Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

As a standalone film, rather than an episode in the seemingly never-ending MCU storyline, this is pretty dire.   The AI villain Ultron, accidentally created by Iron Man, is unmemorable; the CGI action set-pieces feel endless; the story jumps around in a way that fails to build any dramatic tension.   It all feels muddled and unfocussed, but I guess that is always a problem with having so many characters. Worst of all, no one, including Iron Man, seems especially bothered at the mayhem he has unleashed so carelessly. I also found the cutesy dialogue rather uninspired and less amusing than usual. Notwithstanding these failings the film does offer a few things to enjoy.  The climactic sequences do have some power.   There's a fight between Iron Man and Hulk which I found mildly diverting.  I liked the new characters, Wanda, her brother Pietro and (best of all) Vision, who gets the funniest line in the film. Disappointingly for me Pietro dies saving H...

I avoid films about The Holocaust - I find them too upsetting and anyway what more is there to say? But this film is directed by Jonathan Glazer whose previous film 'Under The Skin' was one of the most unsettling and disturbing films I have ever seen, so I was intrigued to see how he would follow it up. Normally I don't read reviews in advance, so as to be able to see a film free of preconceptions. Unfortunately in this case I knew enough going into the film so that the moment early on when we discover the truth about the affluent, seemingly nice family we are observing, and what is going on next door to their villa, didn't have the shock value it might have had.  Even so, it's a jaw dropping moment as we come to understand what  those ceaseless and sinister sounds in the background might signify.  The family we are observing is that of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig.  He was executed for war crimes in 1947 whilst she lived to a ripe old ag...

Unquestionably this film deserves its Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.  It's not so much that the story told is especially clever; in essence it's fairly simple and can be summarised quite easily - a woman is put on trial for the murder of her husband, and (spoiler alert) is cleared.   We the audience are left unclear whether she is in fact guilty, or whether the death (from a fall) might be an accident or even suicide. The merit of the screenplay (by Arthur Harari and the film's director Justine Triet) lies more in the ways it draws us into the relationship between successful novelist Sandra (played superbly by  Sandra  Hüller ) and her frustrated husband Samuel, and how it manages to maintain ambiguity without annoying us.  The flashback scene where eventually we get to see the tensions between Sandra and Samuel  exploding to the surface is one of the most riveting I can remember.   The dialogue as each of them tries to seize the moral h...

I was a bit shocked when this film ended up only third in the 'Screen Drafts John Grisham Super Draft', behind 'The Pelican Brief' and 'The Client'.  I was further taken aback to find out this film only gets 76% on Rotten Tomatoes. I have always thought of this as an excellent adaptation of what is surely Grisham's best novel. Rewatching it though I can see that those critics who complained about its length (two and a half hours!) and its slow pace might well have had a point.  And it's fair to say that the director Sydney Pollack might not be the best at handling the thriller elements, especially towards the end. The basic setup is great: a bright law student Mitch (Tom Cruise, at 31 just about young enough to play the part) is tempted to join a small law firm in Memphis only to discover that they are connected to a Mafia mob in Chicago.   Any lawyer trying to leave the firm is murdered, and just to make things worse the FBI are investigating and want M...

This is a sequel to 'Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse'.  I loved the first film, for its freewheeling humour, for the concept of infinite worlds, each with its own Spider-Man, and for its animation style, which brought to life the look of 1960s comic books which I read avidly for a while as a child (although I was more into DC than Marvel). Inevitably this sequel didn't make quite the same impact, because the novelty value had worn off a tad. That being said it's still highly enjoyable.   The animation throughout is stunning, and this time it brings to life the look of more modern comic books.  And we get some terrific new characters, notably Gwen Stacy, who is Spider-Woman on Earth-65, and Miguel O'Hara who is - well I'm not entirely sure, other than that he is in charge of the Spider-Society (whatever that is). Miguel's main concern (understandably, to be sure) is to stop the entire Spider-Verse collapsing.  This could happen if in an individual universe ...

The structure of this film is simple enough - it's about 11-year old Sophie's holiday in a Turkish resort with her father Calum, who has separated from her mother. We experience the holiday interspersed with bits of footage taken by Sophie on a miniDV camera, and also with some odd dreamlike sequences where adult Sophie is in a crowded rave, trying to get close to Calum (who hasn't aged). At first I thought this film was going to be about child abuse, but quickly it became apparent that this wasn't where the film was heading.   Instead it gradually emerges that Calum is not just unhappy, but depressed.  There are poignant moments  scattered throughout where Sophie senses her father's deep unhappiness and attempts to comfort him in some way. Although nothing terribly dramatic happens in the film, I found it riveting thanks to the excellent performances by Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio, who have a lovely chemistry, and to the way the writer and director Charlotte Well...

My main reason for watching this film was to see Jodie Foster's performance.  Her recent film appearances have been few and far between, so I welcomed the opportunity to see her in a performance that garnered her an Oscar nomination (her first since 1994). However her character doesn't have a lot to do, and I came away more impressed with the lead performance of Annette Bening, and a supporting performance by Rhys Ifans. It's the kind of film that wouldn't normally appeal to me much, a sports drama of sorts about a real person, Diana Nyad, and her remarkable feat of endurance: in her early '60s she became the first person to swim the 110 miles from Cuba to Florida. Despite Bening's compelling performance, I always feel uneasy about celebrating someone's monomaniacal commitment to doing something which is, when you come down to it, essentially pointless.  But the film could be said to be a celebration of the human spirit and I  did find the conclusion of the ...