Grade: B

Air: Shoe de Grâce

Jeremy BeckReviews
Matthew Maher, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck in Air

It’s 1984, and Air, the new movie by Ben Affleck, wants to make sure you know that. It opens with a blizzard of archival footage and pop-culture clips—the soundtrack quickly shifts from Dire Straits to Violent Femmes—transporting you to the halcyon era of the Ghostbusters, that Apple commercial, and Mr. T. Yet for Affleck, nostalgia is more than a fuzzy feeling; it’s a mode of filmmaking. He fancies himself a throwback—an old-school artisan in the vein of Howard Hawks—which is why his prior feature, the noir flick Live by Night, attempted to echo classic gangster melodramas to the point of embalmment. Air, about Nike’s quest to sign Michael Jordan to an endorsement deal (it was marketed with the subtitle “Courting a Legend”), is a less self-serious picture, and also a more enjoyable one. Watching it is a bit like watching a highlight package of an old sporting event you’ve heard about but never saw live: You can appreciate the talent and the craft on display, even though you already know which team wins at the buzzer.

Speaking of highlights, that introductory blitz isn’t the only time Affleck dips into montage. Though Air takes place exclusively during the year of “Sister Christian” and Beverly Hills Cop—Harold Faltermeyer’s famous synth theme for the latter appears on the soundtrack, even though it wasn’t released until months after the shoe signing (one of many factual liberties cheerfully taken by Alex Convery’s script)—at one point it suddenly travels through time, revealing grainy footage of classic Jordan moments (the hanging game-winner against Cleveland, the lefty layup versus the Lakers, etc.). It’s an understandable impulse, because despite being branded as a sports movie, Air features vanishingly little action or athleticism. In fact, its hero is a paunchy middle-aged white guy who can’t even manage one lap around the track. Read More

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Quick Hits: Scream VI, Cocaine Bear, Creed III, Magic Mike 3, and Emily

Jeremy BeckReviews
Michael B. Jordan in Creed III; Keri Russell in Cocaine Bear; Jenna Ortega and Melissa Barrera in Scream VI; Emma Mackey in Emily; Salma Hayek Pinault and Channing Tatum in Magic Mike's Last Dance

Between the Oscars, our TV rankings, and our list of the year’s best movies, it’s been a busy past month here at MovieManifesto. As a result, while I was able to write a few proper reviews of new movies (the new Shyamalan, the new Ant-Man), I neglected to make time for a bunch of additional 2023 films. That changes now! Well, sort of. Unlike Lydia Tár, I can’t stop time, so I’m unable to carve out enough space for full reviews. Instead, we’re firing off some quick-and-dirty capsules, checking in on five recent releases. Let’s get to it.

Scream VI. The clever double-act of the Scream pictures—the platonic ideal established by the first installment and never quite equaled since—is that they’re movies about scary movies and are also, well, scary movies. In the prior episode, Scream (which should have been called Scream 5, but never mind), new directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett satisfied one and only one side of that equation, cleverly skewering the toxic fandom that attends modern discourse but failing to serve up memorable carnage. Now returning with Scream VI, the pair have essentially flipped the script. The meta ideas bandied about here are a little less trenchant, but the nuts-and-bolts execution—and executions—is first-class. Read More

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M3gan: Hell Comes to the Dollhouse

Jeremy BeckReviews
Amie Donald as M3gan

They say the eyes are windows to the soul, which is why the most expressive anthropomorphic characters in cinema—E.T., Gollum, Wall-E—all sport wide, soulful peepers. But windows work both ways. In M3gan, the sly and spry new horror-comedy directed by Gerard Johnstone, the titular android gazes out into the world through a pair of delicate grey-blue irises, less concerned with comprehending her internal essence than with mapping her external environment. Her vision is rendered like that of an eerily empathetic cyborg—when she sees a person, she instantly analyzes their “Emotional State” and assigns quantitative ratings to various feelings (trust, joy, fear), like a talent scout grading an athlete—but she’s doing more than just gauging behavioral patterns. She is constantly downloading new data and feeding it into her processor, which means she’s learning, judging, evolving.

How, you might wonder, will such a creature ultimately regard our society? Then again, you might not wonder that, because if you’ve seen any previous entry in the child-doll subgenre of horror, you already know. Yet while M3gan’s predictable plotting rarely deviates from its predecessors’ silly and shrieky playbook, it is nevertheless a thoroughly enjoyable diversion—smart, funny, and even a mite provocative. Read More

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The Menu: Till Chef Do Us Part

Jeremy BeckReviews
Anya Taylor-Joy in The Menu

Nobody technically eats the rich in The Menu, even if a few splinters of bone marrow make their way onto some dinner plates. But the movie, which was directed by Mark Mylod from a script by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, plainly has an appetite for first-world destruction. This makes it a familiar dish—a sizzling satire of upper-crust vulgarity whose recent forebears include the hide-and-seek thriller Ready or Not and the yachting misadventure Triangle of Sadness. Yet while The Menu may be rooted in a recognizable recipe, it nevertheless mixes its customary ingredients with shrewdness and flair. It doesn’t introduce new flavors to your palette, but it’s plenty tasty all the same.

If these metaphors seem indecent, just wait until you meet the movie’s characters. The opening act introduces a coterie of pompous oafs, all of whom have paid an outrageous fee to travel by boat and dine at an exclusive island restaurant called Hawthorn. They include a pretentious food critic (Janet McTeer) and her sycophantic editor (Paul Adelstein), a has-been actor (John Leguizamo) and his exasperated assistant (Aimee Carrero), three insufferable finance bros (Rob Yang, Mark St. Cyr, and Arturo Castro) who surely would’ve founded FTX if only they’d had the chance, an elderly couple (Reed Birney and Judith Light) who are among the establishment’s most loyal regulars, and a foodie named Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) who slurps oysters with the zeal of a child opening Christmas gifts. Fatted lambs who just may be buying a ticket for their own proverbial slaughter, these snobs carry themselves with an air of entitlement that instantly make them unsympathetic—creatures of obscene privilege and even greater self-regard. Read More

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Violent Femmes: The Woman King, Pearl, and God’s Country

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Viola Davis in The Woman King, Mia Goth in Pearl, and Thandiwe Newton in God's Country

Women are fighting back. Well, at least at the movies. Women aren’t a monolith on screen or off, but this past weekend’s new theatrical releases were striking for how they centralized female characters, and how they placed them in varying postures of defiance. At the cinema, the fairer sex is through with unfairness.

The most ambitious of these movies, The Woman King, is also the most conventional. Directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood from a script by Dana Stevens, it’s an old-fashioned historical epic, in the vein of Spartacus or (for a more recent vintage) Gladiator. And when it comes to women fighting, its depiction is quite literal: It tells the story of the Agojie, a troop of female soldiers for the Dahomey kingdom in nineteenth-century West Africa. Led by the fearsome Nanisca (a reliable Viola Davis), they wage war against a rival empire—not out of territorial bloodlust, but out of desire to prevent their citizens from being conscripted into slavery. Read More

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