Grade: A minus

The Drama review: To Have and to Scold

Jeremy BeckReviews
Robert Pattinson and Zendaya in The Drama

It’s a classic meet-cute. He spies her in a coffee shop reading a book. He has to talk to her, so he quickly googles the novel and approaches her with some canned, cheesy material about how much it spoke to him. He keeps stumbling over his words, panicking when she refuses to engage, only for her to startle and remove an unseen AirPod from her left ear. “I’m deaf in this one,” she explains, and he starts to melt, realizing she didn’t hear a damn thing he said, but then she throws him an unexpected lifeline: “Do you want to start again?”

This is the delightful opening scene of The Drama, a bewitching and provocative movie that initially unfolds as a storybook romantic comedy. Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are the perfect couple: smart, attractive, blessed with verbal and physical chemistry. Their courtship checks all of the boxes, in particular a magical first kiss that would be the envy of Jane Austen. It’s now the week of their wedding, and we learn the details of their fairy-tale engagement as Charlie runs a draft of his speech past his best man, Mike (Mamoudou Athie), who’s so moved he starts crying. Everything is so light and sweet and charming, you wonder if Kristoffer Borgli, the film’s writer and director, somehow got the title wrong. He didn’t. Read More

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Wake Up Dead Man review: Confessions of a Dangerous Kind

Jeremy BeckReviews
Daniel Craig and Josh O'Connor in Wake Up Dead Man

Benoit Blanc is a showman. Sure he’s a brilliant detective, but he doesn’t solve mysteries out of societal obligation or some pathological need to do justice. What animates him is the unveiling—the moment when he synthesizes all of the scattered clues and dangling threads into a cogent and satisfying portrait before a cluster of rapt onlookers. For him, the most important element of any crime isn’t the motive or the method. It’s the audience.

That Rian Johnson, the writer-director of three Blanc-centered pictures, shares his hero’s canny crowd-pleasing instincts has long been obvious. Whether making movies about high-school Bogarts or time-traveling assassins or intergalactic rebels, Johnson is a born entertainer, using his craft and his smarts to tell elegant, engaging stories whose crisp resolutions invariably inspire admiration and applause. Wake Up Dead Man is his third Blanc film, following Knives Out and Glass Onion, and it thus carries the inherent risk of diminishing returns—the danger that this now-franchise’s vibrant charms might calcify into shtick. Read More

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Thanksgiving Roundup: Zootopia 2, Frankenstein, Train Dreams, Rental Family, Sentimental Value

Jeremy BeckReviews
The fox in Zootopia 2; Oscar Isaac in Frankenstein; Joel Edgerton in Train Dreams; Brendan Fraser in Rental Family; Renate Reinsve in Sentimental Value

In a perfect world, I’d use this website to write long-form reviews of every new movie I watched. Sadly, I lack both the time and the talent to do so. Yet my combination of OCD and narcissism compels me to always register my opinions in some fashion—typically via Letterboxd, where I can scribble down two-paragraph capsules that convey my overarching thoughts without adhering to the formal style and detail of a proper review. (For example, I never found the time to review Hamnet, but my spoiler-heavy Letterboxd blurb digs into that film’s majestic ending.) I try not to shill for corporations, but whether you’re the dorkiest of cinephiles or just a casual viewer, it’s a free and useful app, and—what was I saying about narcissism again?—if you’re ever searching for my thoughts on a movie that I didn’t review here, you can likely find them there.

This week, though, rather than choosing a single title to highlight, we’re going rapid-fire through some recent releases—a blend of audience-pleasing blockbusters, independent fare, and streamers that Netflix refused to let you see in a theater. Let’s get to it. 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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Weapons: From Soup to Guts

Jeremy BeckReviews
Julia Garner in Weapons

The title is plural for a reason. The characters in Weapons brandish any number of destructive instruments—not just guns and knives, but also needles, scissors, forks, teeth, locks of hair, and more. You’ll never look at your vegetable peeler the same way again.

Yet the most potent tool on display here—maybe second-most, given how the use of that peeler has seared itself in my brain—is writer-director Zach Cregger’s craftsmanship. Weapons is a bold and bloody movie, full of ghoulish turns and ghastly violence. It is also a work of consummate skill—a deftly constructed tapestry that weaves imagination, precision, and patience. It’s a beautiful nightmare. Read More

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