Drama

After the Hunt review: Sexual Behavior in the Human Yale

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield in After the Hunt

Like everyone else, the title is hiding something. The prepositional phrase “after the hunt” implies an event followed by an aftermath: cause and effect. Yet one of the purported insights of this intriguing, frustrating movie is that contemporary life is a pinwheel of controversy and catastrophe—a perpetual cycle of predation, victimization, and antagonism. After this hunt is over, another one is sure to follow. And eventually, they’ll come for you.

Who are “they,” exactly? After the Hunt, which was directed by Luca Guadagnino from a script by Nora Garrett, supplies no shortage of potential bogeymen. The woke mob. Coastal elites. Old white men encrusted with privilege. Young Black women exploiting affirmative action. Out-of-touch shrinks who don’t know the difference between The Doors and The Smiths. Bearded professors. Protesting students. Queer people. (Seriously, at one point somebody snarls at a non-binary character, “Beat it, they!”) Read More

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The Smashing Machine: Do You Smell What the Schlock is Cooking?

Jeremy BeckReviews
Dwayne Johnson in The Smashing Machine

Over the past 18 years, Dwayne Johnson has appeared in several dozen films but has been credited as “The Rock” only once (in the wrestling drama Fighting with My Family, where he played a lightly fictionalized version of himself). That he was able to drop his famous WWE moniker and still become one of the world’s most bankable movie stars—headlining a number of original hits (San Andreas, Central Intelligence), supercharging the Fast & Furious franchise, turning Jumanji into a global brand—is a testament to the impressiveness of his career transition; he’s come a long way since the brute who awkwardly lumbered across the screen in The Scorpion King. Yet while Johnson has proved his talents as an action hero and self-deprecating comedian (the latter quality best displayed in his vocal part in Moana, if maybe not its forgettable sequel), he’s rarely found work as a dramatic actor, possibly because his hulking size and booming voice prevented filmmakers from envisioning him as a regular person.

The Smashing Machine, the new biopic from Benny Safdie, represents an effort to change that. Not that Mark Kerr, Johnson’s role here, could fairly be dubbed a normal guy; he’s a muscle-bound giant, the kind of incredible hulk whose sheer mass draws stares in waiting rooms. But he isn’t a spy or a thief or superhero. He’s just an athlete, and his (relative) ordinariness seems designed to reshape Johnson’s image, and to lend his rippling physique a sheen of prestige credibility—the kind of artist who earns Oscars as well as dollars. Read More

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One Battle After Another: Inherent ICE

Jeremy BeckReviews
Leonardo DiCaprio in One Battle After Another

Did Paul Thomas Anderson just make an action movie? Yes and no. Certainly, One Battle After Another is a robust and muscular production, replete with car chases, kidnappings, and explosions. Yet its most exhilarating sequence—the one that best encapsulates its singular combination of tumultuous suspense and whip-smart comedy—is just a guy talking on the phone.

It helps, of course, that said guy is Leonardo DiCaprio, one of our last true movie stars. He plays Bob Ferguson, a lapsed revolutionary whose stormy past as an ideological militant has long since subsided into a cloud of bong smoke and disorientation. With his scraggly facial hair and his fried brain cells, Bob seems an unlikely hero of a decades-spanning epic from the acclaimed director of Magnolia and There Will Be Blood. But One Battle After Another, which Anderson adapted from Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, has no interest in being bound by expectation or convention. It is a wildly ambitious picture that takes as its subject no less than the precarity of the American experiment, yet it is also an intimate family melodrama—a poignant tale of darkened souls clawing their way back toward the light. Read More

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The Long Walk: Fear Eats the Stroll

Jeremy BeckReviews
David Jonsson, Cooper Hoffman, and other dudes in The Long Walk

As depicted in The Long Walk, the United States is a land of turmoil and suffering. Shortfalls in productivity have led to a crippling economic depression. State-sanctioned violence is broadcast in the form of bread-and-circuses entertainment. The military persecutes citizens who dare voice their dissent. To clarify, the movie is a work of fiction, not a documentary.

Specifically, The Long Walk is based on a novel by Stephen King, though its horror is allegorical rather than supernatural. Taken literally, the story’s premise—in which 50-odd young men compete in a grueling endurance test that doubles a perverse battle for life and death—isn’t especially plausible. But it’s less unrealistic than it might have seemed, say, eight months or three days ago. When the nation’s president declares war on the free press, when his toadies mount an intimidation campaign against anyone who opposes conservative orthodoxy, when TV networks suspend late-night programs out of fear of governmental retribution… well, it becomes more difficult to frame the image of tanks rolling down public streets as a flight of imaginative fancy. Read More

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Splitsville, Twinless, and the Offbeat Romantic Comedy

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Dakota Johnson in Splitsville; Dylan O'Brien and James Sweeney in Twinless

It’s been a rough two decades for the romantic comedy. Twenty years ago, the summer box office was already showing signs of intellectual-property creep, but nestled amid the Star Wars prequel and the Batman origin story and the Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton remakes were two smash-hit original rom-coms: Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. (You could also throw in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, depending on your level of genre pedantry.) In 2025, you need to scroll all the way down to #18 before finding a single romantic comedy, Materialists (and calling that one a rom-com is a bit of a stretch); at a modest $37M, it’s the only rom-com of the year to scrape its way past $3M domestic.

Were studios just waiting to unleash their laugh riots until after Labor Day? Whatever the reason, last weekend saw the release of two new comedies that, while not strictly adhering to rom-com conventions, nevertheless serve as a welcome change of pace for anyone exhausted by all of the comic-book adaptations and animated sequels. Neither exactly set the box office afire, which is a shame, given that one of the pleasures of a well-made romantic comedy is the joy of experiencing collective laughter and heartbreak with fellow patrons. That, and both of these happen to be pretty good. Read More

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