Scarlett Johansson Archives | Deep Focus Review

Jurassic World Rebirth

Brian Eggert — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 23:28:48 +0000

Listen to the audio version of this review. Jurassic World Rebirth further proves that Steven Spielberg invented the visual language of modern blockbusters, and other filmmakers merely speak in it. Rather than create something new, director Gareth Edwards spends 134 minutes paying homage to Spielberg and his 1993 original, Jurassic Park. But more than just the masterful first film based on Michael Crichton’s book, or even its now-six sequels, Edwards also nods to Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) in a recapitulation of iconic Hollywood imagery. No slouch himself, Edwards—the helmer of Monsters (2010), Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), and The Creator (2023)—devises almost nothing new here. What seems new stems from recycled ideas that never really worked in the first place, such as genetically altered mutant dinosaurs. Rather than take the time to stretch his talent, Edwards falls back on the same reverence for Spielberg that directors Colin Trevorrow and J.A. Bayona displayed in Jurassic World (2015), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018), and Jurassic World Dominion (2022). And yet, even though Edwards’ visual nods to Spielberg and Rebirth‘s story autocannibalize the Jurassic series, it manages to be more purely entertaining than the last […]

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The Phoenician Scheme

Brian Eggert — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 16:38:09 +0000

Note: This review of Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme was originally posted on May 24, 2025. The film arrives in theaters in wide release on June 6, 2025. Wes Anderson’s last few films have operated similarly to his latest, The Phoenician Scheme. They hum along in his predictably fastidious, parodiable manner, deploying both random asides and narrative-driven scenes with the same attention to detail. And oh, what detail. Anderson and his team of designers in the production, costume, and graphic departments give every corner of the frame equal attention, ornamenting everything so meticulously that almost nothing stands out—the cinematic equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s all-over painting method or panoramic compositions in photography. Anderson and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel present tableaus that flatten the screen image, directing our attention nowhere and thus everywhere. The narrative almost feels secondary to Anderson’s consideration of the image’s totality, brimming with fascinating touches and layered meanings. This quality enriches and hinders The Phoenician Scheme, an amiable if not-quite-essential entry in Anderson’s filmography. Consider the credits sequence, which features a shot looking down from above—recalling Brian De Palma’s early scene in The Untouchables (1987), where Al Capone gives an interview while receiving a shave. In Anderson’s film, set in the […]

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The Prestige

Brian Eggert — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 18:44:58 +0000

Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige involves the secret world of magicians who obsess over and make profound sacrifices for their craft. They thrive on new ways to make the ordinary do something unexpected, and then, to the audience’s delight and wonderment, reveal their mastery over the illusion. In many ways, that’s just what Nolan does in this tale of dueling magicians at the turn of the last century. Along with his brother Jonathan Nolan, the director adapts the 1995 novel by Christopher Priest and applies the three-part structure of a magic trick defined in the story: the Pledge shows the characters and their motivations; the Turn shows them doing extraordinary, impossible things; the Prestige reveals the nature of their illusions. Yet, there’s another type of magic in the film—the same kind of magic Arthur C. Clarke wrote about in his 1962 book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible, when he claimed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” And while the illusions and science—and the science of illusions—remain central to the narrative and its complex structure, what’s at stake, even more than his characters’ fates, is whether Nolan is as accomplished a cinematic magician. […]

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Asteroid City

Brian Eggert — Sun, 11 Jun 2023 16:32:32 +0000

Note: After debuting at the Cannes Film Festival last month, Asteroid City will be previewed at a special Alamo Drafthouse screening on June 12 before its wide release on June 23, 2023. Wes Anderson has become a jewelry maker, fashioning pretty objects with creative facets, decorations, and polish that invite distanced appreciation. Like pieces of jewelry, Anderson’s latest films contain little innate emotion, only the suggestion of it. They are fine works of art, to be sure, but like a ring to its recipient, they seem to rely more on the sentimental value that the spectator brings than an inherent emotional draw. This quality of Anderson’s work has only become more heightened in recent years. His peculiarities, aesthetic fastidiousness, and capacity for moving material may have reached their height nearly a decade ago with, arguably, his best work, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). That film matched its considerable style with emotional weight and a theme that argues in favor of art for art’s sake. But Anderson has struggled to find anything new to say in his recent stylistic exercises, Isle of Dogs (2018), The French Dispatch (2021), and his latest, Asteroid City. The film is an articulately cut, arranged, and designed […]

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Marriage Story

Brian Eggert — Sun, 03 Nov 2019 16:35:33 +0000

Marriage Story opens with the voices of Charlie and Nicole, a couple played by Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, who offer tender remarks about each other. Charlie, an acclaimed New York stage director, recites an ode to his wife, his longtime muse and lead actress in his plays. She’s a talented, generous mother, he explains in voiceover, the sort who can play as a child would with their 8-year-old son. She’s competitive at family game night, can open any jar, and charmingly leaves cups of tea around the house. When it’s her turn, Nicole tells us that Charlie looks good in whatever he wears, eats as though he’s afraid that someone’s going to steal the food from his plate, and always remembers to bring coffee for everyone in his theater company, even the intern. As they recount what they cherish about one another, we see their domestic space come to life in a few brief moments, and we understand why these two fell in love. It seems like the perfect marriage, until we realize the voiceover comes from a written exercise, assigned by a counselor to begin the process of divorce on a positive note. Those glimpses of a warm, […]

