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<\/p>\nMy introduction to the Wickiverse was watching all three movies back-to-back during a \u201csnow day\u201d and I had the best time. The series becomes more and more absurd as it goes on, and while by the end of the third instalment I found myself missing the lean, taut ferocity of the first film, the action sets pieces are still a thing to behold and the wider universe that the series creates is absolutely fascinating, as soon as one makes peace with the fact that while the world of these films bears a superficial resemblance to our own, it definitely has different rates of employment for professional assassins and different laws of physics (wait till we get to Fast X<\/em>). What\u2019s remarkable is how much variety they are able to conjure up without really changing the formula overmuch. The best set-pieces here (the early hotel fight, the long overhead shot, the Arc de Triomphe) are some of the most exciting I\u2019ve ever seen (wait till we get to Mission Impossible<\/em>) and if it isn\u2019t really about anything\u2026 well, was that ever the point? MVP: Rina Sawayama who makes an astonishing debut in her first movie.<\/p>\n Guardians of the Galaxy 3 <\/strong> I don\u2019t care about Marvel the way I care about some other properties, like Doctor Who or James Bond. A bad James Bond film is a particular tragedy as there tends to be only about one every three years. But if this Marvel movie \/ TV series \/ holiday special doesn\u2019t work, well there\u2019ll be another six later this year. Antman and the Wasp: Quantumania<\/em> I thought had some bright spots and some fun cameos, but managed to squander the promise that Jonathan Majors showed in Loki<\/em> (and how Kevin Feige must be ruing building all of Phase Five around that particular actor) and eventually collapsed under the weight of its own silliness. This tries to combine some of that same goofy good-time feel, with the same cartoony anything-is-possible vibe and still try and deliver a backstory with real weight and depth of character and theme. It\u2019s an odd mix, and the elements fight with each other as often as they mesh, but it\u2019s still a pleasure to see this team together again. MVP: Will Poulter, who clearly isn\u2019t needed for the plot to work, but is determined to make his every second on screen count.<\/p>\n Shazam: Fury of the Gods <\/strong> If Marvel is slipping into irrelevance generated at least in part by overabundance of content, DC is suffering from releasing movies which set up stuff we know is never going to be paid off because the James Gunn reset is bearing down on us. Like a lot of part twos, this benefits from not having to walk us through the standard beats of the superhero origin story, allowing us to get straight on with the adventure, but then is weakened because the whole point of this particular character is the gulf between the two personas, which are brought far too close together now that Billy Batson is used to being Shazam. Dijmon Honsou, Helen Mirren, Lucy Lui and Rachel Zegler are fine additions to the cast, but there are too many members of the super team for me to keep them all straight, especially when they\u2019re all played by two actors, so it was hard for me to stay invested. An uncredited Gal Gadot shows up at the end as Wonder Woman. MVP: Skittles.<\/p>\n Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse <\/strong> The first Spider-Verse film was such an astonishing achievement that any attempted to create a follow up looked doomed to failure. And yet what\u2019s fascinating about this film is that it takes the weakness which doomed Fury of the Gods<\/em> and turns it into a strength. By emphasising the importance of the superhero origin story and making the repetition of that the whole point of the narrative, it manages to say something about mythic storytelling, while being visually eyepopping, terribly funny, tightly plotted and tugging the heartstrings. Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Brian Tyree Henry and Luna Lauren V\u00e9lez all return and do excellent work as everyone\u2019s favourite local neighbourhood spider-family and new recruits Jason Schwartzman, Oscar Isaac and Issa Rae all find moments to shine. But nobody told me that this was designed as part two of what is now a trilogy so I found the unresolved ending bewildering. MVP: Daniel Kaluuya whose Spider-Punk should be in every movie from now on. Not every Spider-Man movie. Every movie.<\/p>\n Fast X <\/strong> Listen, I\u2019m a huge Fast fan and this was a big leap up from the doldrums of F9<\/em> and even if there\u2019s a slight sense of fatigue setting in as far too many characters circle the plot hopefully looking for a role in it, and even as far too many of them started off as implacable villains needing only one encounter with the Fasticles to turn them into self-sacrificing goodguys, and even if there seems to be an awful lot of standing around and talking for the first hour \u2013 when the action does kick in, it\u2019s pretty impressive, with Hulk<\/em> director Louis Letterier never giving away that he was essentially brought in to steer the ship after it had set sail. Retrofitting a new villain into the plot of Fast Five<\/em> (still the high watermark of the franchise, although Seven<\/em> is pretty banging too) is exactly the kind of dementedly convoluted continuity I\u2019ve come to expect from these films and \u2013 what a villain! Jason Momoa is funny, scary, hulking, camp, prissy, absurd and clearly having the absolute time of his life and he\u2019s obviously the MVP. But nobody told me that this was designed as part one of what is now a two-part finale, so I found the unresolved ending bewildering. An uncredited Gal Gadot shows up at the end as Gisele.