Jeremy Beck, Author at MovieManifesto

The Accountant 2: In Autism’s Life, No Second Tax

May 1, 2025April 30, 2025 Jeremy BeckReviews

Jon Bernthal and Ben Affleck in The Accountant 2

The Accountant 2 could’ve been a pretty good movie, if it weren’t a sequel to The Accountant. It’s best suited as a hangout picture, sporting playful dialogue, a light comic touch, and a pair of appealing performances. Yet because this emergent franchise made its bones as a hot-blooded crime yarn, it subjugates its mild-mannered strengths in favor byzantine plotting and stale gunplay. It’s guilty of genre evasion.

Yet the Hollywood IP machine cranks on, and there are worse figures to resuscitate than Christian Wolff, the autistic genius and assassin who first appeared on screen nine years ago in the hunky, bespectacled form of Ben Affleck. The decade away hasn’t improved Christian’s social skills: When we first catch up with him, he’s the eye of a speed-dating hurricane, only we learn that single ladies are throwing themselves at him because he hacked the app’s algorithm; once he opens his mouth and starts rambling about appreciating assets, their excitement quickly curdles into dismay. Read More

Sinners: (Don’t) Let the White One In

April 25, 2025April 24, 2025 Jeremy BeckReviews

Michael B. Jordan, times two, in Sinners

We always say we want more original movies, but how many movies are truly original? Sinners, the latest feature from Ryan Coogler, is in some ways a work of pastiche, incorporating strains of gangster cinema, music videos, and horror lore. But despite embracing its influences (which is not, in itself, a bad thing), it manages to feel new—both for the urgency of its ideas and the vibrancy of its filmmaking.

That description also applied, with partial force, to two of Coogler’s earlier efforts, Creed and Black Panther. In those pictures, the director managed to imprint his personality onto the material while still operating within the brand-managed confines of the cinematic franchise. (His attempt to repeat the feat with Black Panther’s sequel, Wakanda Forever, was markedly less successful, if partly for tragic reasons beyond his control.) Sinners, for all its boisterous entertainment value, shackles him with no such commercial chains. No longer is Coogler reinterpreting and revitalizing a cherished piece of intellectual property. He’s reimagining the world. Read More

Drop, Warfare, and Putting Viewers in the Shit

April 18, 2025April 17, 2025 Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews

Roger Ebert famously said that the movies are a machine that generates empathy, but that same machine can also manufacture terror. Cinema is an art of forced perspective—we adopt the point of view of a film’s main characters, figuratively if rarely literally—and directors often use the medium to churn our stomachs, to make us experience anxiety and fear. Two of last weekend’s new releases, while occupying different genres and deploying different styles, share the goal of distressing their audience by thrusting you inside their heroes’ nerve-racking headspace. They may ask you to empathize, but they really want you to sweat and shudder.

Of the two, Drop is both the more conventional and the more outrageous. Directed by Christopher Landon from a script by Jillian Jacobs and Christopher Roach, it belongs to an emerging breed of subgenre: the technophobic thriller. Cells phones were supposed to ruin horror movies—why would the final girl cower in fright when she could just call 911?—but filmmakers have adapted, turning tools of salvation into instruments of torment. We spend an increasing percentage of our time interacting with screens; turns out, in addition to distracting us with cute memes, those displays can besiege us with images of our worst nightmares. Read More

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