Unlike Cats, we can now look at the main character without skin-crawling existential horror. But in making Sonic look more like he does in the games, it only brings the movie out of the depths of “so bad it’s good” and up to merely “meh”.
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I had all the ingredients for a brisk, 109-minute ride of joy – a wonderful pastel palette, funny characters, well-choreographed action – but I was also thrown into each and every one of its numerous directions at dizzying speeds, and by the end of it I felt like it was, for the most part, a hit.
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Half the time I was amused by how Ritchie can keep the most convoluted plots with an extraneous number of screwball characters interesting, but the other half of the time I’m fiddling with the keys in my pocket pretending I have some sort of fast forward button.
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The violence is a lot gorier than I had remembered from the previous two films, but even with a different director at the helm – long-time collaborators Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah – the DNA remains much of the same.
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If it isn’t already apparent, I love these movies. I recognize their flaws, and I’m okay with them. I expect them to function on a basic story level, but none more so than the original movie, with its Joseph Campbell formula, where Lucas draped his rich world-building. For me, The Rise of Skywalker is decidedly middle-tier Star Wars. It’s not nearly as frustrating as many clickbait-y headlines, thirsty for the partisan rage that kept pundits in the black when The Last Jedi came out, will attempt to argue.
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It turns out that observing how time withers men who believe they’re impervious to everything, especially the law, is an essential add-on to Scorsese’s body of work. Appropriately, it’s a movie about the ravages of time that would have been impossible to make without the hundreds of years of collective experience of the cast and crew.
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If Walk the Line was panned for being a solid but profoundly clichéd film, then Ford v Ferrari should be similarly panned. There's nothing to really dislike about this decent film, but if you're looking for some deeper philosophy on how close racing is to death, why egos get so huge, Italians vs. Americans, old vs. new, risky vs. safe, etc. etc. then Mangold's not very interested in discussing it.
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Even if you’re not the superstitious type, Eggers is able to make you believe that a violent encounter between Winslow and a one-eyed seagull is like Winslow signing his death warrant.
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So you take a comedy about the polarization of politics and the spread of nationalist rhetoric and set it in the context of the Second World War. These are issues that were relevant then and are still so today, but by viewing it in a different context, it gives us some breathing room.
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Messy psychology aside, Joker behaves in the Batman film universe very much like The Killing Joke does for comics: it doesn’t need to connect to any other stories or characters, and captures just one possible timeline for how the Joker came to be, much like the several different threads that Heath Ledger’s Joker references in The Dark Knight.
Read More![[VIFF 2019] REVIEW: I am a willing host for 'Parasite'](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5856d460197aea66c1dc96bf/1570200415251-GUE2AD8FU0IG1O03NYKO/Parasite+1.jpg)
For the second straight year, following Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, a Korean film is going to dominate top-10 lists, including yours truly. It is the first Korean film to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and just the second to win by unanimous vote since Blue Is the Warmest Colour. It would be remiss to say that Korean cinema is on the rise -- if anything, it has already arrived and Parasite is just the new high water mark.
Read More![[VIFF 2019] REVIEW: 'A Hidden Life' is so pretty you forget there's a story](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5856d460197aea66c1dc96bf/1570114178198-C11XFLTJZ03BYPFU8DMM/A+Hidden+Life+1_.jpg)
The main criticism – like all the other Malick films -- is its length. In the right mood A Hidden Life can be a truly enjoyable watch, but it’s about a half-hour to one hour too long to hold your attention span with such a thin narrative, though it will certainly be Malick’s most well-received since The Tree of Life.
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In a context where space travel is this much more attainable, the story of a hero astronaut pursuing his father, a rogue scientist, to the edge of human experience is entirely logical. As some of the dangers and technological hurdles inherent in deep space travel are removed, it opens the door to a deeply affecting narrative that weighs commitment to a mission against the responsibilities to a family.
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Bafflingly, the question posed by the film’s title doesn’t really come into force until halfway through. And various storytelling devices intended to tame the movie’s shaggy bits, like voiceover by the protagonist’s daughter and flashback exposition-dumps, are too inconsistently applied to keep anything in check.
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