MovieManifesto

Oscars 2025: Nomination Predictions

January 21, 2026January 20, 2026 Jeremy BeckOscars

Tomorrow morning, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce its nominations for their 98th awards. This will not be the most meaningful news item of the day, nor will it be the one most likely to flood you with rage; even the most devoted Best Original Song fetishists are sure to be more infuriated by real-world developments. In our era of state-sponsored terror campaigns and plotted territorial invasions, the annual ritual of complaining about the Oscars—the boringly safe choices, the bias and entrenchment, the so-called “snubs”—is less cathartic than quaint.

This doesn’t mean that the movies are a distraction; they’re the whole point. In the American utopia—i.e., the opposite of our current political moment—people spend far too much time getting far too angry about far too many dumb Academy choices. If we stop kvetching about the Oscars—which, despite my annual complaints, typically honor films that are at least pretty good—then evil has already won. Read More

Primate review: When It Comes to Blows, Chimping Ain’t Easy

January 16, 2026January 15, 2026 Jeremy BeckReviews

So much for species equality on screen. Over the past decade-plus, in movies like the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise or the Robbie Williams vehicle Better Man, the computer-generated chimpanzee has been a symbol of evolution and humanity—sad, intelligent, soulful. (Though featuring a different genus, the new blockbusters involving King Kong similarly depict the gorilla as a nice guy.) Yet here comes Primate to lay waste to these fantasies of human-animal harmony. The monkey here may be smart, but he sure isn’t friendly; he’s a fearsome killing machine who uses his mighty strength to facilitate his appetite for brutal, bloody violence. I’m surprised PETA hasn’t called for a boycott.

Not that Ben, the titular beast who is played (sort of) by Miguel Torres Umba, initially seems like a bad boy. He instead presents as the happy and docile pet of Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), a university student returning to her gorgeous home in Hawaii, where life seems pretty good. Lucy’s late mother was an expert linguist who taught Ben to communicate by punching buttons on a vocalizing tablet, allowing him and others to mash together noun-adjective combinations like “Ben happy” and “Lucy sorry.” Her half-absent father (Troy Kotsur) is the author of a lucrative mystery series with unfortunate titles like “A Silent Scream,” and its popularity has afforded him a swanky beachfront estate that would make the tech bros from Mountainhead jealous. Her younger sister (Gia Hunter) is resentful toward her—apparently for the sin of, I dunno, going to college?—but they quickly patch things up, and Lucy anticipates luxuriating with family, friends, and her favorite furball. Read More

Indie New Year: No Other Choice, We Bury the Dead, The Plague

January 9, 2026January 8, 2026 Jeremy BeckReviews

Lee Byung-hun in No Other Choice; Daisy Ridley in We Bury the Dead; Everett Blunck in The Plague

Christmas tends to be a big holiday for new movies, but New Year’s Day, not so much. Major studios rarely drop new films in the chill of early January, so the flip of the calendar instead becomes an opportunity for limited releases to expand slowly (sometimes glacially—looking at you, The Testament of Ann Lee). Today, we’re catching up with three independent pictures gradually making their way around the country, though viewers in some markets may be forced to wait until they hit streaming. This is why I support a national law requiring all movies to play in all theaters at all times.

No Other Choice. Capitalism is murder. You work and you work, pouring your blood and sweat into a numbing career that drains the life from you, in service of unfeeling bosses who can sack you whenever they want. (Note to any of my superiors who happen to be reading this piece: I love you and I love my job, please don’t fire me.) If you’re a CEO, they send you packing with a golden parachute. If you’re a line worker, they give you an eel. Read More

Marty Supreme review: Nights of the Downed Table Tennis

January 1, 2026December 31, 2025 Jeremy BeckReviews

There’s a moment in Marty Supreme when someone tells the title character to stay calm. I generally don’t like spoiling things, but given that the movie was directed by Josh Safdie—and given that Marty (surname Mauser) is played as a bundle of raw nerves and febrile energy by Timothée Chalamet—I feel comfortable in informing you that this advice proves unsuccessful. Asking Marty Mauser not to get agitated is like asking the earth not to rotate on its axis. It’s a plea in defiance of natural order.

The cinema of the Safdie Brothers, which includes grubby scraps like Good Time and Heaven Knows What, places a premium on speed and shock while also championing aesthetic ugliness in the name of visceral authenticity. They found the right calibration on Uncut Gems, their 2019 tour de force of addictive anxiety, before venturing out on their own. Benny recently made The Smashing Machine, a solid enough picture that was largely forgettable outside of Dwayne Johnson’s committed performance. Marty Supreme is hardly a perfect movie, but it sure is a memorable one. It’s got sex and violence and mad dogs and crooked cops and Chalamet’s bare ass and Gwyneth Paltrow in mink-wrapped lingerie. Josh Safdie may have gone solo, but he hasn’t gone acoustic; he remains committed to pulverizing viewers with volume and intensity, resulting in an experience that straddles the line between exhilarating and exhausting. Read More

Avatar: Fire and Ash review: In the Flame of the Father

December 24, 2025December 23, 2025 Jeremy BeckReviews

Pandora represents the promise of the new. In narrative terms, the Avatar pictures aren’t revolutionary; they refract age-old tales—about conquest and heroism, exploration and degradation, love and loss—through their own giddy popular mythology. But they are nonetheless designed to astonish viewers with their visual bravado and innovative grammar. In Avatar and its sequel, The Way of Water, James Cameron showed us things we’ve never seen before: blue warriors catapulting through the air and landing on orange winged beasts; reef-dwellers diving into the ocean and communing with its exotic flora and fauna; luminescent landscapes glittering with color and danger. The challenge for the third installment, Fire and Ash, is not just to perpetuate Pandora’s extant wonders, but to conceive of even more dazzling forms of cinematic novelty.

Judged against that lofty standard, Fire and Ash falls a bit short. It is, to be clear, a hugely impressive movie: vibrant and gorgeous, with engaging characters and provocative ideas. But it is also something of a recycling, repurposing its predecessors’ brilliant technique without equaling their sense of true discovery. It’s expectedly amazing. Read More