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Existential Dark Comedy ‘BEAU IS AFRAID’ is Unhinged, Overlong, Hysterical 

Reeling from the death of his iconoclast mother, an emotionally stunted, mentally ill man must traverse to her funeral in Ari Aster’s oft-indescribable dark comedy, Beau is Afraid. Aster frames the journey as if he were Homer himself, making for a melodramatic and depraved comedy of errors turned familial nightmare, stuffed to the brink of bursting with pure orchestrated chaos. Shocking, subversive, and very often hilariously funny, the genre-defying A24 feature stars Joaquin Phoenix as the titular Beau, a man for whom the pressures of the world are quite overwhelming. The film plays like What About Bob as remade by the director of Hereditary, but as an Oedipal fever dream. It’s a lot thematically. It’s a lot structurally. It’s a lot from a performance-perspective. It’s just a lot of movie. And most of it is pretty brilliant. Read More

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Out in Theaters: IRRATIONAL MAN

To “get into character,” many actors have taken it upon themselves to devastate their money-making temples. History credits Robert De Niro with starting the trend; his packing on pounds for Raging Bull set a record, as well as the stage for silver screen physical transformations. Today, Christian Bale is a particularly looney example of someone willing to batter himself with physically implausible weight-gain and loss but, to his credit, it informs his performance in oft tremendous ways. Read More