I'm watching it thinking "any one of these [storylines] is a movie, but all of these things together is a mess."

| Mar 28, 2025

[Jonathan Majors] is great in it, but it is very tough to watch.

| Mar 28, 2025

There is no character here, but a walking time bomb that only acts when compelled to by outside influences.

| Original Score: D | Mar 24, 2025

Magazine Dreams is a something’s-wrong-with-men movie that doesn’t actually want to delve deeply into the pain its protagonist is experiencing, because it finds the external manifestations of his alienation more compelling.

| Mar 24, 2025

While the story itself bottoms out long before the film’s finale arrives, there is no question that Majors delivers a magnificently unsettling performance.

| Mar 21, 2025

Jonathan Majors plays a volatile bodybuilder named Killian Maddox, presumably because the writer and director Elijah Bynum thought calling the character Murderguy Sulkface was too on the nose.

| Mar 21, 2025

The homages and borrowings—not just from Scorsese’s oeuvre but other widely-seen films, including a brazen lift from “Boogie Nights”—constrict the movie and prevent it from breathing on its own.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 21, 2025

A powerful inquiry into the contradictions of masculinity, the lure of fame, and the impact race has on both. Like its unhappy hero, it is humble and overwhelming at the same time.

| Mar 20, 2025

Bynum piles on the misery in increasingly bogus ways.

| Mar 20, 2025

While Magazine Dreams is an interesting character study, one many actors would love to play for all its dramatic opportunities, it also seems crafted entirely to provoke and shock -- especially in the almost unbearably bleak final hour.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 20, 2025

This is disturbing, unnerving work in an often electrifying film, and Majors leaves everything on the table.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 20, 2025

“Magazine Dreams” is a runaway train of a character study; it’s hard to watch as this emotionally stunted man goes way off the rails and could take others down with him.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 20, 2025

“Magazine Dreams” is a portrait of a man who is running out of time to get it together lest he fall utterly and tragically apart.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 19, 2025

Magazine Dreams is visceral and intense but ultimately feels like only a half-realized portrait.

| Feb 11, 2023

...Bynum, as a writer, runs out of ideas. That’s why this piece of desensitizing, ultra-violent mayhem fades like a nightmare...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Feb 1, 2023

Jonathan Majors is a revelation.

| Feb 1, 2023

Even as the pacing falters, Majors is impossible to look away from: a man who desperately needs the world to see him — and if they refuse, to feel his pain.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 31, 2023

Jonathan Majors is spectacular as an aspiring bodybuilder in this uber-intense drama.

| Jan 31, 2023

Magazine Dreams melds the alluring and the horrific in an unsettling mixture suited to its account of the peril of pursuing physical perfection.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 30, 2023

[Jonathan] Majors... a twitching muscle of ferocity here, alternately pitiable and terrifying as he fumbles at finding love and acceptance in a world that regards him as a freak.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 28, 2023