The Duke (2022) - Movie Review

A little over a year ago, I found myself in the midst of quarantine brain and, in a desperate attempt to return things to what can charitably be called ‘normality’ as we know it around here, decided to pick out a random film that was showing at the time and just… get the hell out of the house for a bit. Said film was Blackbird, an ensemble film that, while I honestly haven’t thought much about it since publishing my initial review of it, I can at least look back on with some fondness for not totally wasting my time.

And here I am again, in need of getting myself out of a static rut I have found myself in of late, and once again deciding to essentially throw a dart at the Now Showing list as an excuse to get back to work and (more importantly) get back into a stable routine. And once again, I find myself looking at a film by Roger Michell, who also made Blackbird, and… well, let’s just say that my previous criticisms about not feeling as strongly about the material don’t apply here. Hell, if I’m being honest, there’s a lot about this that I like.

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) - Movie Review

 

We’re gonna be stepping into new territory with this review, as I’m not just looking at a film but an interactive film. Netflix has been toying around with this idea for a while now, even porting a version of Minecraft: Story Mode onto the service, but this is the first attempt at something for more mature audiences. Getting into the details with this one is going to be tricky, as this is the kind of feature where there exist flowcharts that detail all the different choices and paths you can take as a viewer/controller; I’ll be here all day if I tried to pin down this film’s singular narrative. So, instead, I’m basically going to treat this like any other piece of interactive fiction: How does it control, what’s the story like, and is one worth dealing with to get to the other (i.e. would this have worked better as just a standard feature)?

The Children Act (2018) - Movie Review

Religious freedom is a tricky idea to discuss at any great length, especially nowadays. While it seems a given that people should be free to harbour whatever beliefs they may have about themselves and their place in the celestial scheme of things, friction manifests when it comes to the intersection between one’s own beliefs and the actions of others. With the recent developments regarding acknowledge of LGBT rights, it seems like people are screaming for their right to religious freedom now more than ever… even if it largely amounts to being free to vilify and belittle others without recourse. And even further than that, there are times when upholding one’s own faith means that others end up in direct harm, even death.

Dunkirk (2017) - Movie Review

Christopher Nolan is one of those directors who seems to ferociously divide audiences, usually in reference to the director’s more staunch defenders. He has made some truly incredible films, like the cerebral heist flick Inception and the ground-breaking superhero film The Dark Knight, both of which I’d count among my favourite films ever… but the guy’s reputation has been stuck in a bit of a mire for a while now.

 

Interstellar wasn’t that well received overall, and while The Dark Knight Rises still holds up as a good Batman film, it and combined with his involvement in Man Of Steel resulted in the current state of the DC Extended Universe, one that was definitely painted with Nolan’s dark brushstrokes from his Batman work. Naturally, as is the case with pretty much all of his films, the marketing for his latest has been rather inescapable. Knowing my own hesitance to full-force advertising of films and my want for him to pull through with a film that I don’t have to defend quite so hard as something like Rises, this is already looking like an interesting situation for a film’s release.

 

But that’s all background noise; what’s the actual movie like?