Grade: C plus

Free Guy: Leveling Up, One Cross-Promotion at a Time

Jeremy BeckReviews
Ryan Reynolds in "Free Guy"

Once you acknowledge that it’s creatively bankrupt, Free Guy becomes a reasonably diverting time at the movies. It’s a work of benevolent fraud, like an identity thief who steals your credit card and then buys you some cool shit before jetting off to Cancun. It’s also a fascinating document for where it sits in today’s precarious blockbuster landscape: a big-budget original screenplay that nonetheless feels awkwardly bootstrapped to the superior pictures it’s imitating. It’s an original copy—an organic movie with a synthetic soul.

Free Guy was technically directed by the journeyman Shawn Levy (Night at the Museum, Real Steel), but its true authorship is corporate. It’s being distributed under the banner of “20th Century Studios”, which means it was initially developed at Fox before that company was acquired by Disney, the insatiable commercial behemoth that currently owns roughly 98% of the market share. The film’s first trailer, which premiered back during the Before Times of December 2019, winkingly ridiculed the Mouse House’s penchant for recycling old hits (“from the studio that brought you Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King… twice”), but Free Guy occupies a curious double-zone; even as it’s trumpeting its original bona fides at every turn, it’s continually leveraging its preexisting brand in the hope of launching yet another merchandise-friendly franchise. Read More

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Wonder Woman 1984, The Midnight Sky, and the Christmas of Flops

Jeremy BeckReviews
George Clooney in "The Midnight Sky"; Gal Gadot in "Wonder Woman 1984"

On Christmas Day 2019, I attended one of the most memorable double features of my life: Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, followed by the Safdie Brothers’ Uncut Gems. Forget the visual and verbal audacity of both pictures (not to mention their, er, tonal differences); what I remember most now is the sensation of sitting in a jam-packed auditorium. Neither of those films is conventionally crowd-pleasing, but I don’t think I’m manufacturing a memory when I recall the communal thrill that swept through the audience when Saoirse Ronan delivered an impassioned speech, or when Adam Sandler placed yet another dubious bet. What could better distill the holiday spirit—the anticipation, the laughter, the shared cheer—than watching a movie with total strangers?

Suffice it to say that Christmas Day 2020 unfolded a little differently. But even though the COVID-19 pandemic prevented me from spending my holidays at the movie theater, it didn’t prevent me from spending it watching movies. The clear highlight of the season was Pixar’s Soul, which I’ve already reviewed, but Christmas also brought us two other high-profile streaming releases: Wonder Woman 1984 (on HBO Max) and The Midnight Sky (on Netflix, and technically released on December 23). Both have received fair-to-middling reviews, though I’d argue that one is rather underrated. 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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Unpregnant, The Glorias, and Women Directing Women

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Julianne Moore in "The Glorias"; Haley Lu Richardson and Barbie Ferreira in "Unpregnant"

The COVID-19 pandemic has ruined lives, crippled economies, and paralyzed entire nations, but what has it meant for the movies? The received wisdom is that 2020 has been a lost year for cinema, and there’s a degree of truth to that; I’ve lost count of how many major studio releases have been delayed until 2021 or beyond, and many other films—which ordinarily would have had the opportunity to chase eyeballs on the big screen—were unceremoniously interred in the graveyard that is VOD. But while it’s understandable to lament the movies that this year has taken from us, it’s also important to acknowledge those that it’s given us. The dearth of blockbusters created a cinematic vacuum that was promptly and happily filled by scrappier, less conventional titles: quirky comedies, chilling horror flicks, tender romances, robust actioners. And many of these movies came from a demographic that Hollywood has long neglected: They were directed by women.

Perhaps this has nothing to do with COVID-19; maybe 2020 was already shaping up to be the Year of the Woman even before the coronavirus reached American shores. Regardless of causality, it’s oddly invigorating to survey the year’s best films and to see how many were helmed by women, and with such variety. Consider: the quiet agony of The Assistant and the boisterous fun of Birds of Prey. The contemporary sadness of Cuties and the classical enchantment of Emma. The male friendship of First Cow and the female solidarity of Never Rarely Sometimes Always. (I dissented on both The Old Guard and Shirley, but other critics would surely point to them as well.) Women have always been making good movies, but their collective voice seems to be growing louder now, telling stories of ever-greater urgency and vitality. Read More

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