आलोचक समीक्षाएं

Overall, Cummings and McCabe’s film touches a raw nerve with sharp, funny, awkwardly prickly provocation.

The movie, at its best, holds you in its grip.

Whilst occasionally breathless to the point of exhausting, there’s nothing second-rate about The Beta Test, a sharp satire on the film industry that really packs a punch.

Against a lean genre construction, Cummings sputters and apologizes and screams at people and breaks things—vaping constantly—less a force of nature than a flesh-and-blood body half-failing to contain the whiny forces of nature within. His performance is a miracle of control and timing, focused by how little control Jordan has in his life, how poorly timed everything seems to be.

Underneath the film’s seeming casualness is an astute portrait of alcoholism, as well as a knowing glimpse of how micro tensions affect macro power plays, from pissing contests between men to sexual violations.

Cummings and McCabe zero in on an angle they do understand—the death scream of the untouchably powerful man—and can make fun of with precision.

Cummings works the same muscles that attracted attention in the festival darling Thunder Road and its follow-up, The Wolf of Snow Hollow: Exploring the varieties of volatile awkwardness and desperation, he plays a well-known type (the showbiz ladder-climber who’s nothing but a smile) while making the character unlike any we’ve seen.

The Beta Test is a wired, wound-up and instantly-hip/instantly-dated Hollywood riff on relationships — romantic, business and otherwise.

Part delicious satire of Hollywood culture and part frustratingly muddled thriller. But the good bits are sufficiently impressive it wouldn’t be fair to hold its flaws against it too much. We mustn’t be greedy for perfection.

If one can get past the exaggerated nature of The Beta Test, there’s much to glean from its mixture of laughs and critiques. Come for the mystery, stay for the study of society by two white guys playing absolute assholes. Even if that study reaches farther than it can grasp.