<\/p>\n The Flash <\/strong> Tired? Try being the Flash. Seeing the shadow of the James Gunn reset looming over you? Try being the Flash. Even by the standards of modern superhero blockbusters this is a very busy, noisy film. Faced with a leading actor who is pretty annoying on-screen and pretty reprehensible off it, Warners has opted make a film with an even more annoying version of the character and I have to say, scenes of the older and younger Barry Allens interacting are pulled off with a degree of aplomb from both a performance and a technical standpoint. But the plot doesn\u2019t make a lick of sense, generally relies upon everyone involved being as dumb as possible and the few good ideas that are present never cohere into anything meaningful or even all that interesting. Yes, sure, it\u2019s fun to see Michael Keaton back and saying his famous catchphrase \u201cWhy don\u2019t we be crazy?\u201d but it all feels re-heated, pointless and dull. Possibly this would all have had more impact if we hadn\u2019t already seen multiverse excursions in Everything Everywhere All At Once<\/em>, recastings of iconic characters in Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness<\/em>, and return appearances by veteran actors in Spider-Man: The Third One with Home in the Title<\/em>. An uncredited Gal Gadot shows up at the beginning as Wonder Woman. Guys. The trick is keeping her to the end. MVP: Sasha Calle as Kara Zor-El. I would have watched a whole movie about Superman\u2019s cousin landing in the Soviet Union instead of America.<\/p>\n Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny <\/strong> Tired? Try being an action movie star in your ninth decade, as Harrison Ford is here. The most successful section of the film is the opening, when largely convincing computer graphics return the 80-year-old actor to something like his prime (and when Toby Jones makes a wonderful addition to the supporting cast). But there\u2019s a depressing lack of either innovation or specificity here, and while James Mangold mounts some impressive sequences (one of the best being the very tense sub-aqua scenes, where the primitive 1960s technology really ramps up the anxiety levels) this fails to recapture any of the old magic, and very few of the rest of the supporting cast really register. Shaunette Ren\u00e9e Wilson is a luminous presence who looks as if she\u2019s going to be a key player in the narrative, until she\u2019s suddenly shot dead and never referred to again. Ethann Isidore as Teddy is more often annoying than adorable, and Mads Mikkelson looks like he\u2019s going through the motions. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is given more to do than anyone else \u2013 she\u2019s really the only one with anything like a satisfactory arc \u2013 and she gives the film everything she\u2019s got, but even she can\u2019t stop the final act from feeling anything other than completely absurd. MVP is Phoebe obviously, but I also want to mention Antonio Banderas who does much with very little screentime.<\/p>\n Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One <\/strong> Having enjoyed past Missions Impossible, especially the third and fourth instalments, nothing could have prepared me for quite how good the sixth film was \u2013 it absolutely blew me away. It might be the perfect action film for the twenty-first century. Everything about it just works. So, the pressure was on for this one to succeed. And early on, it seems to have just a little trouble getting the sparks to ignite. A lot seems to be happening around<\/em> the characters we care about, but not to <\/em>them or by<\/em> them. Luckily, this doesn\u2019t last for very long and once the chessboard is set up, and the pieces start merrily colliding with each other, the fun really begins. The now familiar team of Ethan, Benjy and Luther is augmented by the winning unpredictability of the frankly incredible Hayley Atwell, who manages to simultaneously embody complete disbelief at the ridiculous things that the IMF is involving her in, with her own sense of self-possession, self-interest and mischief. It\u2019s a star-making turn for a phenomenal performer and it\u2019s a fantastic new ingredient which freshens up the formula without fighting with it. Like Indiana Jones<\/em>, the McGuffin here is a little outr\u00e9 but Christopher McQuarrie treats it lightly, and keeps the emphasis on what matters most. This time, I did know that this was part one of two (it very helpfully says \u201cpart one\u201d right up there on the screen) but by the time that extraordinary final stunt sequence had concluded I was wrung out, and not the least bit bothered by the presence of a few dangling plot threads. A far cry from the other movies which played the same trick which just stopped in the middle. My only other complaint is that the villain was a bit underpowered, but then this series has only ever had one really top-notch villain (Philip Seymour Hoffman). MVP: Hayley.<\/p>\n Barbie <\/strong> This is a very silly film. It\u2019s disorganised, unruly, and often makes very little sense. It sets up rules and then ignores them. It places great emphasis on where certain characters are and when, and then forgets they ever existed. It seeks to contrast the unreality of Barbieland with the grounded reality of the real world, and then makes some elements of the real world just as loopy as Barbieland. Very few characters have anything like an inner life, or an arc, and you don\u2019t have to wonder what the point is, because it gets spelled out to you with relentless in-your-face clarity. I loved it, and it might be a work of genius.