Jeremy Beck

Jeremy Beck is the editor-in-chief of MovieManifesto. He watches more movies and television than he probably should.

The Phoenician Scheme: The Hand Grenade’s Tale

Jeremy BeckReviews
Mia Threapleton, Benicio Del Toro, and Michael Cera in The Phoenician Scheme

Wes Anderson’s movies are so meticulously constructed, it’s easy to overlook that they also tend to be explosive, messy, and violent. It takes all of 30 seconds into The Phoenician Scheme, his latest lavishly imagined whirligig, before someone gets literally blown in half by a missile. Not long after, the picture’s unscrupulous hero, an entrepreneur named Zsa-Zsa Korda (Benicio Del Toro), emerges from the wreckage of a plane crash, trying to stuff a protruding organ back inside his body. Over the picaresque adventure that follows, Korda will face flaming arrows, gun-toting guerillas, duplicitous spies, overcooked pigeons, and a pit of quicksand. He’s the unflappable eye of a fastidiously unstable hurricane.

That all of this mayhem unfolds in the context of Anderson’s characteristic rigor—a method of careful framing, crisp camerawork, and filigreed production design—isn’t really a product of dissonance. Rather, The Phoenician Scheme harmonizes control and commotion. Anderson’s style is often pejoratively deemed fussy, but his exacting craft doesn’t drain the life from his filmmaking. Quite the opposite: The rich colors, the sharp wordplay, and the impeccable ornamentation all coalesce to imbue the proceedings with urgency and vivacity. In this heightened alternate reality, precision generates momentum. Read More

Read more

Bring Her Back: Foster, It’s Australian for Fear

Jeremy BeckReviews
Sally Hawkins and Jonah Wren Phillips in Bring Her Back

For two guys who cut their teeth making YouTube videos, Danny and Michael Philippou are curiously retro when it comes to horror iconography. Their first feature, the indie hit Talk to Me, fashioned its inciting instrument as a large ceramic hand, one that facilitated spiritual possession through the nigh-quaint process of physical connection. Their follow-up, Bring Her Back, opens with grainy VHS footage depicting an enigmatic ritual whose significance won’t be established until some time later. The movie features a fair number of scares, but the biggest jolt for this Xennial was remembering just how frustrating it was to futz with the tracking setting on a VCR.

This doesn’t mean the Philippous are classicists. But they aren’t exactly modernists either; their skills and shortcomings could easily belong in any era of horror filmmaking. Bring Her Back confirms their talents as purveyors of mood, taking place in an unsettling surreality where the vibes are always off and your danger sensor is constantly on. As a piece of evocative atmosphere, it’s quite creepy. As a work of dramatic storytelling, it’s stillborn. Read More

Read more

Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning: This Wreckage Will Self-Construct

Jeremy BeckReviews
Tom Cruise and Hayley Atwell in Mission Impossible, the Final Reckoning

It’s been a long journey for Ethan Hunt. Over 29 years and eight increasingly elaborate movies, he’s gained friends and lost wives, donned masks and exposed traitors, defied superiors while obeying his own code of justice. He’s infiltrated impenetrable buildings and sprinted down the façades of skyscrapers and clung to the wings of aircraft mid-flight. But while his maximal effort has remained constant, the pictures around him have quietly executed a rare and curious mid-series pivot.

For its first decade and a half, the Mission: Impossible franchise comprised essentially four standalone films, unified only by Tom Cruise’s ageless star power. Sure, they shared certain features—globe-trotting hijinks, duplicitous bosses, incredible stunt work, self-destructing messages—but their stories had virtually nothing to do with one another; their styles were also distinct, in part because they were all directed by different people. But with Rogue Nation, Christopher McQuarrie took and then kept the reins, retaining the operatic flair but constructing a more sprawling and interlaced cinematic universe. As its title suggests, The Final Reckoning—the eighth and (presumably) last Cruise-led episode of world-saving and death-defying—is designed to function as a capstone, taking the series to new heights of derring-do while also bringing retroactive meaning and connectivity to its once-independent predecessors. Read More

Read more

I Watched All 6 Final Destination Movies in 7 Days. I’m Still Alive.

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Ali Larter, Tony Todd, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kaitlyn Santa Juana and Shantel Vansanten in the Final Destination movies

Every cinephile has their blind spots. One of the unfortunate consequences of a mortal lifespan is that we lack sufficient time to watch all of the movies we want to before we die. Some people have never seen a film by Godard or Ozu. Others have never known the glory of Citizen Kane or Casablanca. My own confession: Until last week, I’d never seen a single Final Destination movie.

As ignorance goes, this may seem less shameful than other gaps in motion-picture consumption. But the horror franchise—which originated in 2000 and methodically churned out four more entries over the next 11 years, then went on hiatus before being resurrected last week—has amassed a certain level of, it not artistic prestige, at least cultural penetration. Its recurrent and enduring premise—expendable characters are dispatched not by some masked or malevolent slasher, but by the unseen, inexorable force of Death itself—is now idiomatic. When Osgood Perkins’ The Monkey arrived in theaters earlier this year, most critics (including this one) couldn’t resist commenting that its cavalcade of tragicomic kill sequences resembled a Final Destination flick. In constantly cutting short its residents’ lives, the series has proved weirdly eternal. Read More

Read more

Thunderbolts: Avengers, Resembled

Jeremy BeckReviews
Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Sebastian Stan, and Hannah John-Kamen in Thunderbolts

Yelena Belova is bored. She’s just elegantly parachuted into a secret laboratory in Kuala Lumpur, swiftly dispatching a crew of anonymous guards before overpowering a hapless scientist so that she can bypass the facility’s facial-recognition security and retrieve… forget it, it doesn’t matter. The point is that she’s done this sort of thing before. To a layman, such strenuous effort may sound exciting, but for Yelena, it’s just another day at the superhero-adjacent office. She needs something fulfilling, something inspiring, something new.

Thunderbolts is the 36th(!) installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the key to its moderate success is its understanding of Yelena’s self-described ennui. The MCU is no longer the global box-office behemoth it once was, in part because there are only so many times self-important men in metallic suits and spandex can save the world from imminent catastrophe. Thunderbolts, directed by Jake Schreier from a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, is not a great movie; it remains overly reliant on franchise mythology, and its storytelling is a little choppy. But it’s an appealing sit—not just for its welcome lightness of tone, but for its willingness to shift away from standard-issue heroes and toward more colorful, esoteric characters. Specifically, it’s about a bunch of losers. Read More

Read more