Beast review – down-and-out MMA fighter film is predictable but still lands punches

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Directed by Tyler Atkins and co-written by Russell Crowe, this Australian feature follows a familiar playbook – but you’ll find yourself surprisingly invested Ah, yes: the promising fighter who could’ve been a contender, could’ve been a champion. But then life intervened: bad decisions were made, promises broken, the wrong paths taken. But what if the past came knocking on his door? What if our long-in-the-tooth hero could have another crack, set things right, get in the ring one more time? To say that Tyler Atkins’ Australian martial arts drama Beast plucks moves from a well-worn playbook is putting it lightly. This is one of those genre films in which nothing surprises in broad terms; it’s the small pivots and deviations that matter. Given the ring of familiarity surrounding everything, I was surprised to find myself as invested in the film as I was, particularly because so many chest-thumping sports movies are already out there, many of which I find about as intellectually engaging ...
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Leave the World Behind review – Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke’s apocalypto-paranoid thriller

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Roberts and Hawke’s weekend getaway starts to go wrong when two mysterious strangers appear at the door. Then things get weirder

Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali and Ethan Hawke star in this glossy, Shyamalan-level-10 apocalypto-paranoid conspiracy thriller, adapted from the 2020 bestseller by Rumaan Alam. It’s an example of a growing tendency in the movies: baggy, lengthy, episodic pictures which are starting to split the difference between feature film items and streaming TV. Amat Escalante’s Mexican thriller Lost in the Night is, I think, another example of this tendency: films that go on for a while and, like a shaggy-dog story, leave things open for the possibility of getting recommissioned for season two. (Ridley Scott’s Napoleon epic for Apple TV also straddles film and TV, with extra content for the small screen iteration – although, admittedly, he can hardly be accused of leaving things open at the end.)

Roberts and Hawke play Amanda and Clay, well-off Brooklynites with two teen children; she’s a cynical ad exec, he’s a laidback humanities college professor. On a whim, they decide to take a luxurious weekend break in a luxury Airbnb mansion outside the city. But things get weird; there are storms outside, problems with the phone signal and the wifi and they witness something very disturbing at the beach. That evening, two strangers show up at the door – an elegant sophisticated man and his college age daughter, very well played by Mahershala Ali and Myha’la Herrold – with a very plausible explanation as to who they are and why Amanda and Clay should let them in. Things go terribly wrong.

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