By the end of Joe Wright’s “Cyrano”, which concludes with the requisite solemn tragedy of its source, I realised that I really had not been very taken with his gentle, thoughtful engagement with the more than century-old play.
What’s an Irish movie without a rendition of “Danny Boy”? Kenneth Branagh’s very-Irish “Belfast” confronts this question about midway into the film with an offkey rendition that’s oddly one of the scenes I found myself most drawn to.
The opening scene of Matt Reeves’ “The Batman,” the third live-action version of the caped-crusader in the last 16 years, delays our introduction to the eponymous vigilante.
In writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest feature, “Licorice Pizza”, a warm and fuzzy preoccupation with the past overwhelms the languorous manoeuvrings of its 134-minute running-time.
For all the things that might be said about Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, I’d be surprised to hear anyone say it’s anything less than consistently engaging.
Sundance 2022 has offered a wealth of different kinds of stories and themes, particularly the female-centred films which have been some of the better options at the festival this year.
If there’s been a recurring trend in the American world-premieres at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, it has been the number of films that feel explicitly bound to the contemporary social issues they are unearthing.
What are movies for? It’s a question that often haunts cinematic discourse, as if a pithy response explaining the whys of cinema would make it more important.
Some people remember the first time
Some can’t forget the last
Some just select what they want to from the past
– Mary Chapin Carpenter, “Come On Come On”
In 1992 Mary Chapin Carpenter released her album “Come On Come On”.
Three witches prophesy nobler futures for a thane. The thane and his wife, covetous of that future, plot to murder their king to accelerate the royal destiny promised to them.
Credit to Jon Watts, director of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and the screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers: in this third iteration of the MCU’s version of our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, they have finally managed to liberate Tom Holland’s Peter Parker from Tony Stark and the previous films’ strange class politics.