Drama

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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Original Screenplay Weekend, Again: Honey Don’t, Eden, and Relay

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ana de Armas in Eden, Margaret Qualley in Honey Don't, Riz Ahmed in Relay

The top grosser at the box office last weekend was a sing-along version of KPop Demon Hunters, Netflix’s animated phenomenon about a girl-pop trio who use their musical talents to battle demons disguised as a boy band. I’m not lamenting this; it’s a mostly charming movie, and it’s nice to see any Netflix product in theaters, even if that company remains philosophically committed to eradicating the very existence of cinema. KPop Demon Hunters is also an original work, meaning its success derives from thoughtful artistry and word-of-mouth rather than by leveraging intellectual property.

Not every new release last weekend was so triumphant. Look considerably lower down the box-office chart, and you’ll find the debut of three movies with original screenplays that combined to gross less than one-third of Demon Hunters’ $19M. (I’m ignoring Splitsville, which played in just five theaters across the country.) When I last performed this exercise in 2021, I expressed gratitude that original pictures had returned to theaters as the industry rebounded from the COVID-19 pandemic. Four years later, I’m less optimistic about our cinematic future. But let’s celebrate (and evaluate) what we’ve got, while we’ve still got it. Read More

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Materialists, The Life of Chuck, and the Pleasure of Brute Force

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal in Materialists; Annalise Basso and Tom Hiddleston in The Life of Chuck

Movie critics are supposed to crave subtlety. We like to complain about obviousness, whether it appears in the form of voiceover, backstory, or exposition. Bluntness is axiomatically amateurish; true artistry lies in the oblique, the implied, the invisible.

I’m mostly joking, even if I acknowledge that I’m not immune to this sort of rhetoric. But directness in cinema can be satisfying, provided the story is told well. Last weekend saw the release of two new movies, Materialists and The Life of Chuck, which exhibit a plainspoken quality that’s more appealing than insulting. They wear their hearts on their sleeves and get yours pumping in the process. Read More

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