‘Beau is Afraid’ Review: Mommy Issues

Is all well over at Apple TV+‘s “Severance“? Not according to Puck News, who report that Season 2 of the hit show has run into some roadblocks, including scrapped scripts and showrunner who hate each other. That’s not exactly what Apple wants from a show that nabbed 5 Emmy noms in its first season.

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J. Kim Murphy Armen Nahapetian wants the world to know: “I’m not AI.” The 16-year-old actor is gaining notice, but not only for playing a teenage version of Joaquin Phoenix’s titular worrywart in Ari Aster’s epic dark comedy “Beau Is Afraid.” He added the disclaimer to his Instagram bio because people keep thinking he’s not a real person, but instead a digitally de-aged Phoenix. “I went to the movie theater a few weeks ago, and one of the employees was pointing at the poster saying, ‘Oh, my God, you’re real!’” Nahapetian recalls, speaking with Variety. The main poster art features four versions of Beau, all posing in shimmering gray satin pajamas. There’s a Phoenix wearing a farmer’s hat, a Phoenix sporting male pattern baldness, a Phoenix buried under wrinkles — and a smooth-faced Nahapetian. The theater employee’s confusion may seem absurd, but the reasoning makes sense: Here are three Joaquin Phoenixes; by inference, the fourth must be one too, right?

We’ve known, for a while now, that Martin Scorsese is a big fan of Ari Aster. Several years ago, the legendary director raved about Aster’s second film, “Midsommar.” Now, as Aster receives some of the harshest critiques of his relatively young career, thanks to his third film, “Beau is Afraid,” Scorsese is there to back him up, yet again.  READ MORE: ‘Beau Is Afraid’ Review: Joaquin Phoenix Guides Ari Aster’s Hilarious, Horrific, Despairing Nightmare, Hellish Mom Comedy During a Q&A alongside Ari Aster (via A24), Martin Scorsese talks about the young filmmaker’s career, up to this point, and how he believes Aster is one of the best directors working today.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor SPOILER ALERT: This story discusses major plot points for “Beau Is Afraid,” currently playing in theaters. In the final act of Ari Aster’s three-hour anxiety trip “Beau Is Afraid,” Beau, played by Joaquin Phoenix, arrives very late for his mother’s funeral and finds himself reunited with his childhood love Elaine, played by Parker Posey. It’s an awkward reunion for the two, but the two wind up in bed together. Just as they are about to have sex, Elaine pulls out her phone and the intro to Mariah Carey’s 1995 hit “Always Be My Baby” begins to play. Speaking over Zoom, the film’s music supervisor Jemma Burns said Aster told her during their first meeting, “’If there’s one thing you do for me on this film, I have to have this Mariah Carey song.’”

Ari Aster’s Beau Is Afraid did decent business in its second week, expanding from four screens to well over 900 for a gross of $2.7+ million and a cume of $3.14 million. The A24 film starring Joaquin Phoenix has a $2.8k per screen average and no. 9 spot. It’s a weekend with a wide range of specialty films in a market that’s improving by some measures — some more product, some stronger openings — but still hard to read amid the blockbusters.

Joaquin Phoenix is jokingly making a public service announcement to those people buying tickets to go watch him in his latest film Beau is Afraid.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In movies, the word “bomb” has always meant two things, generally at the same time. The first and most important definition of bomb is that a movie has lost a disastrous amount of money. Movies, in general, can’t afford to do that — they’re too expensive to produce. Bombs happen, but as a business model they’re not sustainable. A movie that bombs commercially has never been something to write off as a trivial matter. The second definition of bomb, which is linked to the first (though not automatically), is that a film is spectacularly bad. It is, of course, not axiomatic that a movie that bombs commercially has failed as a work of art. There are movies we think of as classics that crashed and burned at the box office — like “It’s a Wonderful Life” or “Blade Runner” or “Intolerance” or “The Long Goodbye.” It’s become almost trendy to rescue certain films from the scandal of their box-office infamy. The mother of all those rescue jobs is “Heaven’s Gate,” the grandly picturesque 219-minute Marxist art Western that effectively put a stake through the heart of the New Hollywood, helping to take United Artists down along with it — though it’s a film that numerous observers have re-evaluated as a misunderstood masterpiece. I can’t agree on that one; to me, “Heaven’s Gate” remains a visually stately but indulgent wallow. Nevertheless, it’s always worth standing up for the principle that a box-office fiasco isn’t necessarily a bad film.

After posting giant per screen numbers at four theaters last weekend, A24’s Beau Is Afraid  jumps to 926 for the distributor’s third outing with Ari Aster. It’s a very different film from his horror favorites Hereditary and Midsommar but one the distributor hopes will cement the director’s place as a modern auteur.

Joaquin Phoenix has said that he once “just started screaming” on the set of Beau Is Afraid to prepare for a specific scene.Directed by Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar), the black comedy horror film follows mild-mannered but paranoid-ridden Beau Wasserman (Phoenix) who embarks on a surreal odyssey to return home to his mother.Speaking during an A24 podcast interview (via Variety), Phoenix said he was left “spinning in a panic” because Aster wanted to shoot an intense scene where Beau takes a bath in a single take. In order to feel “free” while filming the scene, the actor resorted to screaming to “fully humiliate” himself beforehand.“I’m a little reluctant to say this, because it sounds so fucking stupid and just like actor shit, but I remember… what I did before was I did the scene, but I wasn’t really volatile,” Phoenix recalled.“I was still nervous. I was still… In some way, I was controlling a little bit.

