The Creator (2023) - Movie Review

2023, in all facets of the film industry, is likely to be remembered as ‘The Year Of AI’. Production-wise, Hollywood has seen a once-in-a-generation workers’ strike (partly) out of fears of artificial intelligence threatening the livelihood of creatives. Narratively, stories about the looming threat of replacement by machines have reached a point of relevance that, even considering sci-fi’s rich history of prescience, is still kind of bizarre to contemplate at this point in time. And on the critical side of things, it seems like every goddamn person who writes about movies has uttered some variation of “it’s as if an A.I./ChatGPT/an algorithm made/wrote this film” as a go-to criticism for films that feel assembly-line or generic. Yes, I resorted to this very thing during the year-end lists for 2022, but the extent to which it has since mushroomed into a genuine cliché is… getting kind of irritating.

At any rate, alongside films like Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part 1, The Creator feels like one of those emblematic releases that help define a year as a pop culture moment. That it’s one of a shrinking minority of tentpole sci-fi flicks that aren’t based on pre-existing material (directly, at least, but we’ll get to that…) adds to that battlefront mentality. What can I say, this is the kind of metanarrative shit I crave in media.

It Lives Inside (2023) - Movie Review

I really wanted to like this one. Between my growing disdain for the ubiquity of Christian exorcism horror in the modern day, and how much I’ve gotten into films that directly swerve from that standard like Godless, I was hoping that this would serve as another welcome change of pace for the genre. But not only is this production nothing all that special on its own, but it’s the kind of mid that ends up flying right in the face of the message at the heart of the story.

Retribution (2023) - Movie Review

 The decision to watch this movie was something of a desperation measure. At time of writing, I’m not only still dealing with the finale of the After series with After Everything, which even for that series is pretty damn bad, but also having watched the new Digimon movie the night before and… well, recovering from the realisation that a kids’ movie could turn out that badly. As such, even though Liam Neeson’s film career has been in a bit of a worrying place in recent years, I went into this knowing that it wasn’t going to some grand masterwork, but still hoping that it would least be better than the other shit I’ve seen over the past 24 hours. And thankfully, I can report that this film is actually not that bad.

After Everything (2023) - Movie Review

Well… it had to end eventually. I mean, yeah, this still has a prequel and sequel in the works, but as far as the main story that is the increasingly fucked-up relationship of Hardin and Tessa, this is meant to be the finale. And with the unholy bombshell that the last film ended with, I am once again morbidly curious about how they could possibly follow that up and, more pertinently, how they could make things even worse. And sure enough, they found a way.

Blue Beetle (2023) - Movie Review

While DC Studios deals with one hell of a production reworking (one of several over the last decade), this film has been released in limbo. Following on from The Flash, whose reality-twisting premise seems to have officially spelled the end for the DCEU timeline as we know it, but still coming out before James Gunn’s official re-establishing of the universe. Between the burnout that the superhero genre has been experiencing post-Endgame, and the ongoing fandom civil war concerning DC on the big screen, it’s unfortunately easy to see why this production would get left behind in the shuffle. Even the upcoming Aquaman sequel, which also exists in the same state of flux, has a stable connection to what past films have shown us; this has to stand entirely on its own. Although, it should be said, that this film arguably does manage to do that, albeit with some stumbling blocks along the way.

A Haunting In Venice (2023) - Movie Review

After the release limbo and subsequent inundation of cast controversies that wound up plaguing Death On The Nile, it is somewhat relieving that Kenneth Branagh’s latest dive into the works of Agatha Christie hasn’t run into any such unpleasantness just on the surface. And yet, right from its horror-tinged trailer, I admit to being sceptical about how much I would like this one. Honestly, my first impression was that this was going to be yet another attempt to cross-promote with the Conjuring supernatural aesthetic, which has been steadily shrinking in my favour over the course of 2023. But hey, this wouldn’t exactly be the first time I went into a film with weird and arguably unfair expectations, much as I try to avoid such things. And it’s ultimately a moot point anyway since, again like Death On The Nile, I quite enjoyed this.

Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken (2023) - Movie Review

This film feels like a course correction in the worst way possible. DreamWorks Animation, who have dealt with labels of ‘Disney/Pixar rip-off’ pretty much since their inception, have recently been making films that are not only really damn good, but good in a way that sidesteps any kind of association with other studios. The Trolls movies, The Bad Guys, Captain Underpants, How To Train Your Dragon, not to mention last year’s genuine artistic triumph with Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. Their reputation in the modern day is quite secure, far as I’m concerned… which is what makes their latest release so thoroughly disappointing.