It’s great!
An absolute celebration of women, mothers, sisters and friendship — all wrapped in kinetic, vibrant style.
The animation is fun, the story’s emotionally resonant, the soundtrack is a brilliantly pastiche of early 00’s boy bands by Finneas/Billie Eilish.
Bursting with personality, passion, and charm. Well worth your time.
Pixar have been killing it lately. Highly recommended.
Classic Wes Anderson, in the sense that it’s unlike his other films while still being quintessentially a Wes Anderson film.
More a series of loosely connected stories hung on a bookend framing device than a singular narrative. Each section is portrayed with Anderson’s distinctive flair, immaculate set design, quirky characters and deadpan delivery.
The cast is perhaps the most stacked of any of his (which is really saying something), and each of the vignettes comes packaged in black and white with only occasional shots of vibrant colour for impact. Likely as close as he’ll come to doing a full feature in black and white, his shot composition is nonetheless striking even drained of colour.
The set design and staging execution is fantastic, especially in the repeated motif of tracking shots that move from scene to scene, with actors holding pose as though in a still life painting.
Offbeat and weird. If you like Wes Anderson, you won’t be disappointed. If you can’t stand his style or the way he shapes performances, this isn’t likely to change your mind.
Still, very much recommended.
James Gunn has an inimitable talent for elevating rejects and burnouts into some of the most compelling, complex characters in modern pulp fiction.
Even indicental characters get more development than half the leads of modern blockbusters, in a mix of deep pathos and hilarious irreverence.
Peacemaker is no different — an anti-hero at his heart, John Cena brings a gravitas to this sad asshole that makes him much more fun than your standard comic fare.
Ultra-violent, frequently disturbing, and leaning into Gunn’s penchant for visceral body horror spliced with dark humour, it’s a wild ride and a tonne of fun.
If you liked the recent (and also excellent) The Suicide Squad, you’ll like this.
Recommended.
Social satire at luxury resort in Hawaii, where we know that by the end of the week one of the cast will be dead.
You’ve got bratty rich, workaholic rich, insecure rich, newly married rich, naive rich… and all the staff stuck keeping their vacations as pleasant as possible.
Naturally, that goes off the rails.
There’s enough red herrings and misdirects to keep you on your toes working out who the cadaver will be right til the very end, and the cast all put in solidly charismatic and likeable performances.
Gorgeously shot, regularly hilarious and doesn’t overstay its welcome. Oh, and the soundtrack is great.
Recommended.
Solid creature feature with some excellent practical effects and a unique, intriguing premise, based on this great short story:
A few moments of weird and convenient movie logic keep it back from greatness, but it’s otherwise very well executed and the creature design is awesome.
Well worth a watch if monster movies are your jam.
It’s fine?
Weirdly drops its title character entirely in the back half to become The Mandalorian s2.5, and then pulls back to the main plotline in the finale.
Star Wars is kind of its own worst enemy — the best parts of it are the things that aren’t really connected to the original trilogy, yet it constantly finds itself afraid to stand on its own without somehow tying back into the same handful of characters.
TBoBF unfortunately succumbs to these bad instincts, going for recogniseable and familiar places, tropes and characters instead of really doing something all its own.
It’s a mixed bag of great and terrible design choices, excellent VFX and horribly shot/staged action.
Finishes up not really doing much more than setting up the next Mando season, which is itself straying away from the self-contained vignette style that made it so appealing.
Maybe Obi Wan will be better, but I don’t have high hopes.
Watch it or don’t.
Solid fantasy/action, benefitting from a more coherend (read: linear) arrangement of timelines than the first season.
Interesting spins on all sorts of legendary monsters give it a distinct and grounded flavour of high fantasy.
Cavill proves again he’s the perfect casting, and the love he has for the role oozes off the screen.
Nice to revisit painting the charater too, since the illustration I did for the first season kicked off the habit of adding them to reviews.
If you enjoyed the first season, you’ll enjoy this one. If you weren’t totally sold but thought it had potential, this season might change your mind.
Recommended.
Post-apocalyptic fiction with a theatrical slant.
Switches back and forth between the first hundred days of a world-ending flu virus, and twenty years after the fact—following a troupe of actors circling the Great Lakes of Northern America.
For all its waxing lyrical about the power of performance and the pretensions of art, it ultimately places its value on human relationships and the ties that bind us.
Tied together with a series of Shakespearean performances, some people will likely find it too high-minded and slow. But for those willing to stick it out there’s a unique, self-contained story about stories here.
More, it’s refreshing for once to see a civilizational collapse story about the slow, protracted death of the modern world. Among post-pandemic media, it’s distinct for not retreading the same beats you’ve seen a thousand times.
Recommended.
Kind of pointless?
Great cast, and a director I usually love, but this didn’t do anything for me.
Seems like it’s aiming to be a throwback to old-school classic zombie tropes, but doesn’t bring anything new or interesting to the table. Doesn’t even strike a compelling tone, or wring distinct performances out of anyone.
Plot just sort of meanders from one scene to the next, there’s no apparent stakes, and everything is playing so straight and flat that it almost seems like it’s supposed to be satire?
Impossible to tell what it’s trying to say, in that case.
Dull. Skip it.
There’s been a boon of films lately that feel like they would have been better served as a limited series. The Silent Sea is the opposite.
A pretty serviceable sci-fi B movie that is unfortunately stretched too thin over an eight episode runtime. Doesn’t have enough material to stop the back half from retreading the same beats without adding any clever new twists or stakes.
Once its premise is established it doesn’t have anything more to show besides a pretty standard, drawn out story you’ve seen half a hundred times.
Well produced, just not that compelling. Decent, not great.
NERVE.SQUID.PILOT 