Handwringing over the running-time of movies ahead of their release is a dangerous game: good movies feel just-right, regardless of their length and lesser movies feel long, overstaying their welcome, no matter how brief.
“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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.