Stop Whining About Spoilers. Also, Stop Spoiling Things.

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Robert Pattinson in The Drama; Michael B. Jordan in Sinners; Sophie Thatcher in Companion

The Drama is so called on account of its in-universe angst and chaos, but out in the real world its title acquired a meta meaning. In the days leading up to the film’s release, it became the center of a swirling social-media discussion—not about its quality or its themes, but about how to discuss it at all. Were critics allowed to mention its twist? Was “twist” even the right word for a narrative turn that occurs during its first reel? How do you write about a movie when you can’t write about what the movie is about? Is Film Twitter now a police state—a spoiler police?

That all of this dialogue was taking place before The Drama even opened would seem to do its viewers few favors. But the latest iteration of this discourse, spurred in part by A24’s unusually oblique trailer, reignited a familiar firestorm about spoiler culture, a topic that inspires no shortage of vitriol. So let me make my position plain: Readers have no business dictating the work of film critics, who should have absolute freedom to say whatever the hell they want in their reviews. For the most part, spoilerphobes are whiny, entitled, and misguided. Also, they kind of have a point. Read More

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The Drama review: To Have and to Scold

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama

It’s a classic meet-cute. He spies her in a coffee shop reading a book. He has to talk to her, so he quickly googles the novel and approaches her with some canned, cheesy material about how much it spoke to him. He keeps stumbling over his words, panicking when she refuses to engage, only for her to startle and remove an unseen AirPod from her left ear. “I’m deaf in this one,” she explains, and he starts to melt, realizing she didn’t hear a damn thing he said, but then she throws him an unexpected lifeline: “Do you want to start again?”

This is the delightful opening scene of The Drama, a bewitching and provocative movie that initially unfolds as a storybook romantic comedy. Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are the perfect couple: smart, attractive, blessed with verbal and physical chemistry. Their courtship checks all of the boxes, in particular a magical first kiss that would be the envy of Jane Austen. It’s now the week of their wedding, and we learn the details of their fairy-tale engagement as Charlie runs a draft of his speech past his best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), who’s so moved he starts crying. Everything is so light and sweet and charming, you wonder if Kristoffer Borgli, the film’s writer and director, somehow got the title wrong. He didn’t. Read More

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Alpha review: The Girl with the Nag and Tattoo

Jeremy BeckReviews
Golshifteh Farahani and Mélissa Boros in Alpha

She’s only made three movies, but Julia Ducournau has already built her own cinematic festival of female suffering and endurance, focusing on women plagued by peculiar conditions. In Raw, the heroine seemed perfectly normal until she was overcome with a genetic craving that compelled her to eat her sister’s severed finger. Her challenges were trivial compared to the lead in Titane, a murderess whose automotive copulations slowly transformed her internal fluids into motor oil. Next to her, the tribulations of Alpha, the 13-year-old girl at the center of Ducournau’s eponymous new whatsit, are relatively prosaic; she just got a tattoo via a dirty needle and may have become infected with a strange virus. This quickly proves to be the least of her problems.

Having seen all of Ducournau’s features, I’m not sure that I’ve properly understood any of them. This is, mostly, a compliment. Aesthetically speaking, the French provocateur is a gifted and fearless stylist, using robust techniques and bold aural and visual flourishes. Intellectually, her works tend to be ambitious and enigmatic, probing thorny ideas but refusing to neatly spell out their themes. This can be vexing, but the inherent tension—the collision between muscular filmmaking and knotty storytelling—is also enveloping. You enjoy getting lost in the labyrinth. Read More

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Project Hail Mary review: Galaxy Stressed

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary

The novelist Andy Weir specializes in “hard” science-fiction, embroidering his stories with mathematical precision and analytic rigor. He’s a best-selling author whom you might also call a serious writer. The filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, by contrast, have built their success on silliness, making droll animated yarns (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, The LEGO Movie) and the spoofy Jump Street pictures. They seem unlikely candidates to translate Weir’s brainy acumen to the screen. But while Project Hail Mary, which Lord and Miller have adapted from Weir’s 2021 book (via a screenplay by Drew Goddard), may be a blend of durable genres—part space opera, part survival saga, part buddy comedy—it isn’t a jumble of tones. Instead, the directing duo has applied their quippy instincts with warmth and sincerity, resulting in a crowd-pleasing movie that’s both playful and earnest. Call it hardy har har sci-fi.

This doesn’t mean Project Hail Mary is a model of discipline. It’s long, sappy, and choppy, with set pieces that are more intriguing than eye-popping. But it’s nonetheless coherent, and its humor works in tandem with both its muscular ambition and its abiding sweetness. Read More

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Oscars 2025: Sinners and Winners

Jeremy BeckOscars
Autumn Durald Arkapaw accepting her Oscar for Sinners

The Oscars don’t matter. But the movies do.

That was the real takeaway of the 98th Academy Awards, an uneven ceremony that venerated some very good motion pictures. As a matter of celebratory choreography—as, y’know, an awards show—it was awfully bumpy. With the exception of Will Arnett and Channing Tatum, most of the paired presenters were dreadfully stiff, while the producers—perhaps traumatized by lingering memories of Adrien Brody a year ago—were unduly hasty in playing the winners off stage, especially for the below-the-line fields. The sound mix was clunky, some of the speeches felt obligatory, and a bunch of prearranged bits landed with a thud. It was far from the smoothest commemoration of the power of cinema.

But these Oscars were still, on the whole, a good time, in part because the movies they feted were so satisfying. It didn’t hurt that Conan O’Brien, in his second straight stint as host, was locked in from the jump, with an ingenious introduction—repurposing the rousing climax of Weapons into a rapid-fire tour through many of the nominated films—that led into a note-perfect monologue. O’Brien obviously knows how to work a crowd, but here he located just the right blend of good-natured sarcasm, political snark, and sincere admiration. He also delivered some pointed jabs about the industry’s future—roasting Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, castigating phone-cropped atrocities, teaming with Sterling K. Brown to mock the clumsy storytelling habits of the streaming era—without spoiling anyone’s fun. Read More

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