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Jojo Rabbit

Brian Eggert — Sun, 20 Oct 2019 16:28:41 +0000

Taika Waititi plays Adolf Hitler in Jojo Rabbit, but a version of the Nazi leader who exists only in the mind of a young German boy. The 10-year-old Johannes Betzler, nicknamed “Jojo,” sees his Führer as an imaginary presence, fulfilling the “Hitler is every German boy’s best friend” sentiments of the regime’s propaganda. Jojo, an awkward outsider, has latched on to the idea of Nazism, unable to grasp its sinister meaning but clinging to its inclusive groupthink. It’s an unlikely setup for a feel-good comedy and condemnation of fascism, but the gamble works, resulting in a film that is playful, warm-hearted, sobering, and distinctly a product of its writer-director. Waititi based his screen story on Caging Skies, the 2008 novel by New Zealand-Belgian author Christine Leunens. Though the source material treats the subject matter with grievous veracity, the film retains only its narrative shell, resolving instead for a broad “anti-hate satire”—the ubiquitous statement, along with the bunny ears/peace sign of the film’s poster, employed by Fox Searchlight’s promotional team to ensure no neo-fascists somehow interpret the film as sympathetic to the Nazi cause. But there’s no risk of mixed messages here, as Jojo Rabbit feels like a whoopie cushion placed […]

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Avengers: Endgame

Brian Eggert — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 15:47:51 +0000

For more than a decade, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has invested millions of viewers in the fates of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. The expansive storylines that began in 2008 with Iron Man, and continued in a half-dozen other franchises, come to a close in Avengers: Endgame, an epic reward for those who have remained invested over the course of 21 films (and a few television series). Though these superheroes began in the pages of Marvel Comics, where youngsters, nerds, and outsiders consumed them, they have since become billion-dollar franchises, transforming Hollywood in the process. The MCU has also instilled a new narrative shorthand on par with Greek mythology or The Force. Thanos’ finger-snap in last summer’s Avengers: Infinity War alone, which led to half of the universe’s population disintegrating into ash, is an image now burned into the zeitgeist, while also challenging Han Solo’s three-year carbonite nap as the granddaddy of all cinematic cliffhangers. Fortunately, Endgame lives up to its promise, sometimes in unexpected ways. But who could have anticipated that Marvel Studios and Disney would release a three-hour extravaganza whose exquisite character-focused scenes outshine the FX-driven action? Taking the title too literally would be a mistake. Not every subplot introduced […]

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Avengers: Infinity War

Brian Eggert — Fri, 27 Apr 2018 21:00:44 +0000

A landmark in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Avengers: Infinity War boasts around two-dozen superheroes converging in an epic-sized crossover the likes of which the comic book genre has never seen. Marvel Studios has loaded the eighteen preceding films with storylines, fanboy clues, subplots, and post-credits scenes leading to the events in this film, marking its arrival as a monumental and unprecedented event in blockbuster filmmaking. It makes the previous crossovers of The Avengers and Avengers: Age of Ultron seem quaint by comparison. After all, no other franchise in the history of cinema—not Star Wars, not The Lord of the Rings, not Indiana Jones, and certainly not the DCEU—has accomplished the consistent vision of scope and spectacle as Marvel’s president Kevin Feige and his team of talent have. And Infinity War is a rare commercial film that realizes, to its full potential, everything that works about franchise filmmaking and remains unique about the MCU, which is to say, it assembles the eighteen building blocks that came before into a culmination. Using the bonds and plot elements of earlier Marvel films, Infinity War puts every established storyline and character to use by unleashing emotion, action, humor, tragedy, romance, and shocks over the course of its breezy two-and-a-half-hour runtime. The audience is left drained, albeit thrilled, and […]

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Isle of Dogs

Brian Eggert — Sun, 01 Apr 2018 23:19:18 +0000

By now, dogs have figured out that to appear in a Wes Anderson film means death or at least exposure to certain peril. In The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Owen Wilson’s drugged-up cowboy author madly drove his sports car into the Tenenbaum home, killing their Beagle named Buckley. The family replaces Buckley with an impromptu Dalmatian that probably died shortly after that. In The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004), the dog left behind by Filipino pirates had three legs and, alas, its fate was unknown. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) featured a Beagle put to sleep by poisoned blueberries. Did he ever wake up? Not likely. As for the terrier named Snoopy in Moonrise Kingdom (2012), Khaki Scouts finished him with an arrow. Fortunately, the sole dog in The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) survived; the cat wasn’t so lucky. Perhaps this trend is why the canine actor union staged a protest against Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, forcing the director to resort once more to stop-motion animation, instead of living dog actors, to tell his story. (No, not really.) Anderson attempts to make up for a career of doggie displacement with his title, proclaiming “I love dogs,” an oronym that, when discovered, blows the mind. Once again venturing into the fastidiously controlled world of […]

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Ghost in the Shell

Brian Eggert — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 16:40:16 +0000

Drawing from and building upon science-fiction’s ubiquitous questions about the nature of Self in the face of burgeoning technology, Masamune Shirow’s 1989 manga Ghost in the Shell explored the relationship between humanity, robotics, and an early form of the internet. Mamoru Oshii’s popular 1995 anime adaptation turned the story into a cult classic that shaped The Matrix, among many other films. After nearly thirty years of gestating to form a now-cemented nostalgia, the story has become an essential intellectual property. And since Hollywood’s obsession with thirtysomething franchises, nostalgia, and live-action versions of popular animated fare has achieved a peak, it seems inevitable that a Scarlett Johansson-starring Ghost in the Shell would arrive in theaters. But unlike the source material or animated film, the live-action production, released by Paramount Pictures, exists less as an essential addition to its genre than a chance to exploit its name brand. Director Rupert Sanders delivers another gorgeous looking picture; following his lavish but empty 2012 debut on Snow White and the Huntsman, he establishes himself as a visualist filmmaker. The story takes place in an uncertain future in New Port City, a megalopolis amalgamated from Hong Kong, Toyko, and several cities from sci-fi essentials (Metropolis, […]

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