<\/p>\n It’s vital to understand that all the foregoing is perfectly deliberate, just as Gerwig\u2019s decision to split Little Women <\/em>into two timeframes was, and for all the apparent shenanigans going on here, I believe there\u2019s just as much careful directorial rigour here as there was there. The casting is also perfect, with Margot Robbie sensational as Barbie, Ryan Gosling hilarious as Ken and able support from Helen Mirren, Kate McKinnon, Simu Liu, Will Ferrel, Rhea Pearlman and countless others. Only Kingsley Ben-Adir seemed to be struggling to find the tone \u2013 pulling faces when others were just being. I desperately wanted the final credits to include the joke of simply crediting all the Barbies as \u201cBarbie\u201d and all the Kens as \u201cKen\u201d as was delighted when they did. The \u201canything goes\u201d approach of this film means that it\u2019s unlikely to resonate deeply inside my soul, but I was thoroughly entertained, I\u2019m thrilled that it exists, and even more thrilled that it looks like it\u2019s going to go on to make a billion dollars at the box office. MVP: a photo-finish between America Ferrera, who maybe has the hardest job of anyone and makes it look easy, and Michael Cera as Allan, whose complete irrelevance eventually comes quite close to being the entire point of the movie.<\/p>\n Oppenheimer <\/strong> And this is the big one. Big as in 70mm IMAX, 11 miles of film big. Big as in atomic bomb big. Nolan\u2019s films thus far have usually avoided confronting what goes on inside the heads of his central characters: Batman is the costume, Leonard Shelby is defined by his condition, The Prestige<\/em> is about the tricks, Inception<\/em> is about the dreamscapes, Dunkirk<\/em> is about the acts of heroism, rather than who did them and why. The one which tries to deal with who a person is, is one of my least favourites. Who watches 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em> and says \u201cYou know what would make this better? A daddy-daughter love story.\u201d? No. No, it would make it a hundred times worse. But this film doesn\u2019t present the building of the first atomic bomb as a race against time, or a scientific or engineering problem to be solved, or a political conundrum, although all those things are aspects of the story. It wants to know: who would build such a thing? And what effect would that have on the rest of his life? In a way, it\u2019s new ground for Nolan, who takes sole writing and directing credit for this one.<\/p>\n He couldn\u2019t have asked for a better collaborator than Cillian Murphy, who manages to dig under the surface of the text and unearth a man who goes from nervy student to strident professor to guilt-wracked public figure to quietly malicious political operative. But the film has a lot of ground to cover and in the first third, this felt like the frantic bang-bang-bang pace, which killed Tenet<\/em> for me, was back, as people marched in and out of rooms, announcing exposition at each other, to the relentless strains of Ludwig G\u00f6ransson\u2019s ever-present score. Thankfully, after a while, the editing slows down and the feeling of \u201cLast time on Oppenheimer<\/em>\u201d recedes, and scenes are allowed to breath a little. And there are some remarkable performances here, including a very solid Matt Damon, Emily Blunt bringing much to an underwritten part, Gary Oldman doing his Gary Oldman thing as Harry Truman, and Tom Conti as a cuddly and thoughtful Albert Einstein.<\/p>\n But while the race to build the bomb, leading up to the first test, is absolutely incredible (and it\u2019s great to see this presented as a true team effort, unlike say the absurd The Imitation Game <\/em>which gave Alan Turing credit for everything that happened at Bletchley Park) and the cut-aways to the senate confirmation and security clearance hearings help fill in other aspects of his character, I do feel that it fundamentally did not work to escalate from the detonation of the world\u2019s first nuclear device to a petty act of political revenge from one embittered man to another. That said, MVP here is clearly Robert Downey Jr whose performance as Lewis Strauss might be the best of his career. I also thought that having Oppenheimer recite his \u201cI am become death\u201d catchphrase during a tits-out sex scene was completely ridiculous, and the kind of thing I\u2019d expect to see in a film like Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story<\/em>.<\/p>\n Right, now I think I need to watch a movie in black-and-white with subtitles about someone who goes for a quiet walk and sees a caterpillar or something.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I remember thinking \u201cuh oh, this COVID thing is really serious\u201d when they didn\u2019t release the James Bond movie as scheduled. Since then, the world of cinema has been in turmoil, and now this feels like the first real summer of movies we\u2019ve had, the first year that the top ten films at the global […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[12,19],"class_list":["post-3497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","tag-movies","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-Up","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3497"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3501,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3497\/revisions\/3501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"3](\"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/plugins\/universal-star-rating\/includes\/image.php?img=01.png&px=12&max=5&rat=3\")
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