Ralph Ineson Archives | Deep Focus Review

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Brian Eggert — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 18:24:40 +0000

Listen to the audio version of this review. The Fantastic Four: First Steps comes as close to greatness as MCU movies get. Accented by a dazzling retro-futurist style and strong characters played by a pitch-perfect cast, it adheres to the save-the-world formula found in many superhero movies: Planet Earth faces an impossible threat from outer space, and only the titular heroes can save us. However, instead of the flat digital environments and lack of distinct visual flair found in most movies of this ilk, there’s a wonderful alternate reality for audiences to explore, set in a version of the 1960s replete with spaceships, robots, and flying cars. The movie instills an instant desire to investigate this familiar yet unique world, something most MCU movies cannot claim. Rather than feeling like The Fantastic Four is more of the same, it feels alive and new—an inspired variation on a theme that, admittedly, has already been tackled onscreen but to subpar effect. With a terrific cast who embody their iconic characters and a visual energy that presents a refreshing alternative to the Marvel house style, The Fantastic Four is not only immediately engaging but also one of the MCU’s most satisfying offerings yet. […]

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Nosferatu

Brian Eggert — Mon, 16 Dec 2024 21:08:58 +0000

Once again immersing himself in the history and folklore of old, Robert Eggers applies his fastidious knack for detail to Nosferatu, another of the filmmaker’s beautiful, haunting visions. He doesn’t rethink the tale from a contemporary perspective, as another filmmaker might. Instead, he transports the viewer into the past, inhabiting a specific place and time that can feel backward, superstitious, and rooted in mysticism. This has been his approach since his memorable debut, The Witch (2016), which established his interest in research, period-appropriate language, and avoiding anachronisms—aside from the presence of a camera, of course. Eggers continued in this vein with The Lighthouse (2019), his best film, which I initially undervalued, about two lighthouse keepers beset by isolation and seafaring lore. And while The Northman (2022), steeped in Viking violence and imagery, was considered a commercial failure, that didn’t stop Focus Features from also distributing his latest, another perfectly calibrated tale rooted in arcane fears and historicity, albeit shaped by Eastern European legends and themes of sexual repression. Nosferatu is also unique in Eggers’ career for rethinking an existing book and movie, whereas his earlier films used various historical writings as inspiration. Nosferatu is a remake that credits F. W. […]

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The Northman

Brian Eggert — Thu, 21 Apr 2022 20:13:09 +0000

Early in The Northman, a Viking epic from arthouse favorite Robert Eggers, a wise man asks a king and prince to prove they are men. The nobles, crawling on their hands and knees, growling and howling like dogs, respond with a respective belch and fart. In doing so, both prove they’re “wise enough to be the fool.” The scene demonstrates a guiding philosophy in Eggers’ work that values historical reality over audience expectation. The sprawling, panoramic production conveys Viking life with authentic details, telling a vast and gory tale of revenge centered on Alexander Skarsgård, who helped develop the film. Eggers doesn’t shrink from realities that might seem silly, cruel, or divisive today. Much like the singular ambition of its central warrior, The Northman reaches for historical and mythological accuracy, refusing to bend to modern sensibilities to soften the blow of anthropological interest. That artistic choice results in refreshing and brave filmmaking, but it’s also distancing. In a sense, Eggers does not care if the moviegoing public comes away having learned about themselves or achieved some measure of catharsis. The film serves the internal needs of its protagonist, nothing more. The conceit is admirably single-minded. Then again, Eggers combines period-accurate […]

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The Tragedy of Macbeth

Brian Eggert — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 01:56:26 +0000

