Best thing you’ll see all 2025: Magazine Dreams

As Killian Maddox strolls out into the parking lot with his groceries, his mind squirms with the enormity of what-ifs and could-haves. If only he had… What might have happened if… It could have been that… But out of the turmoil, he comes to a decision and a halt, all at once. A car’s tires screech mildly, followed by the unmistakable car-on-car tump of a fender bender. 

Surely the sound effect is something Magazine Dreams director Elijah Bynum added in post-production. The timing is just too perfect. It happens exactly as Killian makes his decision. The effect onscreen is almost invisible, but it’s there: Maddox’s resolve has all the force and nuance of a minor car accident.

“Killian Maddox” is one of those movie names that sounds like a movie name. It’s pat and almost ridiculous. Like “Travis Bickle”. This is no coincidence since Magazine Dreams, which is about a body builder named Killian Maddox, is an almost beat-for-beat nod to Taxi Driver. Both movies are about modern alienation as suffered and ultimately misunderstood by simple — indeed simplistic — men. We’re never told just what’s wrong with Maddox or Bickle, but we know they’ve got hangups at best, and probably diagnosable pathologies at worst. Both men slip through the cracks of their social networks, including friends and coworkers. Both men fumble for love and power, firepower even, to end up somewhere on the far side of redemption. 

Jonathan Majors shoulders the burden of his performance magnificently, with a guileless innocence, yet cunning determination. Maddox’s outbursts of rage are ridiculous tantrums, his pronouncements inane, his gaze vacant, with eyes alternately dead or childishly wide. It’s nearly heartbreaking the way he fatuously apes YouTube patter (“Hey guys, it’s Kilian Maddox”), the way he sheepishly apologizes to a white lady when he sees he’s made her uncomfortable, the way he assents to his grandfather’s senile platitudes. But it’s all of a piece with his willingness to terrorize the helpless, to mutter about “splitting your skull open and drinking your brains like soup”, to push mild confrontations into wrathful extremes, to rampage and destroy and even murder. Whatever was going on with Majors’ personal life, spilling into headlines and the justice system, it’s also here onscreen, in one of those rare performances in which an actor completely vacates or perhaps reveals himself. This is acting at its most raw and Magazine Dreams is crafted around it.

At a certain point, we find out why Maddox lives with his grandfather. It’s not exposition or anything, just a couple of simple statements, mentioned almost in passing. But it’s a dramatic shift in the movie for how enormously sympathetic it makes him. God’s not the only one who loves orphans! But Bynum refuses to give us this moment. Things again shift immediately, irrevocably, indeed viciously.

Part of what’s remarkable about Magazine Dreams is how Bynum suffuses it with childlike bewilderment. It plays out with the heightened reality of a P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, but along a different trajectory. Magazine Dreams gets mean and frightening. It spares no one. And although it’s not terribly interested in race, neither does it deny the role it plays here. Imagine if Travis Bickle weren’t just unhinged, but also a grotesquely jacked-up black man.

But just as Bynum hasn’t made a movie about race, neither has he made a movie about body-building. This is no mere fetishization of muscle. Instead, the story uses a body-builder to express power (Rose Glass did something similar in Love Lies Bleeding). Converting mass into muscle is a discipline and Bynum doesn’t seem to have any special admiration for it, and he certainly doesn’t romanticize it. We see Maddox’s almost incessant eating, as rote and joyless as shovelling coal into a furnace. Steroids help, of course, as does cocaine, and there’s no whitewashing here. But it’s mostly dull weight lifting. Getting up early and sweating and grunting and grimacing and pushing through repetitions, channeling angry determination in on itself, involuted and intimate. How often do these men lock eyes with themselves in the mirror as they compel their bodies to strain and struggle, as they subsume pain, transforming anger into muscle mass? It’s not just the mortification of the flesh, but the transubstantiation of rage. Travis Bickle could learn a thing or two.

(Magazine Dreams was my favorite movie of 2025. If you’re a Patreon subscriber, you can see my top ten movies of 2025 here. Which is actually my top fifteen since I couldn’t resist listing five runners up.)