Thriller

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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Knock at the Cabin: Whoever Wins, They Choose

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dave Bautista, Abby Quinn, and Nikki Amuka-Bird in Knock at the Cabin

In one of the many tense sequences in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, a young woman implores a housemate to shut the door before a malevolent force breaks through: “Don’t let them in!” That same pleading desperation permeates the opening scenes of Knock at the Cabin, Shyamalan’s new thriller, which finds a vacationing family—an adorable seven-year-old named Wen (Kristen Cui) and her two fathers, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Spoiler Alert’s Ben Aldridge)—under sudden assault from a quartet of armed, menacing invaders. But where The Village cultivated a tone of suffocating suspense (what will happen?), the mood here is instead one of clammy inevitability. The trespassers break through the cabin’s fortifications with minimal resistance, quickly tying up our heroes and establishing that the movie will not unfold as a typical home-invasion yarn. Sure, you may briefly wonder whether the victims will use their collective guile to escape (did someone just mention Chekhov’s gun?), but mostly you ponder why the intruders are there and—once you learn that answer—whether there is any legitimacy to their stated purpose.

Ever the economical storyteller, Shyamalan answers the first of those questions in a matter of minutes. (Even he isn’t as efficient as the film’s trailer, which naturally divulges the entire plot.) The housebreakers—led by gentle-giant Leonard (a very fine Dave Bautista), who’s joined by the fretful Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), the timid Adriane (Abby Quinn), and the surly Redmond (Rupert Grint, currently starring on the Shyamalan-produced Servant)—behave according to a peculiar, seemingly contradictory code. On the one hand, they are obviously threatening, with their crude weapons (mallets, picks) and their grim determination. Yet despite their forcible entry and disturbing fervor, they insist—with apparent honesty—that they aren’t there to hurt anyone. Rather, they solemnly inform their captives that unless the family sacrifices one of its own, the world will end. And to prove the truth of their purported prophecy, they will ritualistically kill one of their own until the prisoners—watching helplessly, and goosed by ensuing television reports of global bedlam—resolve to make an impossible choice. Read More

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Infinity Pool: The Excremental Tourist

Jeremy BeckReviews
Alexander Skarsgård in Infinity Pool

If Brandon Cronenberg is anxious about being compared to his father, he’s doing a good job hiding it. His prior feature, the art-house hit Possessor, leveraged the metamorphic gifts of Andrea Riseborough (newly minted Oscar nominee!) for a sordid story of corporeal invasion and existential agony. Now he returns with Infinity Pool, a wild and grimy phantasmagoria full of damaged bodies and deranged images. It may lack the deceptive polish of his pop’s best work, but it rivals him for sheer nastiness.

This is a matter of theme as well as form. In broad terms, Infinity Pool is a crude satire of white privilege and colonialist prerogatives. It’s set in the fictional country of Li Tolqa—filming took place in Croatia and Hungary, but the looming specter of “rainy season” suggests Southeast Asia—which attracts tourists with its opulent resorts and sandy beaches, but which someone ominously describes as “uncivilized.” The movie’s premise, which stirs echoes of last year’s Dual (and also The Prestige), revolves around a particularly perverse kind of black market: When interlopers break the law and find themselves subject to the third-world nation’s draconian justice system, they can evade punishment by paying the authorities (embodied by a louche Thomas Kretschmann) a hefty fee to manufacture a double—a perfect recreation endowed with their memories as well as their appearance—who will then suffer the death sentence in their stead. The only catch (OK fine, there are lots of catches) is that they must bear witness to their doppelganger’s execution. Read More

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