Austin Butler Archives | Deep Focus Review

Eddington

Brian Eggert — Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:53:21 +0000

Listen to the audio version of this review. Ari Aster dissects the culture war with Eddington, a portrait of how COVID-19 irrevocably tore America apart at its already frayed seams. The pandemic intensified partisan rancor, social fragmentation, and reactionary behavior—conditions that enabled opportunists to seize power amid the chaos and, ultimately, profit from it. Set in late May 2020, the film looks back five years at the titular New Mexico town, seemingly in an attempt to understand what led to the erosion of democracy in Trump’s America today. Described as a Western in the promotional materials, it’s also a period piece, though the time hardly feels that long ago, much to the film’s detriment. Still, Aster captures the uncertainty, paranoia, and desperate search for answers that drove people to rely on the worst possible source: social media. Rather than offering clarity, it only deepened the divide between the right and left, as both sides leaned into their worst impulses and most extreme reactions. Fortunately, Eddington boasts an excellent cast, led by another tour-de-force performance by Joaquin Phoenix under Aster’s direction. It’s unquestionably well-crafted and brimming with the director’s anxiety-ridden style. But the question remains: Is now the right time for […]

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The Bikeriders

Brian Eggert — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 01:27:58 +0000

The Bikeriders, the latest engrossing film by writer-director Jeff Nichols, who hasn’t released a new feature since 2016, reminds moviegoers what they’ve been missing. Nichols based his complex and violent film on the 1968 book by Danny Lyon, a photojournalist who, in the spirit of Hunter S. Thompson’s book about the Hell’s Angels, spent years with an outlaw motorcycle club as research. Following Lyon’s text, Nichols takes us into a secret masculine world, complete with its desire for freedom, possessiveness, violence, and borderline ritualistic need for order—qualities that often contradict each other and, in time, corrupt the overarching institution. Nichols’ lens through which he looks at this world is Kathy, played in an outstanding performance by Jodie Comer. Kathy is the wife of a member of the fictionalized Vandals, based on Chicago’s Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Through her account, The Bikeriders is an almost ethnographic study of a niche group whose romantic prime was short-lived and, like so many other American institutions in this era, corrupted by the influence of power and greed, and then ruined by battles for control. If Nichols occasionally softens the real-life edges in this otherwise brutal film, he captures the attractive yet repulsive dynamic that makes […]

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Dune: Part Two

Brian Eggert — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 17:38:03 +0000

“Our plans are measured in centuries.” —Reverend Mother Mohiam, Truthsayer to the Emperor of the Known Universe Denis Villeneuve has made something extraordinary with Dune: Part Two and its predecessor. Adapting the 1965 novel to the screen, Villeneuve turns Frank Herbert’s ideas and characters into visionary cinema. Beyond tapping into the source material’s vast potential for emotion and sociopolitical commentary, which he does with a careful hand and sharp detail, the director of Arrival (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) applies a formal bravado and seriousness found in history’s most substantial works of science fiction. To say the filmmaker made good on the promise of the first part from 2021 is an understatement. Both films are exceptional in their own ways, but they become something altogether more when considered together—among the most satisfying and accomplished science-fiction series in recent memory. Not only do they supply an epic-sized spectacle with action and awing sights, but they also remark on political occupation, genocide, the battle for natural resources, and religion as a means of control. While it could have been a typical retread of Star Wars in a lesser director’s hands, Villeneuve’s version takes a galactic view to consider the broader implications. […]

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Elvis

Brian Eggert — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 00:41:12 +0000

From the kaleidoscopic, gem-encrusted opening to the adulatory end titles that celebrate Elvis Presley as the best-selling solo artist of all time, Baz Luhrmann’s biopic turns the dial to 11 for over two-and-a-half hours. Tackling The King, arguably the most iconic figure in popular music history, presents an impossible task of condensing his larger-than-life persona and lasting mythology into a feature film. Luhrmann approaches the challenge of Elvis with the same frenetic energy as other iconic subjects covered in his Romeo + Juliet (1996) and The Great Gatsby (2013)—by rushing headlong into an eye-popping, head-spinning array of jam-packed montages, vivid camera movements, and anachronisms characteristic of the director’s ostentatious style. Anything less than hyper-stylized and it simply wouldn’t be “a Baz Luhrmann film.” However, the story amounts to little more than the obligatory dramatic beats of any musician biopic, such as Walk the Line (2005) and Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)—Elvis’ rural beginnings lead to artistic inspiration, a meteoric rise, the curse of fame, drug abuse, and eventual downfall. Ultimately, the film is a mixed bag of highs and lows, and precisely what you might expect from Baz Luhrmann’s treatment of this or any subject. Among the most prominent and surprising lows […]

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The Dead Don’t Die

Brian Eggert — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 02:49:40 +0000

In The Dead Don’t Die, Jim Jarmusch uses his unhurried style of arthouse filmmaking to characterize humanity’s continued sleepwalk through the apocalypse. Jarmusch ponders why no one acts as climate change heats the planet, kills the oceans, and melts the polar ice caps; as scientists predict that humanity has just a few decades left, unless we change our ways; as the digital age turns everyone into unthinking or reactionary clods; as fascism and intolerance return on a global scale; and as populist world leaders turn every country into an idiocracy. It’s all too much to process, resulting in a condition of zombie-like paralysis that has taken over our culture. Exhuming the spooky graveyard style of George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead (1968), Jarmusch reflects on a world steering toward disaster, even though humanity greets the end with little more than a shrug and a snarky tweet about oblivion. Part genre experiment, part Jarmusch’s angry statement about the world today, The Dead Don’t Die uses the broad strokes of comedy and zombie horror to make sociopolitical observations. And while he doesn’t say anything new, the result is nonetheless charmed, frightening, and in the end, appropriately gloomy. Jarmusch […]

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Yoga Hosers

Brian Eggert — Sat, 03 Sep 2016 00:00:43 +0000

Kevin Smith and Johnny Depp are proud parents. So proud, in fact, they gave their teenage offspring small roles in Smith’s last movie, Tusk (2013), a Canadian horror-comedy that costarred Depp as a wacky detective. Their girls did fine, but the proud fathers saw genius and resolved to produce an entire feature around them—another pseudo-horror-comedy set in Canada, entitled Yoga Hosers. Propelled by a degree of admiration only a father could have, the movie provides a showcase for the teenage girls to demonstrate their joy of singing, knack for comedy, and, I suppose, yoga. But rather than inspire the writer-director to elevate his game for the sake of familial pride, Smith delivers the worst effort in his career, largely because of the movie’s other driving force: his callow desire to proclaim his hatred for critics onscreen. We first meet the titular same-named clerks, Colleen C. (Lily-Rose Depp) and Colleen M. (Harley Quinn Smith), rehearsing their girl band in the back of the Eh-2-Zed convenience store, alongside their 35-year-old drummer Ichabod (Adam Brody). When these Winnipeg sophomores aren’t rehearsing, they’re dismissing everything as “basic” and texting away on their smartphones—in other words, occupying Smith’s over-exaggerated categorization of modern teenage girls. The […]

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