[IMAX]
From Michael Giacchino’s chilling score, Matt Reeves’ epic telling is a towering spectacle; every opportunity to present Pattinson’s caped crusader as fantastically as possible achieved splendidly as the world of Gotham is realised in all its seedy glory in a brilliant crime saga as Pattinson’s young vigilante is tested in a story about his past, aided by Kravitz’s mesmerising Selina Kyle and Wright’s righteous Lt. Gordon.
[IMAX 3D HFR]
In the thirteen intervening years, James Cameron has made the world of Pandora even more beautiful and intoxicating in another aptly timed eco-centric feature, but fails as a storyteller. The antagonists are as cardboard as before and cause an eye roll at their world-limiting introduction, while the excessive runtime, especially in the climax, leads to a repetitive narrative. This may be Cameron’s most beautiful film, but, poetic around Christmastime, it’s a Christmas tree bauble: Shiny and pretty, but hollow inside.
It’s a New Life | Netflix Originals Month 2023
A far more subdued Happy Madison production than what the company is most famous for and has done in their previous three Netflix productions, this Robert Smigel film ends up becoming quite bland as a result as Sandler and Rock play socially distant people, a constructionist and a surgeon respectively, who come together as their children get ready to be married and events go horribly wrong left, right, and centre.
Damien Chazelle’s epic recreation of Hollywood during the transition from silent pictures to talkies is a tremendous cinematic achievement of excess, taking you on a rollercoaster ride of a narrative with scenes building in tension and hilarity before bringing you crashing down as Pitt and Robbie’s actors struggle with the changing world around them. Chazelle’s opus is slightly, sadly, unfocused in execution, leading to its excessive runtime as it tries to hit too many marks, but is nonetheless a powerful production to behold.
If Infinity War was the culmination of ten years’ hard work by Marvel Studios, Endgame is a celebration of Marvel itself; a chance to spend time with old friends in one last hurrah in a film that gives new meaning to the word “epic”. For that, it is a technical masterpiece, making every single frame count and edited to perfection as Feige, Markus, McFeely and the Russos’ vision is fully realised in this capping-off point to twenty-two films’ worth of story as the universe moves on to a bright and unknown future.
There are few instances nowadays where a film can be classed as an event, but Marvel’s Infinity War, even for its strange inclusion of 4 sub-villains with no previous introduction and the film’s importance likely being retconned within a year’s time, is an event; from the “10” in Marvel Studio’s logo, this has been the culmination of the studio’s hard work that pulls no punches with its heroes for the most noteworthy Marvel film in the studio’s short existence of producing their own films.
