Jeremy Beck, Author at MovieManifesto

The Best Movies of 2014, Nos. 6 & 5: Guardians of the Galaxy; The Imitation Game

February 11, 2015June 30, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

The Manifesto is wrapping up its rankings of all of 2014’s movies with its look at the best movies of the year. If you missed previous installments, check out the following links:

Nos. 10 & 9: Locke; The LEGO Movie
Nos. 8 & 7: Nightcrawler; Boyhood

6. Guardians of the Galaxy (directed by James Gunn, 91% Rotten Tomatoes, 76 Metacritic). It is so, so hard to make a good comic-book movie, much less a distinctive one. The genre’s myriad requirements—the commercial imperative for outrageous spectacle, the numbing obligation of fan service, the daunting duty to connect with installments from other franchises—all conspire to make comic-book productions feel more like prepackaged, interchangeable morsels of formula than actual movies. But despite its cutting-edge special effects and dazzling space-opera aesthetic, and despite a cameo from the mega-villain of The Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy never once feels like it rolled off the blockbuster assembly line. This is partly due to what it lacks: It doesn’t feature any historic action sequences, it doesn’t conjure a particularly menacing antagonist, and it doesn’t even tell an especially original story. What it has, however, is something far more important: a personality.

The Best Movies of 2014, Nos. 8 & 7: Nightcrawler; Boyhood

February 10, 2015June 30, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

Jake Gyllenhaal in "Nightcrawler"; Ellar Coltrane in "Boyhood"

If you missed the first entry in the Manifesto’s Top 10 Movies of 2014, you can find it here.

8. Nightcrawler (directed by Dan Gilroy, 95% Rotten Tomatoes, 76 Metacritic). What’s the creepiest thing about Louis Bloom? Perhaps it’s how he looks, with his lank and greasy hair, skeletal frame, and bulging blue eyes that never seem to close. Or perhaps it’s how he talks, constantly spouting mind-numbing corporate rhetoric that he seems to have memorized from a self-help seminar. Most likely, it’s how he acts; an amoral creature, Louis has no use for other people except to bend them to his will, and to use them to slake his lust for power and control. I’d say he was born without a moral compass, but he probably just sold it for a better video camera.

The Best Movies of 2014, Nos. 10 & 9: Locke; The LEGO Movie

February 9, 2015June 30, 2021 Jeremy BeckReviews, Top 10 Lists

Tom Hardy in "Locke"; Chris Pratt in "The LEGO Movie"

After having analyzed 95 different 2014 releases over the past month and change, we arrive at last at the top 10. We’ll be splitting these into five separate posts of two movies each, with the top two titles dropping on Friday.

10. Locke (directed by Steven Knight, 91% Rotten Tomatoes, 81 Metacritic).
He just can’t stop talking about the traffic. Ivan Locke is cruising down the motorway in his BMW late at night while chatting nonstop via his Bluetooth, and he has a lot on his mind. He’s hurtling at high speeds toward a hospital so he can be present for the birth of his third child, but the woman he’s meeting isn’t his wife, it’s his mistress, Bethan (Olivia Colman). He’s abandoning his lucrative position as lead architect on a high-profile project that’s about to break ground, and he needs to constantly provide instructions to his panicky associate. And he has to call his wife, Katrina (Ruth Wilson), to inform her that he won’t be home for dinner because nine months ago, he and a coworker split a bottle of wine and fell into bed. This is a man whose life is disintegrating as his Beamer flies past one mile marker to the next. Yet whenever he finds himself speaking with Bethan, he acts less like an expectant father than a news reporter. She tells him she loves him; he responds, “I should be there in an hour—the traffic is very good.”

Banshee Review: “Tribal”, or how Cinemax’s Most Fun Show Turned Me into an Emotional Mess

February 7, 2015March 18, 2024 Jeremy BeckFeatures

I used to think Banshee was a stupid show. Fun stupid, certainly—there is always vicarious pleasure to be derived from watching invincible heroes maneuver out of impossible situations, especially when they complement their brawny machismo with a wink and a smirk. The show’s first season was happily insane, and even as its second run deepened its mythology and tightened up its writing—an improvement that rated fairly well in my catalogue of 2014’s TV shows—I never experienced it as anything more than impressively choreographed entertainment. Banshee has always been an enjoyable show, and it’s grown funnier and more confident as it’s progressed, but it never made me feel anything.

The Last of the Missing Pictures: Selma, A Most Violent Year, Still Alice, and a Sci-Fi Mind-Bender

February 6, 2015March 18, 2024 Jeremy BeckFeatures

David Oyelowo in "Selma", Oscar Isaac in "A Most Violent Year", Julianne Moore in "Still Alice", and some people in "Coherence"

Welcome to the third and final installment of The Missing Pictures. This is the last supplement to our rankings of every movie from 2014. If you missed the prior issues, you can find Part I here and Part II here.

37. Coherence (directed by James Ward Byrkit, 85% Rotten Tomatoes, 64 Metacritic). Aside from the ominous comet glittering across the night sky, all seems well at the beginning of Coherence, a spooky sci-fi yarn drenched in metaphysical inquiry. Eight privileged adults gather at a suburban house for a dinner party, the kind where someone blathers about the feng shui while passing around the ketamine. It’s the sort of pompous get-together that seems ripe for a cinematic home invasion (think Adam Wingard’s You’re Next), but Coherence indulges in a more introspective form of terror. The power does soon goes out (as does all cell phone service), but instead of intruders bursting through the door, the frights begin when two of the more manly guests venture down the block, peer through the windows of the only lit house on the street, and see…