Jeremy Beck, Author at MovieManifesto

The White Lotus S3 Finale: Mystery Loves Company

April 11, 2025April 10, 2025 Jeremy BeckReviews

Walton Goggins and Aimee Lou Wood in The White Lotus

The White Lotus isn’t a murder mystery. There is no brilliant detective piecing together clues, no array of suspects telling conflicting stories, no grand reveal that exposes dark motivations or cunning conspiracies. There is, however, a dead body, the discovery of which bookends each season. The effect of this gambit, which writer-director Mike White has maintained for each of the series’ three runs, is to freight the proceedings with a suspenseful question—who’s going to die?—while still allowing him to structure the show as a rangy, acidic comedy rather than a conventional crime yarn.

This approach worked splendidly for the first two seasons of The White Lotus (both of which made my top, er, 11 in their respective years), but it yields diminishing returns for Season 3—not because White’s methodology has grown stale, but because he’s failed to properly calibrate it. For its first six (deeply enjoyable) episodes, this season operates as a dyspeptic and incisive class satire that also features tendrils of anxiety and anticipation. But in its final two installments, it squanders some of its shaggy charm, replacing it with clumsy attempts to goose tension and invite speculation. Read More

Jonathan Majors’ Body Is Criminal

April 4, 2025April 3, 2025 Jeremy BeckFeatures

The opening shot of Magazine Dreams bathes its star in glowing, golden light. The camera looks upward from a low angle, allowing us to gawk appreciatively at its subject as he strikes a pose emphasizing his rippling musculature. The insinuation is that this Adonis has won some sort of award or, as implied by the title, graced the cover of a periodical. It’s the visual language of fantasy, an imagined triumph for both the movie’s troubled protagonist and its troubling star.

Magazine Dreams was supposed to be Jonathan Majors’ coronation. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023 (it received a special jury prize for “creative vision”), after which Searchlight won a bidding war and slated its release for that December—prime awards-season real estate. Majors, who had previously earned acclaim for his nimble turns in critical hits like The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Da 5 Bloods, and Devotion (plus HBO’s Lovecraft Country), was entering the mainstream. That March, he played the antagonist in Creed III (for which he made my Oscar ballot, as he did for Devotion); the month prior, he appeared as the villain in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and the dynastic plotters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe planned for his character, Kang, to serve as its big bad in future installments opposite The Avengers. Magazine Dreams—in which Majors delivers an intense, bruising performance as an unhinged bodybuilder, and which he reportedly prepped for by eating over 6,000 calories a day—represented his logical gateway to four-quadrant stardom. Read More

Black Bag: Sex, Spies, and Videotape

March 20, 2025March 19, 2025 Jeremy BeckReviews

Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett in Black Bag

Multiple dinner parties take place in Black Bag, and you, perceptive viewer and honored guest, are expected to bring a number of things to the soiree. Don’t worry about the wine or the hors d’oeuvres; your host, director Steven Soderbergh, has all manner of luxury covered. Your job is to arm yourself with more sensory gifts: a sharp set of eyes, the better to peer through the low digital lighting; an engaged and discerning mind, crucial to navigating David Koepp’s labyrinthine script; and a healthy appreciation of classical glamour, incarnated here by Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.

That last ask is hardly a tall order. Blanchett and Fassbender are capable of getting dirty—she melted down memorably in Tár, he went feral in 12 Years a Slave—but they’re best associated as ambassadors of crisp, patrician elegance. Here they play Kathryn St. Jean and George Woodhouse, and if those names don’t tip you off as to their nationalities, their accents and wardrobe surely will. One of the first times we see George, he’s prepping a roast, decked out in a striped apron, his features accentuated by a neat haircut and severe black spectacles; after a dollop of sauce stains his shirt cuff, he insists on changing before the company arrives. Quite a few crimes are committed in Black Bag—theft, murder, unauthorized government surveillance, bleeding on a new rug—but the one offense that unifies the characters is that of aggravated Britishness. Read More

Mickey 17: Live Esprit or Die Scarred

March 14, 2025March 14, 2025 Jeremy BeckReviews

Cinema is a medium of imagination, and science-fiction is a genre of possibility. So it’s understandable that movies about the future tend to be, if not optimistic, at least aspirational—conjuring a realm of flying cars and exotic planets and soulful cyborgs. Mickey 17, the latest whatsit from Bong Joon-ho, tacks in the opposite direction. It asks, with a mixture of whimsy and sincerity: What if the future sucks?

To be fair, this line of prospective apprehension has its own gloomy descendants. (Just last year, Alien: Romulus continued that franchise’s preoccupation with capitalistic drudgery, conceiving of a mining colony where indentured servants labored in permanent darkness.) But Bong’s vision here is distinctive for how it depicts galactic exploration as an error-riddled process that’s permanently, perpetually janky. Hardly anything works smoothly in Mickey 17; its characters are constantly beset by glitchy conveyor belts and ineffectual antidotes and crappy cooking, not to mention the usual human malice and venality. It feels a lot like the world of today, only with more spaceships and aliens. Read More

The Monkey: Toy to the World, the Sword Is Come

March 7, 2025March 7, 2025 Jeremy BeckReviews

Longlegs may have cemented Osgood Perkins’ stature in the horror community, but his twisted sensibility has been fully formed ever since his debut feature, The Blackcoat’s Daughter. In both of those films, as well as the two that came in between (Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing Whose Title Is Too Long), Perkins flaunted his gifts as a skilled purveyor of heebie-jeebies, wielding slick camerawork and atonal rhythms to keep viewers on edge and off balance. You might think that venturing into the realm of Stephen King would only elevate the director’s midnight-madness credentials, but The Monkey, which Perkins has adapted from a King short story, is his least scary movie thus far. There is, however, a reason for its relative lack of terror. Quite simply: It’s a comedy.

Specifically, The Monkey deploys countless variations of a single joke. It posits, not without cause, that the spectacle of watching human beings die on screen can be funny as well as tragic. This is undeniably in poor taste, which is part of what makes it amusing. Perkins, channeling his bloodletting instincts in a direction that’s silly rather than spooky, commits to his premise with innovative gusto. People don’t just die in this movie; they are shot, stabbed, dismembered, decapitated, electrocuted, immolated, trampled by horses, and engulfed by a swarm of bees. It’s your worst nightmare, unless you’re a coroner who loves your work. Read More