Jeremy Beck

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

Why I Hate Movie Trailers

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Movie trailers

Last month, the online community informally known as Film Twitter grew abuzz after discovering that the latest trailer for Tenet, the upcoming movie from Christopher Nolan, would be premiering that evening on Fortnite. This seemingly trivial piece of information sent everyone’s hearts aflutter, though the apparent cognitive dissonance was in some ways understandable; with the COVID-19 pandemic depriving cinephiles of new films, it was only natural for them to gorge on unseen movie-related #content like zombies converging on human flesh. The ensuing discourse followed a familiar pattern of instant-reaction, a cacophonous medley of enthusiasm, disparagement, playfulness, and obsession. Responses arrived in many forms; there were breathless analyses and video reviews and screenshots and gifs and memes. If you were logged on to Film Twitter on the evening of May 21, 2020, you were assuredly talking about—or watching other people talk about—the trailer for Tenet.

Except, that is, for me. I didn’t watch the trailer for Tenet, and I instinctively scrolled past any and all online discussion of it. This wasn’t because I’m uninterested in seeing the movie; on the contrary, it’s my most highly anticipated motion picture of 2020, if in fact “2020” is still a calendar year where new movies are released. No, I didn’t watch the trailer for Tenet because it was, well, a trailer. And trailers are bad. Read More

Read more

Hulu’s “Normal People” Is the Show of the Year

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal in "Normal People"

The title practically demands deconstruction. Are the characters in Normal People… normal? The simple, unsatisfying, entirely accurate answer is that, well, they are and they aren’t. The more complex response requires delving into the thematic contradictions that are inherent in most great works of art. The players at the center of this stupendous new series, which is based on a novel by Sally Rooney, are familiar, relatable, and ordinary. They are also unique, complicated, and fascinating.

The brilliance of Normal People, which Rooney has adapted to television with the help of co-writer Alice Birch and showrunner Ed Guiney, is how it captures the universal qualities of its experiences—love and loss, elation and confusion, falling down and growing up—without sacrificing an ounce of its characters’ individuality. The story that it tells is resolutely intimate, never resorting to false contrivances or cheap melodrama. Yet as it progresses, the series accumulates a certain grandeur, an invisible sweep that magnifies the intensity of its images and emotions. On paper (I haven’t read the novel), Normal People’s boy-meets-girl premise may sound prosaic. But on the screen, with beauty and force, it turns that prose into poetry. Read More

Read more

Bad Education: Cleaning Up the District, Cleaning Out the Cash Drawer

Jeremy BeckReviews
Hugh Jackman and friends in Cory Finley's "Bad Education"

The lessons imparted in Bad Education aren’t typically taught in the classroom, but they’re nonetheless worth taking to heart. They include: Don’t give your corporate credit card to your no-account kids. Don’t schedule work trips to Las Vegas. And if you’re going to embezzle money from the school district that you run, do not—do not—encourage the student reporter writing a puff piece on your newest fancy expenditure to “dig deeper”.

The last of these nuggets of wisdom forms the linchpin of Bad Education, the spry and perceptive new movie from Cory Finley that’s currently streaming on HBO. An immensely promising young talent (he just turned 30), Finley’s debut feature was Thoroughbreds, an electrifying thriller about two teenage sociopaths who plot the murder of a loathsome stepfather. At first glance, his follow-up looks to be a dramatic departure; there are no off-screen stabbings, no portentous firearms, no dosed-up cocktails. But the two films do share a preoccupation with the falsehood of appearances: how conniving people construct polished exteriors in order to manipulate others. Finley’s characters tend to be sneakily more—and morally less—than what they seem. Read More

Read more

Underrated Movies to Stream, from A to Z

Jeremy BeckFeatures

As it paralyzes the world, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated all manner of terrifying questions. Am I going to get sick? Will I lose my job? Are my parents safe? When can my kids go back to school? And most importantly: If I’m going to be stuck at home, which movies should I watch?

The last of these questions may not be the most pertinent or existentially troubling, but it happens to be the one that I’m most qualified to answer. One practical consequence of our collective quarantine is that everyone is firing up their favorite streaming services, seeking to either escape from the world or relate to it by means of entertainment. The darkening of movie theaters may have deprived us of the communal experience—that intangible, alchemical joy derived from absorbing a work of art while surrounded by strangers—but it’s hardly prevented us from watching movies. Read More

Read more

The 20 Best Movies of the 2010s: Part II

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists

We’re counting down our picks for the best movies of the 2010s. If you missed #s 11-20—along with our discussion of the decade at large, and of which films just missed the cut—you can check them out here. Also, please remember that 20 is a very small number, so if your favorite film of the decade doesn’t appear on my list, rest assured that it’s nothing personal. Except where it is.

On to the top 10.


10. The Lobster (2016). From the opening scene of Dogtooth, which found three nameless adult children listening to cassette tapes on which their father intoned inaccurate definitions of basic words, Yorgos Lanthimos put his indelibly weird stamp on the decade. Years later, the Greek auteur uncorked two more stunners—I liked The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite even more than Dogtooth—but it’s The Lobster that’s most stuck with me. Lanthimos’ usual tics are on full display—the heavily mannered dialogue, the formal rigor, the absurdist deadpan—but while the movie bristles with strangeness and creativity, it’s also oddly elegiac. A romance where people only pretend to be in love—as well as a comedy where nobody laughs, and a dystopian thriller where the jackbooted thugs always say “please”—The Lobster is distressingly frank about the challenge of finding happiness in the modern world. Yet it’s genuinely heartfelt too, treating its beleaguered characters (led by Colin Farrell, in the performance of his career) with sincerity and respect. It’s a decidedly original work—its bizarre vision could only spring from a mind as twisted as Lanthimos’—but the yearning that it articulates is universal. (Full review here; streaming on Netflix.) Read More

Read more