Grade: B minus

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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Streaming Roundup: Hillbilly Elegy, Happiest Season, Run

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Sarah Paulson in "Run"; Kristen Stewart in "Happiest Season"; Amy Adams in "Hillbilly Elegy"

To paraphrase a seven-time Oscar nominee: There are bad terminators—like, say, the COVID-19 pandemic—and there are good terminators—like the streaming services that keep pumping out new movies. Let’s focus on the good, shall we? Here’s a quick look at three recent releases:

Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix). Early in Hillbilly Elegy, Ron Howard’s diverting and facile adaptation of J.D. Vance’s memoir, a promising student at Yale Law attends a soirée, hoping to impress firm recruiters. He’s a smart and sympathetic kid, but he’s quickly overwhelmed by the trappings of luxury—calling his girlfriend in a panic, he asks, “Why are there so many fucking forks?”—and his charm offensive stalls. Then someone refers to West Virginians as rednecks, he bristles in response, and suddenly an evening of schmoozing has disintegrated into a sullen and awkward standoff between rich and poor. Read More

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Streaming Roundup: Borat 2, His House, On the Rocks, Rebecca, and The Witches

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Sope Dirisu in "His House"; Maria Bakalova in "Borat 2"; Anne Hathaway in "The Witches"; Lily James in "Rebecca"; and Bill Murray in "On the Rocks"

Not long ago, the United States was rocked by a seismic event—one that historians will be grappling with for generations, and one that threatens to further divide an already polarized nation. I’m talking, of course, about the new Sofia Coppola movie.

OK, OK, settle down. The 2020 presidential election may be unprecedented in a variety of ways—voter turnout, disinformation campaigns, whispered implications of an outright coup—but even it couldn’t derail the movies, which keep getting made and released. We here at the Manifesto have been a bit busy of late obsessively tracking every electoral development doing important confidential work, so let’s catch up with some capsule looks at five recent streaming titles. Read More

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I’m Thinking of Ending Things: Meeting the Parents, Leaving Logic Behind

Jeremy BeckReviews
Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley in Charlie Kaufman's "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"

An extended, discursive, baffling game of Choose Your Own Metaphor, Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a weighty treatise on the universal fear of loneliness. At least, I think it is. Maybe it’s a sad commentary on the inexorability of aging? I dunno. In one scene, the characters discuss the board game Trivial Pursuit, so perhaps it’s a valentine to one of that amusement’s classic categories, Arts & Literature; certainly it’s an erudite picture, given how frequently it name-checks writers like Tolstoy, Wilde, and Emerson.

Whatever his faults, Kaufman doesn’t make movies like anyone else. He also doesn’t seem to make movies that can be understood by anyone else. He’s blessed with such a fertile imagination, it’s almost like his films are acts of intellectual upheaval, as though he’s been demonically compelled to yank his ideas out of his brain and plunk them onto the screen. The human mind is a fragile and chaotic place, and so are his artistic creations, which are governed by passion and inspiration rather than order and logic. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is far from his best movie—that title belongs to either Being John Malkovich or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, both of which he wrote but didn’t direct—but it’s arguably his most purely Kaufmanesque (though Synecdoche, New York might like a word). It waltzes along to its own syncopated rhythms, its synapses firing randomly, unable to or just uninterested in packaging its multitude of thoughts into a coherent story. Read More

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The Old Guard, Palm Springs, and Immortality on Screen

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Charlize Theron in "The Old Guard"; Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg in "Palm Springs"

Who wants movie characters to live forever? Plenty of people, apparently, given how many films are made about the undead or the undying. This makes some sense: Reality has yet to discover the fountain of youth, so art has stepped in to fill the gap, allowing us to grapple with the dream (or the nightmare) of life everlasting. But it also presents a unique challenge for storytellers. No picture can fully encapsulate a person’s entire life (not even Boyhood), yet we still expect a certain degree of finality when the credits start to roll. How can movies deliver that necessary closure when their characters’ lives are open-ended?

Last month, two very different films wrestled with this quandary, in decidedly different ways. In The Old Guard, Charlize Theron plays the leader of a band of immortal mercenaries struggling to find meaning in a life of perpetual assassination. And in Palm Springs, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti star as wedding guests locked in an infinite time loop, doomed to relive the same sunny Southern California day over and over. Both movies attempt to interrogate their characters’ predicaments, but only one does so with any real freshness. The Old Guard may be a sturdy and accomplished piece of action filmmaking, but it never truly distinguishes itself from the pictures it’s imitating. Palm Springs, on the other hand, improbably manages to evade the giant shadow cast by Groundhog Day, transforming into a romantic comedy that tickles your brain as well as your funny bone. Read More

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