Jonathan Majors’ Body Is Criminal

Jeremy BeckFeatures
Jonathan Majors in Magazine Dreams

The opening shot of Magazine Dreams bathes its star in glowing, golden light. The camera looks upward from a low angle, allowing us to gawk appreciatively at its subject as he strikes a pose emphasizing his rippling musculature. The insinuation is that this Adonis has won some sort of award or, as implied by the title, graced the cover of a periodical. It’s the visual language of fantasy, an imagined triumph for both the movie’s troubled protagonist and its troubling star.

Magazine Dreams was supposed to be Jonathan Majors’ coronation. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2023 (it received a special jury prize for “creative vision”), after which Searchlight won a bidding war and slated its release for that December—prime awards-season real estate. Majors, who had previously earned acclaim for his nimble turns in critical hits like The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Da 5 Bloods, and Devotion (plus HBO’s Lovecraft Country), was entering the mainstream. That March, he played the antagonist in Creed III (for which he made my Oscar ballot, as he did for Devotion); the month prior, he appeared as the villain in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, and the dynastic plotters of the Marvel Cinematic Universe planned for his character, Kang, to serve as its big bad in future installments opposite The Avengers. Magazine Dreams—in which Majors delivers an intense, bruising performance as an unhinged bodybuilder, and which he reportedly prepped for by eating over 6,000 calories a day—represented his logical gateway to four-quadrant stardom. Read More

Read more

Black Bag: Sex, Spies, and Videotape

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett in Black Bag

Multiple dinner parties take place in Black Bag, and you, perceptive viewer and honored guest, are expected to bring a number of things to the soiree. Don’t worry about the wine or the hors d’oeuvres; your host, director Steven Soderbergh, has all manner of luxury covered. Your job is to arm yourself with more sensory gifts: a sharp set of eyes, the better to peer through the low digital lighting; an engaged and discerning mind, crucial to navigating David Koepp’s labyrinthine script; and a healthy appreciation of classical glamour, incarnated here by Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender.

That last ask is hardly a tall order. Blanchett and Fassbender are capable of getting dirty—she melted down memorably in Tár, he went feral in 12 Years a Slave—but they’re best associated as ambassadors of crisp, patrician elegance. Here they play Kathryn St. Jean and George Woodhouse, and if those names don’t tip you off as to their nationalities, their accents and wardrobe surely will. One of the first times we see George, he’s prepping a roast, decked out in a striped apron, his features accentuated by a neat haircut and severe black spectacles; after a dollop of sauce stains his shirt cuff, he insists on changing before the company arrives. Quite a few crimes are committed in Black Bag—theft, murder, unauthorized government surveillance, bleeding on a new rug—but the one offense that unifies the characters is that of aggravated Britishness. Read More

Read more

Mickey 17: Live Esprit or Die Scarred

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17

Cinema is a medium of imagination, and science-fiction is a genre of possibility. So it’s understandable that movies about the future tend to be, if not optimistic, at least aspirational—conjuring a realm of flying cars and exotic planets and soulful cyborgs. Mickey 17, the latest whatsit from Bong Joon-ho, tacks in the opposite direction. It asks, with a mixture of whimsy and sincerity: What if the future sucks?

To be fair, this line of prospective apprehension has its own gloomy descendants. (Just last year, Alien: Romulus continued that franchise’s preoccupation with capitalistic drudgery, conceiving of a mining colony where indentured servants labored in permanent darkness.) But Bong’s vision here is distinctive for how it depicts galactic exploration as an error-riddled process that’s permanently, perpetually janky. Hardly anything works smoothly in Mickey 17; its characters are constantly beset by glitchy conveyor belts and ineffectual antidotes and crappy cooking, not to mention the usual human malice and venality. It feels a lot like the world of today, only with more spaceships and aliens. Read More

Read more

The Monkey: Toy to the World, the Sword Is Come

Jeremy BeckReviews
Theo James in The Monkey

Longlegs may have cemented Osgood Perkins’ stature in the horror community, but his twisted sensibility has been fully formed ever since his debut feature, The Blackcoat’s Daughter. In both of those films, as well as the two that came in between (Gretel & Hansel and I Am the Pretty Thing Whose Title Is Too Long), Perkins flaunted his gifts as a skilled purveyor of heebie-jeebies, wielding slick camerawork and atonal rhythms to keep viewers on edge and off balance. You might think that venturing into the realm of Stephen King would only elevate the director’s midnight-madness credentials, but The Monkey, which Perkins has adapted from a King short story, is his least scary movie thus far. There is, however, a reason for its relative lack of terror. Quite simply: It’s a comedy.

Specifically, The Monkey deploys countless variations of a single joke. It posits, not without cause, that the spectacle of watching human beings die on screen can be funny as well as tragic. This is undeniably in poor taste, which is part of what makes it amusing. Perkins, channeling his bloodletting instincts in a direction that’s silly rather than spooky, commits to his premise with innovative gusto. People don’t just die in this movie; they are shot, stabbed, dismembered, decapitated, electrocuted, immolated, trampled by horses, and engulfed by a swarm of bees. It’s your worst nightmare, unless you’re a coroner who loves your work. Read More

Read more

Oscars 2024: At a Sturdy Ceremony, a Daring Victor

Jeremy BeckOscars
Mark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in Anora

The internet demands extreme reactions; favored adjectives include disastrous, extraordinary, loathsome, and life-changing. This tends to chafe with my obnoxious penchant for suggesting that most things are Fine. So this year, I’ll do my best to deliver a hot take and proclaim that this year’s Oscars were… pretty good! They were not exceptional; most of the speeches were dull, the songs were a bore, and the lack of clips/footage was infuriating. But while Conan O’Brien initially seemed to be pulling the tedious shtick of complaining that the nominated films weren’t “popular” enough (I groaned when he mocked the length of The Brutalist), his overall vibe proved positive, earnest, and charming; no single movie was the butt of his jokes more than he was himself. His general enthusiasm infected the rest of the show, which had the feel of a playful, buoyant get-together. If Hollywood’s celebrities indulged themselves while the world around them burned, at least they had a good time and let us vicariously share in their joy.

As for the awards themselves, in one sense the Academy spread the wealth; eight of the 10 Best Picture nominees scooped up at least one trophy, with five of them scoring multiple victories. But the night belonged to Anora. Yesterday, I noted the oddity of my predictions, which pegged Sean Baker’s odyssey to win the top prize but only one additional Oscar; I knew that I’d be wrong, but I wasn’t sure which way. Happily, my favorite of 2024’s contenders went on a spree, winning five of the six categories it was nominated in. The sands of history will decide how this quasi-sweep is perceived, but in the moment, I’m very pleased for one of the year’s most enjoyable and poignant movies.

Per tradition, let’s run through the categories in their order of presentation and see which ones I messed up: Read More

Read more