Many directors have translated Shakespeare to film, and the results vary depending on the balance between form and drama. If the filmmaking calls too much attention to itself, the Bard’s dialogue and story suffer. When Kenneth Branagh turned Hamlet into a four-hour masterpiece in 1996, he spared no expense, but his cast’s towering performances matched the elaborate production design. By contrast, a minimalist approach has also worked well. Orson Welles adapted several Shakespeare plays to the screen, usually employing spare sets to focus on the actors, editing, and camerawork. As dramaturgy goes, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth distinguishes itself with its elaborately conceived and condensed version of Shakespeare’s shortest, bloodthirstiest play. Made without his brother, Ethan, the film eschews most of the idiosyncrasies and ironies associated with the Coens’ work in favor of a stark, black-and-white vision in the squared Academy aspect ratio, evoking the prisonlike fate of its protagonist. In a stroke of brilliant casting, Coen enlists Denzel Washington as the ambitious thane, who learns of his inevitable crown and then proceeds to cut through friends and competition to attain it. Frances McDormand, Coen’s wife and creative partner here, reprises her role from the stage as Lady Macbeth. […]

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The Green Knight

Brian Eggert — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 16:15:16 +0000

David Lowery’s The Green Knight might have been a welcome deconstruction of the monomyth, except his verbose stylization of every single moment stalls any hope of making a human connection. Self-consciously arty, Lowery’s adaptation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight comments on the history of artistic reinterpretation but feels lost in the director’s overwrought visual agenda. Over the centuries, the anonymously written fourteenth-century poem has been adapted from Middle English by scholars and even Lord of the Rings scribe J.R.R. Tolkien. Each time, the text’s translation to literature, the stage, or cinema proves a little different, sometimes in fascinating ways. Lowery’s mannerist aesthetic emphasizes wide-angle lenses, CGI-inflected imagery, elaborate production design, and virtuosic camera movements that call attention to themselves. But rather than form-follows-function, The Green Knight’s artifice overextends itself, leaving its potentially rich themes to feel underdeveloped. Dev Patel plays Gawain, the cocky but inexperienced nephew of King Arthur (Sean Harris). At the Round Table’s Christmas feast, a towering, ent-like Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) enters the hall and proposes a game: Anyone willing to deliver a single blow with their sword can take his axe, and in a year, they can seek him out at the Green Chapel, […]

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The Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Brian Eggert — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 15:31:45 +0000

A grim and humorous rumination on mortality, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs encapsulates the varying styles of Joel and Ethan Coen, the brothers who often weigh the brevity and meaninglessness of existence in their films. Whether it’s Nicolas Cage’s ex-con in Raising Arizona conjuring the lone biker of the apocalypse from his dreams, the haunting final image of A Serious Man, or the dreaded Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men assigning fate to the randomness of a coin toss, death comes in various forms, lending their work its furtive quality. Not unlike the tonal range between these examples, their latest effort, a Western in six parts, transitions from the cartoonish to the hopelessly bleak. Along the way, it moseys through the Coens’ stylistic territory, a vast expanse that includes riotous comic absurdities, dark ironies, the hopeless search for meaning, and sobering cruelty. It’s a compendium of the Coen brothers’ cinematic dimensionality and metaphysical philosophy, set against a Western backdrop that, increasingly as it goes on, reflects their worldview in its unforgiving treatment of its characters. Almost instantly it becomes the essential film to introduce budding cinephiles to their methods and motifs, as it almost seems to summarize their entire thirty-year […]

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The Witch

Brian Eggert — Sat, 20 Feb 2016 00:00:01 +0000

Religious hysteria and frighteningly atmospheric period detail saturate the filmmaking of The Witch, writer-director Robert Eggers’ remarkable debut. A spare and haunting “New England Folk Tale”, the film explores an isolated family torn asunder by the perceived presence of a witch. Though one could argue the film’s pagan threats as real or perceived, its equally haunting, evocative, unsettling imagery and a masterful control of tone creep under the viewer’s skin. Eggers straddles the line between realist doubt and supernatural horror for much of the film, and regardless how you feel about the spiritual concept of witchcraft, the viewer is slammed with unbelievably scary images and concepts. Far removed from today’s slapdash supernatural horror yarns, a market seemingly cornered by Blumhouse Productions (Paranormal Activity, Sinister), The Witch is a picture with equal measures of artistic integrity and genuine terror. Set on the edge of a New England forest around 1630, about fifty years before the notorious Salem witch trials, the film adopts meticulous detail and seems to hail from that period. The setting is impressively assembled, ornamented with subtle and careful researched facets that immerse the viewer in the period. A post-film message tells us most of the dialogue was taken […]

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