You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah (2023) - Movie Review

Well, the last two days have been a bit of a rollercoaster. Going through Happy Madison’s output for the year has led to some pleasant surprises, some unsurprising duds, and some genuinely amazing stuff. And I don’t know if it’s because I’m going into this directly after having my heart torn open by Leo, but this coming-of-age teen flick… it’s alright. Just… alright.

Cinderella (2021) - Movie Review

After knocking it out of the park with her directorial debut in Blockers, I’ll admit to being excited for what Kay Cannon had planned next. But at the same time I was waiting for news of that film’s release, I was also hearing some less-than-glowing reactions to an adaptation of Cinderella that Amazon Studios had put together. Then I suddenly realised that these two films were indeed one and the same and… well, I was still hoping for something good, but that expectation has significantly dampened.

Frozen II (2019) - Movie Review

Discussing the worldwide phenomenon that is Frozen is… difficult. Mainly because, for pretty much every single day since its initial release, it’s been damn-near impossible to escape the bloody thing. Overplay is something that can sour a film to an immense degree, and between the moichendising, the sing-a-long screenings that continue to this day, and the ubiquity of Let It Go, it is all too easy to understand why a lot of people have grown plain sick of the whole thing.

For me personally, though… no amount of overplay can kill this thing. It remains one of the single greatest things Disney has ever produced, an astounding feat of sophisticated storytelling and mesmerising animation and music that, upon first watching, it basically became the subconscious watermark that every other animated film has to measure up to for me. Whether in comparison to the media juggernaut that is Frozen’s afterlife, or just the sheer brilliance of the film itself, making a feature-length follow-up to it was going to be a Herculean task. And man oh man, I don’t think anyone was expecting this to be the end result.