Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) - Movie Review

I know this is far from the first time Marvel Studios has done me, but fuck me, the marketing for this film has been extremely annoying. No joke, I saw two ads that were promotional tie-ins to this movie in the pre-session of the actual movie. Because buying a ticket for it apparently wasn’t enough; they had to keep trying to sell it to me. There’s also how flat-out ridiculous the session times for this movie have been, where it assimilated between 75% and 95% of all available screenings at both of my local cinemas, with one, maybe two sessions that were taken up by the eleven other films that are supposedly showing now as well. Anyone trying to use this film’s success as a gotcha for the 'wokeness' of other MCU films, or the MCU in competition with the DCEU, or even as a sign that the industry is picking back up since COVID first broke, are leaving out that the odds were stacked substantially in the production’s favour to get those box office receipts.

To be honest, I deliberately put off watching this movie for its first week because, as much as I love superhero movies, I really didn’t want to reward this overbearing, “Scorsese might have been underselling the problem” kind of behaviour.

Anyway, now that I’ve got my initial gripes out of the way, let’s get into how fucking brilliant this movie is.

Chaos Walking (2021) - Movie Review

I love Patrick Ness’ writing. While I freely admit that I haven’t read his novels, I still have a great affection for the man’s art based purely on his work for the big and small screen. I mentioned in my review for it how much I dug his approach to storytelling with A Monster Calls, and for as little attention as it got, his work on the Doctor Who spin-off Class had quite a few moments of true inspiration within its stunted 8-episode run. At a time when young-adult storytelling has gone from strength to strength in the mainstream, the way Ness approaches incredibly morbid topics like grief, trauma, and loss, has already revealed him to be in the upper echelon of that grouping. So, when news hit that his Chaos Walking trilogy of books were going to get the cinematic treatment, with Ness himself co-writing the script, I was ready for him to impress yet again. What I actually got, though, is… not that.

The Devil All The Time (2020) - Movie Review

This film came recommended to me by a Twitter mutual as a palate cleanser for having sat through Hillbilly Elegy. Have to admit, this film’s been on my radar for a little while now because of just how packed its cast is (up to and including my celebrity crush Tom Holland), and while just about anything would’ve been palatable compared to whatever the hell Ron Howard was thinking, I guess this is the push I need to finally check this flick out.

Onward (2020) - Movie Review

Even without bringing the cinema closures into the equation… I’ll admit, I was putting off watching this one. After the utter clusterfuck that was 2019 in Disney’s history, simultaneously one of their best and one of their worst in terms of both content control and financial reward, I’m a lot more hesitant about the House of Mouse than I used to be. And as I’ll get into, while that event lingering in the background does cut into the enjoyment a little, I still managed to have fun with it.

The Current War (2020) - Movie Review

When it comes to dramatising historical events, there is always the fear that said history on its own could end up being more interesting than a given attempt to tell it. This film, however, may be a rare case of that in duplicate, as the story behind the production not only has a chance of overshadowing the production itself, for the last few years, it actually did. This film has been stuck in release limbo since November 2017, being shelved because of the involvement of Harvey Weinstein in the production and initial distribution deal. That’s the heavily simplified version of the story, because every facet of the thing could easily take up this whole article on their own, but it ultimately leads to a single question: Was this film worth holding onto for this long?

Spies In Disguise (2020) - Movie Review

After years of bewildering popularity and success, it seems like Blue Sky Studios has finally found their own lane in the modern animation market. Yeah, I easily would’ve just assumed that their raison d’etre was being entirely disposable, between the weak Ice Age films to the downright dreadful Rio films, but between this and their last feature Ferdinand, they seem to have found their niche that doesn’t involve boring the audience into a collective coma. If Disney is the standard, Dreamworks the alternative, Laika the retro haven and Illumination the home of all things villainous, then Blue Sky is the place to go for family-friendly treatises on pacifism.

Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019) - Movie Review

Much like Ant-Man And The Wasp was for Infinity War, the latest big screen depiction of Spider-Man feels like exactly what Marvel needed after the culture shock that was Endgame. Just as much sci-fi tinged romantic comedy as it is superhero action bombast, Far From Home finds director Jon Watts and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers still mining gold out of the juxtaposition of superhero life and ordinary high school life.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) - Movie Review

Over the last several months, I’ve probably shown every conceivable pre-conception that a person can have for a movie. Whether it’s down to my own weird tastes or just how surprising this year’s releases have turned out, I’ve gone into the cinema with some odd ideas about what it’ll be like. Well, today’s film will likely represent my absolute worst expectations for a film: I want this film to be bad. Now, as much as I’ve talked about the therapeutic power of cinema, I don’t actively like watching bad movies; I rarely if ever want films to be bad, and it’s even rarer that I would want a film to suck to prove a “point”. Basically, after the clusterfuck that went down in the wake of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which I still maintain is a genuinely good movie despite some definite flaws, learning that the guys behind what is properly the worst film I’ve ever sat through would be behind the next Spider-Man reboot seriously pissed me off. It even got to the point where, and I wish I was joking, I made this claim on Reddit last year:

Just so we’re clear, this is how badly I not only didn’t want to see those numbnuts get rewarded for their lack of effort, but how badly I wanted some hubris to kick in after the honestly OTT reactions ASM2 got. But as I’ve already established, I’m a bit of a fanboy for comic book movies and I’m usually a lot kinder to them than I probably should be; I may not be happy to be proven wrong in this instance but I definitely get that the possibility of it happening here is pretty high. Anyway, enough waffle, let’s see where my cold-hearted cynicism gets me as we look at the latest iteration of the New York Webslinger.

In The Heart Of The Sea (2015) - Movie Review

Moby Dick, much like The Great Gatsby and Homer’s Odyssey, is in the great pantheon of books that you must read before anyone takes you seriously as an adult human… apparently. More importantly, it’s also one of the few literary works that helped turn Khan Noonien Singh into an obsessed psychopath; reason enough to avoid it, I reckon. All the same, it’s in that canon with good reason, since the term “white whale” has become ingrained in the human lexicon and Captain Ahab has been made synonymous with any fictional character in the grips of deep obsession. As such, a film about the purported real-life story that inspired that famous tale is going to be worth at least a gander. Then again, in terms of films about the stories behind the myth, the director this time round doesn’t have the best track record. So, before he resumes work on his next Dan Brown adaptation, let’s look into Ron Howard’s latest epic.