Features

Seeing Red Envelopes: An Elegy for Netflix’s DVD-by-Mail Service

Jeremy BeckFeatures
DVD Netflix

It was a new iteration of a familiar conversation. Speaking with a coworker about my prior evening, I explained that I’d watched a movie (shocker), and that I’d procured it in the form of a Blu-ray disc from Netflix’s DVD-by-mail service. He gawped in amazement: “Netflix still sends DVDs??”

Sadly, not for much longer. At the end of this month, after 21 years of glorious pony-express shipping, Netflix will finally close its brick-and-mortar (disc-and-mailer?) operation and focus exclusively on online streaming. In a way, it’s hard to believe it lasted this long. The company foresaw our digital-dominant present as early as 2007, when it introduced a novel plan to “deliver movies and TV shows directly to users’ PCs” (imagine that!). But it really ushered in the demise of its postal venture in February 2013, when it entered the original-programming space and introduced a little series called House of Cards, which was immediately available to binge in its entirety. (Who wants to watch TV this way, I scoffed.) In retrospect, it’s something of a miracle that Netflix’s DVD arm survived for a full decade from that point, even if the breadth of its selection continually shrank as the corporation poured money and sweat into the streaming wars. Read More

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In the Chamber Dramas “Reality” and “Sanctuary,” Women Fight the Power

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Sydney Sweeney in Reality; Margaret Qualley in Sanctuary

If television can have bottle episodes, can cinema have bottle movies? It probably isn’t worth the taxonomic trouble, given that TV critics routinely rant about how the term is misused. (Traditionally, “bottle episode” describes an installment that’s shot on a single set with no guest stars; it’s gained favor of late as a stylistic departure, but its primary motivation used to be financial rather than artistic.) Still, the minimalist concept—confined location, small cast—isn’t unique to television; plenty of feature films deploy a similar chamber-drama format, attempting to turn their modest mise-en-scène into showcases for narrative suspense and psychological complexity.

Last month saw the release of two such pictures—Reality, a fact-based docudrama about intelligence analyst Reality Winner, and Sanctuary, a two-hander about a sex worker and her wealthy client—both of which feature women trying to claim a measure of agency within a patriarchal structure. In one, the power dynamics are patently lopsided from the start; in the other, they’re the fulcrum of an ever-shifting battleground. Read More

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Stop Citing Rotten Tomatoes

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Scenes from Zootopia, Paddington 2, and Citizen Kane

Ratings are currency. The brunt of criticism, whether you’re writing it or reading it, is words, and words are work. In our entertainment-glutted present, when countless pieces of art compete for your precious time—there is always a new show to binge, a new game to play—people crave a shorthand to cut through the noise. And so, regardless of the specific metric—four stars! C plus! 9 out of 10 fireball emojis!—ratings function as a useful communicative shorthand, crudely but efficiently reducing a critic’s detailed ruminations to a digestible letter or number. Set against this quant-obsessed backdrop, it’s understandable that Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation giant which assigns a “score” to every movie that’s meant to convey its percentage of positive appraisals, has grown to dominate contemporary cinematic discourse. But while the site’s cultural ubiquity may be explicable, it’s also unfortunate, because Rotten Tomatoes is fucking awful.

Actually, it’s worse than awful; it’s meaningless. And even worse than meaningless, it’s distortive. Rotten Tomatoes purports to answer a straightforward question (“Hey, is this movie any good?”), yet in the process it misleads viewers and, more crucially, reframes discussions. The lifeblood of criticism is conversation: the dialectical exchange of opinions and the robust expression of ideas. Yet under the dominion of Rotten Tomatoes, the score doesn’t supplement criticism; it replaces it altogether. It has acquired the fearsome power of language, supplanting the very words it claims to summarize. Read More

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Ranking Every Movie of 2022 (sort of)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Sandra Bullock in The Lost City; Rebecca Hall in Resurrection; Viola Davis in The Woman King; Ana de Armas in Deep Water; Rachel Sennott in Bodies Bodies Bodies

Yesterday, MovieManifesto published its list of the best movies of 2022. Today, per annual tradition, we’re ranking everything else, with a comprehensive list of every movie we watched last year. Except we aren’t really “ranking” them, because rankings are dumb and obnoxious and falsely imply quantitative rigidity in a medium that’s fundamentally fluid and amorphous. Instead, we’re breaking out my beloved concept of tiers, which are somewhat nebulous in their own right but which do a decent job striking the balance between the internet’s demand for comparative metrics and my own distaste toward numerical measures.

Aside from serving as an exercise in nerdy recordkeeping, this piece is meant to serve as a primer for readers who invariably ask themselves that age-old question: Hey, what movie should I watch tonight? That’s why I include which service each film is (currently) streaming on—so that you can use this list as a guide as you mull your evening selection. (On the other hand, I’ve decided to omit the Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic data that I’ve typically appended in the past; I might elaborate on this in the future, but for now suffice it to say that those sites are bad and stupid, and I don’t want to promulgate their dubious methodology.) [Update: I did, in fact, elaborate on this.]

Here’s the complete list of all 138 new movies I watched in 2022, broken into sensible, not-at-all random tiers: Read More

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Getting Personal: The Banshees of Inisherin, Armageddon Time, and Aftersun

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin, Frankie Corio and Paul Mescal in Aftersun, Banks Repeta and Anthony Hopkins in Armageddon Time

Today marks the long-awaited arrival of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, an enormous blockbuster that will make gobs of money, thereby rescuing the box office from its “post-summer slump.” But just because recent releases haven’t been financially successful doesn’t mean they haven’t been interesting. This past weekend featured modest expansions of three small-scale movies that collectively scraped together less than $3 million, which is less than Wakanda Forever will earn in an hour. There’s nothing inherently venerable about independent films, but these three pictures have more in common than modest budgets; they’re also all notably personal in their storytelling, with original screenplays written by their director. If Black Panther is the antidote for Hollywood’s commercial doldrums, these movies provide a valuable reminder that contemporary cinema consists of more than franchises and superheroes.

It doesn’t get much more personal than Armageddon Time, James Gray’s autobiographical depiction of his childhood in Queens in 1980. (In this, Gray gets a jump on Steven Spielberg, whose Arizona-set self-reflection, The Fabelmans, hits select cities today and will go nationwide the day before Thanksgiving.) Gray casts the fresh-faced, soft-featured Banks Repeta (recently in The Devil All the Time and The Black Phone) in the role of young James Gray Paul Graff, an aspiring artist whose idle classroom drawings exhibit greater skill than your typical 12-year-old doodle. Maybe someday he’ll grow up to be a talented filmmaker. Who can say? Read More

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