Reel Encounters

On the Hollywood set for a commercial, two siblings, OJ and Emerald, try to successfully wrangle a horse.

“There is hope for us all.” That line acts as a coda of sorts for the final sequence in the newly released comedy “Mrs Harris Goes to Paris,” where Lesley Manville plays a widowed cleaning lady whose yearning for a couture Christian Dior dress takes her to Paris and on a string of adventures far beyond her dreams.

What does it mean when a “Thor” movie seems uncertain about who Thor is?

There is no single image, or sequence, in Joseph Kosinski’s “Spiderhead” that suggests any passionate stakes in its story, its characters or the world they inhabit.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

Let’s imagine a scenario. You are a space ranger on a quest to explore a habitable planet.

There’s a recurring wave of unease that subsumes much of Robert Eggers’ “The North-man”.

When “Brave” premiered at the Seattle International Festival in June, 2012, it was the first feature from Pixar Animation Studios to feature a female protagonist.

Beyond its role in propelling a specific kind of summer blockbuster into the post-1980s landscape of Hollywood cinema, Tony Scott’s “Top Gun” holds a distinct place in establishing the mythology of Tom Cruise.

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’.

I checked my watch during “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” and was surprised to find that only thirty minutes remained.

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.