Reel Encounters

In writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest feature, “Licorice Pizza”, a warm and fuzzy preoccupation with the past overwhelms the languorous manoeuvrings of its 134-minute running-time.

For all the things that might be said about Guillermo del Toro’s latest film, I’d be surprised to hear anyone say it’s anything less than consistently engaging.

This final Sundance Film Festival dispatch explores a quartet of films concerned about ideas of living, legacies and the state of our world.

Sundance 2022 has offered a wealth of different kinds of stories and themes, particularly the female-centred films which have been some of the better options at the festival this year.

If there’s been a recurring trend in the American world-premieres at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, it has been the number of films that feel explicitly bound to the contemporary social issues they are unearthing.

My Top 20 films of 2021 1. “C’mon C’mon” (d. Mike Mills) 2.

What are movies for? It’s a question that often haunts cinematic discourse, as if a pithy response explaining the whys of cinema would make it more important.

A famous actress is cosmetically and sartorially transformed into a famous historical figure.

Some people remember the first time Some can’t forget the last Some just select what they want to from the past – Mary Chapin Carpenter, “Come On Come On” In 1992 Mary Chapin Carpenter released her album “Come On Come On”.

Three witches prophesy nobler futures for a thane. The thane and his wife, covetous of that future, plot to murder their king to accelerate the royal destiny promised to them.

Credit to Jon Watts, director of “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and the screenwriters Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers: in this third iteration of the MCU’s version of our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, they have finally managed to liberate Tom Holland’s Peter Parker from Tony Stark and the previous films’ strange class politics.

There are many moments in Passing when the camera finds Tessa Thompson’s Irene Redfield, a Black woman in 1920s Harlem, in the act of looking.

Early in “The Power of the Dog”, a character tearfully confesses to another, “I just wanted to say how nice it is not to be alone.”

The theatrical poster for “King Richard” introduces us to an important discrepancy.

Anya-Taylor Joy appears about 20 minutes into Edgar Wright’s “Last Night in Soho” as the savvy and confident Sandy.

We first meet Will Sharpe’s version of Louis Wain, painter and eccentric in the early 20th century, as an old man (a well-aged Benedict Cumberbatch) gazing into space as images of a somewhat younger Wain walks solemnly through the street in funereal attire with a group of women.

Every few months a new Marvel film emerges and every few months critics write critiques of the individual movies that dovetail as critiques of the entire Marvel collection.

“Dune” has been built up as a potential turning point of 2021 cinema since its premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

The opening scene of “No Time to Die” has stayed in mind longer than I expected it to.

If the unhinged earnestness of Tom Hardy’s central performance was the hook that necessitated a sequel to the 2018 “Venom”, it’s a bit surprising that the recently released sequel – titled “Let There Be Carnage” begins with someone other than Eddie Brock and his faithful symbiote friend.