Jeremy Beck

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

Sydney Sweeney Is Not Your Sexpot

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Sydney Sweeney in Americana, Euphoria, and Anyone But You

On last week’s episode of Platonic, Seth Rogen and Beck Bennett rhapsodize about the attractiveness of Sydney Sweeney. Their appreciation manages to be simultaneously crude (“She’s stacked”), onomatopoetic (“She’s ridonk-adonk”), and even architectural (“She’s cantilevered, she’s like a Frank Lloyd Wright building”), though Bennett later insists that his admiration is intellectual as well as physical (“She was the head of her high school robotics team!”). It’s a playful sequence that also proves to be vaguely prophetic, because right now Sydney Sweeney is, in pop-culture terms, Having A Moment.

To be clear, I am not referring to her American Eagle jeans ad, which dropped last month and whose purported backlash (read: a handful of people kvetched about it online) ignited a counter-assault of manufactured right-wing outrage (about “wokeness,” or whatever). I’m instead talking about the arc of Sweeney’s career: an ongoing refinement that blends sex appeal, actorly talent, and interesting choices. Put those qualities together, and you have the makings of a true-blue movie star. Read More

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Weapons: From Soup to Guts

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julia Garner in Weapons

The title is plural for a reason. The characters in Weapons brandish any number of destructive instruments—not just guns and knives, but also needles, scissors, forks, teeth, locks of hair, and more. You’ll never look at your vegetable peeler the same way again.

Yet the most potent tool on display here—maybe second-most, given how the use of that peeler has seared itself in my brain—is writer-director Zach Cregger’s craftsmanship. Weapons is a bold and bloody movie, full of ghoulish turns and ghastly violence. It is also a work of consummate skill—a deftly constructed tapestry that weaves imagination, precision, and patience. It’s a beautiful nightmare. Read More

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The Naked Gun: Burden of Spoof

Jeremy BeckReviews
Pamela Anderson and Liam Neeson in The Naked Gun

Wander into The Naked Gun at the exact wrong (or right) moment, and you may suspect that you’ve mistakenly arrived at the latest Mission: Impossible flick. As a henchman lies handcuffed to a hospital bed, a detective coaxes incriminating information from him under the pretense that the villain’s master plan has already succeeded. Once the crucial details are revealed—and just before the room’s false walls fall away to reveal a phony set, confirming the elaborate masquerade—the cop asks his unseen colleagues, “Did you get all that?”

You probably didn’t. The chief attribute of The Naked Gun, the new sorta-sequel to the Leslie Nielsen-led franchise from the ’80s and ’90s, is density. It runs 85 minutes and features roughly 10 times as many jokes, to the point where your brain can’t possibly process all of the purported humor in real time. The assault is relentless but also oddly reassuring. If a line or gag or reference sails over your head, you need not spend time chasing it; another one will be arriving within 10 seconds. Read More

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The Fantastic Four, First Steps: Blue Is the Stormest Color

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ebon Moss Bachrach, Vanessa Kirby, Pedro Pascal, and Joseph Quinn in The Fantastic Four First Steps

Things are different on Earth-828. I’m not talking about the laws of physics or the division of diplomatic supremacy or the popularity of late-night talk shows; all of that stuff is basically the same. (OK, maybe the talk show thing is a bad example.) No, what’s really jarring about this multiversal variant is that on this planet, nobody has ever heard of The Avengers.

Such ignorance is, if not exactly bliss, at least a small mercy. The Fantastic Four: First Steps is the fourth feature to depict Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s superpowered quartet, but it’s the first to formally integrate them into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Yet any proper crossover that pairs this new/old foursome with our more established caped heroes—an upcoming collaboration that’s teased in the stingers to both this film and Thunderbolts—will need to wait. This movie, for all its interstellar escapades and cosmic hand-wringing, is a relatively self-contained adventure, disregarding the extant members of the MCU and instead focusing exclusively on these four playful, imperiled heroes. Read More

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Eddington: Sicking and Screaming

Jeremy BeckReviews
Joaquin Phoenix in Eddington

Some films yearn to transport you to days bygone, preying on your nostalgia for the glories of the past. Then there’s Eddington, the latest freak-out from Ari Aster and the exact opposite of a whimsical memory-lane venture, instead regarding its chosen era with suspicion and exasperation. Set in May 2020 at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s an unholy time machine of a movie—the kind that will have you clawing at the walls, breaking your fingernails as you search for a way out.

Aster made his bones with Hereditary, a skin-crawling nightmare that refused to let you ever look at your parents or telephone poles the same way again. Eddington has no curses or demons or decapitations, but thematically speaking, it’s even scarier than his debut, seeing as it grapples with society’s collective cluelessness in response to an encroaching plague. Sure, supernatural forces are disturbing and all, but they’ve got nothing on human stupidity. Read More

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