Features

Ranking Every Movie of 2023 (sort of)

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Thomas McKenzie in Eileen; Rosamund Pike in Saltburn; Keira Knightley in Boston Strangler; Aubrey Plaza in Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre; Sofia Boutella in Rebel Moon

You know how this works. Having recently published our list of the best movies of the year, it’s time to rank the rest. And by “rank” I mean clump them into semi-arbitrary tiers. But don’t worry, even though they aren’t individually ranked, nothing’s to prevent you from kvetching that the comedy I slotted into Tier 3 actually belongs in Tier 5, and that the thriller I placed in the “Underrated” tier is Overrated, Actually. That kind of griping is exactly why we have the internet.

Per usual, in addition to identifying each movie’s director, I have also appended the specific service it’s currently streaming on (if any). Note that, given the vagaries of streaming and the gluttony of assholes like David Zaslav, this information is necessarily impermanent. In other words, stream ’em while you got ’em. (Remember, I have stopped including Rotten Tomatoes data because Rotten Tomatoes is trash.)

Here’s the full list of all 134 new releases I watched in 2023, split into tiers that are cogent and precise and totally rigid (where applicable, the hyperlink leads to my review of that particular movie): Read More

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Middlebrow Christmas: The Color Purple and The Boys in the Boat

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Fantasia Barrino in The Color Purple; Callum Turner in The Boys in the Boat

In critical circles, the term “middlebrow” is wielded as a pejorative, alongside “prestige fare” and “Oscar bait.” The idea is that these types of films—often period pieces, featuring inspirational stories that are based on either historical events or popular novels—are tasteful to the point of decorousness, flattering Academy voters for their refinement without taking real risks as works of cinema. As someone who spent his formative years greedily devouring as many Oscar winners as possible, I maintain a steadfast appreciation for the middlebrow picture; I like The Cider House Rules, I love A Beautiful Mind, and I think Kate Winslet was terrific in both Revolutionary Road and The Reader. That a movie attempts to appeal to a broad adult audience doesn’t automatically nullify its pleasures, especially when it’s well-made and well-acted (and sure, gorgeous period costumes can’t hurt).

Christmas tends to be an ideal time for the release of a middlebrow movie, given that the holiday affords extended families the opportunity to spend two-plus hours in a climate-controlled environment without offending any sensibilities. In recent years, sterling examples of this vintage include Little Women, Mary Queen of Scots, and other period pieces that didn’t star Saoirse Ronan (e.g., Fences). Quality prestige pictures, all! Still, just as I reject the notion that middlebrow flicks are inherently inferior, I also acknowledge that they aren’t intrinsically superior; they still need to work on the levels of storytelling and aesthetics. Along with the Michael Mann biopic Ferrari (which I previously reviewed here), this Christmas brought the arrival of two films that seemed like easy wins for prestige-hungry audiences. But despite their differences in tone and scope, they share a sense of failure—both to inspire and, more crucially, to entertain. Read More

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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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