Deep Focus

The franchise’s reason for existence is to show audiences giant, photorealistic alien robots fighting each other. In this, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts succeeds.

As long as we are getting movies as good as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, we can stay in superhero land for as long as filmmakers like.

We may like to imagine the life of an artist as lived in the clouds, responsible only to the winds of their artistic process, caught in the ebb and flow of inspiration. Showing Up disabuses us of that idea almost instantly.

The young people in How to Blow Up a Pipeline have their faces “set like flint” to the task ahead of them as well. They aren’t going to turn over tables in the synagogue… well, actually they kind of are.

The Super Mario Bros Movie is a rollicking riff on one of video games’ longest running franchise (running, left to right across the screen, jumping occasionally).

Avatar: The Way of Water insists that deep, emotional connection between things with breath and blood in them is more powerful and important than any technological ambition or achievement. That’s an admirable message.

Watching The Fabelmans is like sitting at the feet of an accomplished raconteur. I wanted to live in this film. I never wanted it to end.

When Black Panther: Wakanda Forever isn’t being a Marvel movie, it’s a lot of fun.

Physical beauty is but one aspect of beauty, the glint of a greater glory. People are beautiful because they are complex and ineffable, endlessly fascinating creations of the eternal God.

This is not Disney’s film. It is a much darker, weirder tale, rough with knots and splinters, but glowing with boyish mischief.

What a knotty tale this is! You never feel resolution, only sadness and longing and bewilderment.

You didn’t come here for a lesson. You came here to watch the Rock make things go boom.

We keep telling this story because we long for our relationships with out parents to be right.

Hocus Pocus 2 does that thing that Disney has been doing for the last decade or so and tries to offer its villains a measure of redemption.

Blonde is an aesthetically provocative deconstruction of our culture’s conceptions of Marilyn Monroe, of society’s willingness to sacrifice people on the alter of celebrity and consumerism.

Top Gun: Maverick isn’t a movie. It’s music. It’s the kind of story sung by ancient Greek poets who beseech the Muses for inspiration.

The original cartoon, Chip ’n Dale Rescue Rangers, was itself a reboot/reimagining of a couple of classic Disney characters. Why not do it again?

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is another variation on the multiverse concept echoing through our blockbusters of late.

We see what we have the eyes of faith to see. The Northman lets us see with viking eyes for a couple of hours. I see, and I shudder.