Reel Encounters

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.

Barry Levinson’s upcoming “The Survivor” finds itself juggling dual timelines for a large part of its running time.

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.

Later this evening, the 2021 film season will come to an official close when the winners of the Academy Awards are announced.

There’s a moment of quiet in the 1961 “West Side Story” that I think about often.

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.

This final Sundance Film Festival dispatch explores a quartet of films concerned about ideas of living, legacies and the state of our world.

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.

My Top 20 films of 2021 1. “C’mon C’mon” (d. Mike Mills) 2.

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.

A famous actress is cosmetically and sartorially transformed into a famous historical figure.

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.

There are many moments in Passing when the camera finds Tessa Thompson’s Irene Redfield, a Black woman in 1920s Harlem, in the act of looking.