Newly released on digital platforms, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” features a dizzying array of different genres and elements science fiction, comedy, family drama, absurdist humour, martial arts cinema, philosophical treatise and dystopian fantasy.
If you squint, you might recognise a slew of better films that the creators of “The Lost City” may have had in mind as they worked on developing Sandra Bullock’s latest ‘action, romantic comedy’.
It’s hard to say this without sounding a little self-satisfied, but halfway into “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” I guessed the exact way the last two scenes would play out.
Three releases currently in cinema, Michael Bay’s “Ambulance”, Ruben Fleischer’s video-game adaptation “Uncharted”, and Daniel Espinosa’s comic-book adaptation “Morbius” offer divergent (and sometimes convergent) approaches to what blockbuster filmmaking looks like in 2022.
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”.