony our heroines accept their offer of temporary employment—a comfy gig that gradually turns into a fraught, transformative odyssey.

This is the innocuous, loaded opening of Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel, and while the movie’s gradual shift from road-trip hangout to claustrophobic reckoning is dramatic, it doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise—not if you’ve seen Green’s first feature, The Assistant. That film transpired over a single dreary day in the Manhattan office of a Hollywood studio, where an ambitious gofer busied about her dull and dispiriting work in an atmosphere thick with complicity and abuse. Aside from a single tête-à-tête with an HR manager, nothing really happened in The Assistant, but Green nonetheless turned her protagonist’s sober, shameful routine into a trenchant commentary on feminine helplessness and male power. Comparatively speaking, The Royal Hotel represents a significant logistical expansion; it spans two weeks rather than 24 hours, it visits multiple locations, and it features a number of incidents which, when tied together, resemble something akin to a plot. But the two pictures share a fully formed sensibility—a yin-yang anxiety of impotence and rage. Read More

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In the Chamber Dramas “Reality” and “Sanctuary,” Women Fight the Power

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Sydney Sweeney in Reality; Margaret Qualley in Sanctuary

If television can have bottle episodes, can cinema have bottle movies? It probably isn’t worth the taxonomic trouble, given that TV critics routinely rant about how the term is misused. (Traditionally, “bottle episode” describes an installment that’s shot on a single set with no guest stars; it’s gained favor of late as a stylistic departure, but its primary motivation used to be financial rather than artistic.) Still, the minimalist concept—confined location, small cast—isn’t unique to television; plenty of feature films deploy a similar chamber-drama format, attempting to turn their modest mise-en-scène into showcases for narrative suspense and psychological complexity.

Last month saw the release of two such pictures—Reality, a fact-based docudrama about intelligence analyst Reality Winner, and Sanctuary, a two-hander about a sex worker and her wealthy client—both of which feature women trying to claim a measure of agency within a patriarchal structure. In one, the power dynamics are patently lopsided from the start; in the other, they’re the fulcrum of an ever-shifting battleground. Read More

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From the Vault: The Italian Job, 20 Years Later

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mark Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, and Jason Statham in The Italian Job

[EDITOR’S NOTE: In 2003, long before MovieManifesto.com existed, I spent my summer as a 20-year-old college kid writing as many movie reviews as I could. My goal was to compile them all into a website, possibly hosted by Tripod or Geocities, which would surely impress all of the women in my dorm. That never happened—neither the compiling nor the impressing—but the reviews still exist. So, now that I am a wildly successful critic actually have a website, I’ll be publishing those reviews on the respective date of each movie’s 20th anniversary. Against my better judgment, these pieces remain unedited from their original form. I apologize for the quality of the writing; I am less remorseful about the character of my 20-year-old opinions.]

The Italian Job showcases the continued emergence of one of cinema’s newest sub-genres: the heist remake. In 1999, John McTiernan delivered The Thomas Crown Affair, a more erotic but less involving film than its 1968 predecessor. Two years ago, Steven Soderbergh’s wildly successful update of Ocean’s Eleven (originally starring Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack in 1960) wowed audiences with its high-profile cast and elaborate set pieces. Now, F. Gary Gray brings us a modernized version of The Italian Job, the 1969 caper featuring Michael Caine. Read More

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Quick Hits: Renfield, How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Jeremy BeckReviews
Nicolas Cage in Renfield; Ariela Barer in How to Blow Up a Pipeline

As premises go, “Nicolas Cage plays a campy Count Dracula” is a pretty good one. And Renfield, Chris McKay’s new horror-comedy, eagerly exploits the goofy appeal of its conceit; it slathers one of American cinema’s most (in)famous overactors in revolting makeup, dresses him in baroque wardrobe, and affords him ample opportunity to howl, snarl, and preen. Still, as Cage vehicles go, it’s less unhinged than some of his more maniacal late-period work, and in fact his performance works best when he pretends to modulate his hammy instincts with faux politesse, like a dormant volcano teasing you with the prospect of imminent eruption. When an associate informs Dracula that he was just on his way to see him, the vampire’s smiling response—“Oh, you were on your way”—drips with such performative understanding, you wonder if he feeds on anxiety rather than blood.

That associate, of course, is Robert Montague Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), and the problem with Renfield is that it’s mostly about Renfield. This isn’t the fault of Hoult, a fine actor and capable showboat in his own right. (If you haven’t seen him on Hulu’s The Great, you’re missing one of the small screen’s most marvelous imbeciles.) And it makes strategic sense to keep Cage’s wildness in reserve so that he doesn’t drain the film of its oxygen. But the product that McKay and his screenwriter, Ryan Ridley (fleshing out a Robert Kirkman pitch), have constructed around their stars is too flimsy to support the weight of their talent. It’s an idea in search of a movie. Read More

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Quick Hits: Scream VI, Cocaine Bear, Creed III, Magic Mike 3, and Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan in Creed III; Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear; Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in Scream VI; Emma Mackey in Emily; Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance

Between the Oscars, our TV rankings, and our list of the year’s best movies, it’s been a busy past month here at MovieManifesto. As a result, while I was able to write a few proper reviews of new movies (the new Shyamalan, the new Ant-Man), I neglected to make time for a bunch of additional 2023 films. That changes now! Well, sort of. Unlike Lydia Tár, I can’t stop time, so I’m unable to carve out enough space for full reviews. Instead, we’re firing off some quick-and-dirty capsules, checking in on five recent releases. Let’s get to it.

Scream VI. The clever double-act of the Scream pictures—the platonic ideal established by the first installment and never quite equaled since—is that they’re movies about scary movies and are also, well, scary movies. In the prior episode, Scream (which should have been called Scream 5, but never mind), new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett satisfied one and only one side of that equation, cleverly skewering the toxic fandom that attends modern discourse but failing to serve up memorable carnage. Now returning with Scream VI, the pair have essentially flipped the script. The meta ideas bandied about here are a little less trenchant, but the nuts-and-bolts execution—and executions—is first-class. Read More

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