Even if you’re not the superstitious type, Eggers is able to make you believe that a violent encounter between Winslow and a one-eyed seagull is like Winslow signing his death warrant.
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So you take a comedy about the polarization of politics and the spread of nationalist rhetoric and set it in the context of the Second World War. These are issues that were relevant then and are still so today, but by viewing it in a different context, it gives us some breathing room.
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Messy psychology aside, Joker behaves in the Batman film universe very much like The Killing Joke does for comics: it doesn’t need to connect to any other stories or characters, and captures just one possible timeline for how the Joker came to be, much like the several different threads that Heath Ledger’s Joker references in The Dark Knight.
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For the second straight year, following Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, a Korean film is going to dominate top-10 lists, including yours truly. It is the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and just the second to win by unanimous vote since Blue Is the Warmest Colour. It would be remiss to say that Korean cinema is on the rise -- if anything, it has already arrived and Parasite is just the new high water mark.
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The main criticism – like all the other Malick films -- is its length. In the right mood A Hidden Life can be a truly enjoyable watch, but it’s about a half-hour to one hour too long to hold your attention span with such a thin narrative, though it will certainly be Malick’s most well-received since The Tree of Life.
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In a context where space travel is this much more attainable, the story of a hero astronaut pursuing his father, a rogue scientist, to the edge of human experience is entirely logical. As some of the dangers and technological hurdles inherent in deep space travel are removed, it opens the door to a deeply affecting narrative that weighs commitment to a mission against the responsibilities to a family.
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Bafflingly, the question posed by the film’s title doesn’t really come into force until halfway through. And various storytelling devices intended to tame the movie’s shaggy bits, like voiceover by the protagonist’s daughter and flashback exposition-dumps, are too inconsistently applied to keep anything in check.
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As the car magnate, Pace is the core attraction. After playing a similarly intimidating genius named Joe MacMillan on AMC’s retro tech-industry series Halt and Catch Fire, DeLorean feels like a natural choice for the actor.
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Here’s five reasons the movie rules and five reasons it sucked.
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Somewhere inside, the filmmaker believes that his beloved analog Hollywood could have been rescued by a man of action like Cliff. While we’re encouraged to get to know Robbie’s depiction of Tate and root for her, she’s more of an icon for the period of time that Tarantino so carefully recreates here, and preserves in other ventures like his New Beverly Cinema in the real-life L.A.
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The struggle is real; not only is she hounded by questions about her private life (“are you married yet?”), she also has to put on a brave face to keep the family secret because – as her own family members keep pointing out – she’s far too emotional to be able to hide anything. It’s a low-key shot at “western” values that place more emphasis on being open and free-speaking, compared to stoicism as the more widely-accepted ideal in most Asian cultures.
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It’s funny, though, that this would be the detail that the studio would censor in Jon Favreau’s film, because it’s symbolic of the problem in the release as a whole. Every painstakingly recreated scene feels like a crucial piece of it was sliced out to suit a modus operandi of making a version of The Lion King that might feasibly occur in the real Africa.
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So much of Tom Holland’s second solo venture as Spider-Man is tied to Iron Man and Avengers: Endgame that you half-expect another superhero to show up, and it’s oddly weird that no one does. The end result is another competent entry in the MCU, the final chapter in the universe’s Phase 3, but a film that doesn’t stand out on its own.
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The key ingredient of the original film is the relationship between J and K: one an over-confident, rule-eschewing newbie, the other a grizzled veteran. Even though the screenwriters try to fit Hemsworth and Thompson into a similar dynamic, their characters are paper-thin by comparison
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Despite some strong performances and two excellent action sequences, Dark Phoenix never really feel like it had a chance. It’s still rife with problems, but it doesn’t deserve to be forgotten.
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