Ari Aster has made a career out of the horror and twisted comedy of anxiety. Regardless of where each individual audience member is in their life or the experiences they’ve had, this is what makes films such as “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” universally loved and relatable.

A.D. Amorosi The only thing America loves more than watching work imported from Great Britain is when that same British work goes wildly off the rails. What is “The Great British Bake Off” without toppling cakes, or romantic Ed Sheeran without goofy relationship misadventures, or “Dr. Who” without a confoundedly sputtering David Tennant? Targeting the dippier side of American Anglophilia are Henry Lewis, Jonathan Sayer and Henry Shields — the co-founders and playwrights of Great Britain’s Mischief Theatre Company — and their imaginary Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society (Cornley U for the Yanks). Theirs is a team manically adept at creating adroitly bumbling, screwball comic twists on Anglo theatrical tropes. First they lampooned the Agatha Christie whodunnit with “The Play That Goes Wrong,” which was mounted in London in 2012 and has played Broadway and beyond.

Zack Sharf Digital News Director Joaquin Phoenix “just started screaming” on the set of Ari Aster’s “Beau Is Afraid” before filming one of the nightmare comedy’s most intense scenes. During a podcast interview for A24, the Oscar winner and Aster remembered filming a scene in which the eponymous Beau is taking a bath. Aster wanted to shoot the scene in one take, which got Phoenix “spinning in a panic.” The actor said it was important he felt “free” enough while filming so the scene could “reveal itself however it does when it does.” “I’m a little reluctant to say this, because it sounds so fucking stupid and just like actor shit, but I remember… what I did before was I did the scene, but I wasn’t really volatile. I was still nervous. I was still… In some way, I was controlling a little bit. I was controlling what people thought about me. I didn’t want to let people down. And it was like new crew were early on set. And I remember just realizing I had to do something that was fucking stupid, and I just so didn’t want to do it, but I just knew.”

SPOILER ALERT: The following story contains details from the first few episodes of Barry Season 4.

Beau Is Afraid posted the top per-screen average of the year so far and the best limited opening for distributor A24 since Uncut Gems, grossing an estimated $320,396 at four locations in New York and LA for a hefty per-screen average of $80K+ in sold-out shows on both coasts. (Uncut Gems with Adam Sandler had a $105k PSA on five screens in 2019 — a limited-opening record at the time.)

Rebecca Rubin Film and Media Reporter Ari Aster’s latest anxiety-inducer “Beau Is Afraid” is taking the indie box office by storm. The A24 film, which stars Joaquin Phoenix as an apprehensive man who endures a lot over the course of three hours, grossed $320,396 on four screens in New York and Los Angeles. Those ticket sales translate to a sizable $80,099 per location, the biggest screen average of the year. It’s also the second-best per-screen-average for A24 after Adam Sandler’s “Uncut Gems.” Now, “Beau Is Afraid” needs to sustain its momentum as it expands nationwide next weekend. That’s been a struggle for plenty of indies in post-pandemic times, although A24 has managed to propel films like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “The Whale” to box office success. But “Tár,” “Triangle of Sadness” and other acclaimed arthouse films weren’t as successful in parlaying their huge screen averages — which is the key metric for platform releases — to robust theatrical runs. Those films fizzled after struggling to connect with mainstream audiences.

EXCLUSIVE: Beau Bridges (Dreamin’ Wild), Jessica Parker Kennedy (The Flash), Bruce Davison (1923) and Miguel Gabriel (Puss in Boots: The Last Wish) will topline Camera, an indie drama from award-winning filmmaker Jay Silverman (Saving Paradise), which has wrapped production.

The new Ari Aster film Beau Is Afraid, starring Joaquin Phoenix, is now playing in IMAX theaters in NY and LA ahead of a wide release next weekend.

Filmmaker Ari Aster has oedipal issues. The artist has deeply complicated and unresolved issues with his mother that go back to his earliest movies (to this day, Aster won’t really talk about his mother in the press and has hinted at a troubled, rocky relationship).

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Elsa Zylberstein (“Simone: Woman of the Century”) will star as the French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir in a feature film that will be penned by Oscar-winning writer Christopher Hampton and directed by Anne Fontaine. Zylberstein’s Sonia Films will produce the film with Philippe Carcassone’s banner Cine@ and Master Movie, the production vehicle of Marco and Lola Pacchioni. Rather than a biopic, the movie will revolve around the passionate transatlantic romance between de Beauvoir and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Nelson Algren. Zylberstein has scooped the adaptation rights of de Beauvoir’s “Lettres à Nelson Algren” from Gallimard. Through those letters, the film will chart the pair’s affair, which spanned nearly two decades from 1947, in the aftermath of World War II, to 1964. Two-thirds of the movie will take place in Chicago, and the reminder will unfold in Paris.