Companion: Beauty Is in the AI of the Beholder

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher in Companion

She’s the perfect girlfriend. She’s smart but not intimidating. She’s pretty but doesn’t draw too much attention to herself. She’s a good listener but doesn’t dominate the conversation. She’s good in bed but doesn’t demand her own gratification. She’s everything a man could want, and nothing he can’t handle.

The chief satirical insight of Companion, the slick and engaging new thriller from Drew Hancock, is that the preceding paragraph’s negative phrases—emphasizing a woman’s passivity, her lack of desire or independence—function as positive attributes. For the men in this movie, the platonic ideal of romantic partnership isn’t equality but compliance. They aren’t interested in being challenged or enriched; they just want to be admired and obeyed. Read More

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Presence: Phantom Dread

Jeremy BeckReviews
Callina Liang in Presence

As auteurs go, Steven Soderbergh is relatively humble. His closing credits never use the phrase “a film by,” and while he typically shoots and edits his movies himself—not since 2011’s Contagion has anyone else fulfilled either of those roles in one of his features—he also deploys pseudonyms (Peter Andrews for cinematography, Mary Ann Bernard for editing), as if to minimize the fastidious control he exerts over his own productions. That’s especially noteworthy in the case of Presence, given that its star is, well, Steven Soderbergh—or rather, his camera.

To be sure, there are actors in this movie, which centers on a white-collar nuclear family that’s just moved into an appealing new home in suburban New Jersey; Lucy Liu and Chris Sullivan play the parents, respectively named Rebekah and Chris, while their disaffected teenage children are Tyler (Eddy Maday) and Chloe (Callina Liang). But the heart of Presence is its titular entity, an invisible being that roams about the house in a state of persistent curiosity, and whose field of vision doubles as the audience’s point of view. Read More

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The Brutalist: Nadirs of the Lost Architect

Jeremy BeckReviews
Adrien Brody in The Brutalist

The American dream gets flipped upside-down in The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s soaring, scathing portrait of post-war greed. Yet while it may be a troubling tale of moral decline, it opens with its hero going up, up, up, climbing toward the prospect of salvation. His name is László, and we first see him in the steerage of a ship docking at Ellis Island, his pallid skin and crooked nose long shielded from the light of day. As his mind recites a letter from his absent wife, he begins to ascend along with countless other sweaty hopefuls, the camera swooping and twisting like he’s navigating a labyrinth. When he finally bursts onto the deck, his face breaks into an ecstatic grin, the sunlight beaming down on him, the score’s trumpets booming in triumph. Never mind that our first view of Lady Liberty comes at an inverted angle, as though she’s about to plunge her torch—and its elusive promise of prosperity—into the harbor.

This knockout introduction instantly signals The Brutalist’s monumental ambition, both thematic and aesthetic. Much has been made of the film’s length (over three-and-a-half hours, including a 15-minute intermission), but its running time is just one of its many extravagances. Corbet, eschewing subtlety in favor of sheer grandeur, has delivered a truly maximalist production, a work of sweeping scope, vigorous style, and provocative rhetoric. The movie is, to borrow the tagline from Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, an epic of epic epicness. Read More

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Oscars 2024: Nominations and Analysis

Jeremy BeckOscars
Margaret Qualley in The Substance

This year’s Oscar nominations were pretty good, except for the ones that were terrible. Or maybe it’s the other way around. As is always the case, it’s hard for me to get too fired up about the Academy’s selections, even if I inevitably feel a twinge of disappointment when one of my favorite films gets ignored (fare thee well, Challengers) or a rush of euphoria when another gets recognized (Coralie Fargeat, allez!). That’s how this is supposed to work: The snubs omissions go hand in hand with the surprises, resulting in an overall slate that’s flawed, messy, and interesting.

So while acknowledging that the Oscars remain perfectly imperfect, let’s run through the nominees in each of the 14 feature categories that I previously predicted (quite poorly, in some cases), along with some quickie analysis of where things currently stand: Read More

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Oscars 2024: Nomination Predictions

Jeremy BeckOscars
A scene from Emilia Perez

The Oscars are good because they’re bad. If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences exclusively bestowed trophies on the best movies, actors, and artisans, they would instantly become irrelevant—because nobody would have anything to complain about. It is the job of this institution to be wrong, to frustrate and antagonize, to create grist for the online mill of campaigning and caterwauling. What other ceremony could inspire such crazed rhetoric, like people clamoring that Emma Stone’s win last year for Poor Things was illegitimate because it came at the expense of Lily Gladstone for Killers of the Flower Moon? The internet feeds on outrage, and the Oscars foment fury with annual, reliable precision.

They also, as it happens, tend to nominate pretty good movies. My own ballots rarely overlap with those of the Academy, but that’s less a function of incompetence than excess; there are simply too many good options for everyone to agree on the same subset of five (or, in the case of Best Picture, 10). The Oscars don’t matter in the same way that MVP awards in sports don’t matter—the token recognition doesn’t change the underlying performance—but they nevertheless shine a light on pictures which mainstream audiences might otherwise ignore. For that reason alone, they’re worth paying attention to, if not obsessing over. Read More

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