I Care a Lot: Lies of the Guardians

Jeremy BeckReviews
Rosamund Pike in I Care a Lot

Even before you see her blond bob, you know instantly that Rosamund Pike’s newest star vehicle will find her working in the same vein of coolly ruthless savagery that she mined so brilliantly in Gone Girl. That much is clear from her opening voiceover, which finds the crisply talented actor once again ditching her British lilt for a capable American accent, and which concludes with her declaring, “I am a fucking lioness.” It’s an accurate if unnecessary introduction; one glare from her cold-blue eyes or one puff from her vape pen, and it’s plain that Pike’s Marla Grayson is a lethal predator. She plays for keeps, even when the game is other people’s lives.

This description might sounds like the template for a dark and provocative study of sociopathy, but I Care a Lot isn’t especially interested in digging into the pathologies of its protagonist. It isn’t interested in much of anything, really, beyond treating viewers to a rollicking good time with bad people. And this, it mostly does. Written and directed with slick snap by J. Blakeson, it coasts amiably on the gifts of its cast and the jolts of its pulp, untroubled by its own vacuity. Small wonder Marla is its hero. Read More

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Nomadland: Movin’ On Out, Again and Again

Jeremy BeckReviews
Frances McDormand in Chloé Zhao's Nomadland

An ambitious cinematic tone poem that seeks to stand as tall as the stately redwoods it rapturously depicts, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland pays homage to a number of distinctly American wonders: the crashing waves of the Pacific; the rocky palaces of the Badlands; Frances McDormand’s face. With soft-blue ice chips for eyes and hard lines creasing the corners of her mouth, the two-time Oscar winner has the chiseled look of an artifact excavated from one of the film’s historical preserves. But there’s nothing antiquated about McDormand’s performance, which is clipped and unsentimental, but also open and brimming with feeling. She’s the main attraction of this mostly lovely, occasionally frustrating movie, which doesn’t so much tell a story as communicate an experience.

That was more or less true of Zhao’s prior film, The Rider, which deployed non-professional actors to refract the gauzy mythology of the cowboy through the cold prism of modernity. I was somewhat immune to The Rider’s low-key charms; it often felt more like a vibe than a movie. Nomadland operates in a similar vein, but Zhao’s filmmaking has grown more expressive. Soundtracked by gentle compositions from the pianist Ludovico Einaudi, her camera greedily contemplates the vastness of the American frontier, discovering landscapes both beautiful and desolate. The country captured in this picture looks like a gorgeous place to visit and a hard place to live. Read More

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New Streamers: Judas and the Black Messiah, Saint Maud, and The Little Things

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jared Leto in The Little Things; Morfydd Clark in Saint Maud; Daniel Kaluuya in Judas and the Black Messiah

Ordinarily, early February is a cinematic dumping ground. But among the million other things that the COVID-19 pandemic affected, it caused the Oscars to expand their eligibility window by two months, meaning that some high-profile titles just landed on your favorite streaming services. Let’s take a quick run through this past weekend’s newest releases.

Judas and the Black Messiah (HBO Max). The second feature from Shaka King, Judas and the Black Messiah is a contemporary political text that’s also a classical spy thriller. It tells the story of Bill O’Neal (a very fine Lakeith Stanfield), the small-time car thief who became a big-league FBI informant in the late ’60s and infiltrated the Chicago chapter of the Black Panthers, led by Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya). It isn’t subtle about its allegiance; you don’t need a degree in Christian theology to discern which character corresponds to which half of the title. Read More

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Ranking Every TV Show of 2020: The Complete List

Jeremy BeckTV Rankings

This piece is for the cheaters. Over the past five days, we’ve ranked 124 different 2020 TV shows, grouping them into 12 different tiers and eight different columns. Obviously, we encourage you to read all of those, but if you’re feeling lazy and just want to see the complete rankings, then here you are. (To visit the particular piece for each tier, just click on the header.) Read More

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The 10 Best TV Shows of 2020

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists, TV Rankings
Anya Taylor-Joy in The Queen's Gambit; Rhea Seehorn in Better Call Saul; The Lady in the Lake in The Haunting of Bly Manor; Maddie Phillips in Teenage Bounty Hunters; Will Arnett in BoJack Horseman

And here we are. Having spent the past week counting down every TV that show we watched in 2020—all 124 of them—we now arrive at the top 10. If you missed any of the prior installments, you can find them at the following links:

#s 124-110 (tiers 12 and 11)
#s 109-85 (tiers 10 and 9)
#s 84-61 (tiers 8 and 7)
#s 60-41 (tiers 6 and 5)
#s 40-31 (tier 4)
#s 30-21 (tier 3)
#s 20-11 (tier 2)


Tier 1: The top 10
10. Teenage Bounty Hunters (Netflix, Season 1). In empirical terms, there may have been 10 TV shows in 2020 that were better than Teenage Bounty Hunters. But in raw emotional terms—in metrics like “number of times a series made me squeal with glee” or “most scenes that made me leap off of my couch”—this show simply needed to be in my top 10. Sorrowful and joyous, predictable and adventurous, it soars with a combination of traditionalism and modernity, mingling old-fashioned conventionality with new-age vigor. Conceptually, it’s a simple but fun premise: twin sisters (Maddie Phillips and Anjelica Bette Fellini) team up with a grizzled veteran skip tracer (Kadeem Hardison) to track down bail-jumpers—a task they’re bizarrely well-suited for, thanks to their powers of deductive reasoning, technological knowhow, and rich-white-girl access—while also balancing academic duties at their tony prep school. If that sounds ridiculous, it is, but it works, thanks to the actors’ charm and the series’ incandescent joie de vivre. There’s a wonderful warmth to the show, and its relationships—between sisters, between lovers (straight and gay), between confused kids and their helpless parents—brim with deep feeling. Teenage Bounty Hunters may be silly at heart, but its heart is far from silly. Read More

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