Tag: fantasy
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Megalopolis (2024)
I just saw Megalopolis and although it’s not cool to say so, I enjoyed it. It’s an eccentric satirical and symbolic piece filled with characters with names like Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), and inspired by the Catilinarian conspiracy of Ancient Rome. Set in the city of New Rome (New York in our world, retaining the…
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Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024)
I just saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and really enjoyed it. The plot is a little busy and overcomplicated, but it’s delivered at such a level of whimsy and love of tongue-in-cheek macabre storytelling that it works, from a scene of a dismembered succubus nail-gunning herself together while “Tragedy” plays, to a literal soul train and a…
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Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)
The Star Wars prequels have recently undergone a slight recovery in reputation given how disappointing the sequels turned out to be, and in my opinion, they deserve it. Perhaps I’m buying into a conspiracy theory here, though at this point I feel that the backlash was really just fanboys who watched the original films as…
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Imaginary (2024)
Well, I just saw Imaginary, the latest Blumhouse excretion, and it’s an Oscar contender for most boring film of the year. This was actually a major disappointment since the trailers made it seem as though it’d be visually and conceptually interesting. Filmed through what seemed to be eyeholes in a mask and evoking a topsy-turvy…
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The Boy and the Heron (2024)
I just saw The Boy and the Heron and it was great. A fantasy drama out of Japan, it’s set mostly around the bombing of Tokyo during the 1940s and follows a young man whose mother dies and whose father then takes him to the countryside to set up home with a new wife. But…
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The Marvels (2023)
I saw The Marvels and it was pretty bland. You know it’s bland when one of the recurring themes of positive criticism around it is that it’s blessedly short for a superhero film. It’s a remarkably clunky piece of storytelling, lurching from one set piece to the next with no real ebb and flow. In…
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Haunted Mansion (2023)
Based on a theme park ride, Disney’s Haunted Mansion is one of their few live-action films in a while to not be a bastardisation of one of their animated classics. It also has a lively sense of humour and real energy to its storytelling, harkening back to the first Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse…
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Barbie (2023)
I saw the Barbie movie and it was… fine? I’m not really sure what I was expecting and was probably expecting too much. This is really a movie for little girls and women trying to get in touch with their inner little girl, so I feel bad criticising it for things like plot and nuance,…
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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
I just saw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and it was really good. The art style and soundtrack are the best things about it, feeling integrated into the story at a level that’s rare for superhero films. For once one of these projects feels like an actual comic book film, which apart from Doctor Strange in…
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Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (1974)
The film I just saw at my local art centre’s Classic Horror Nights was Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, the only directorial work of Brian Clemens, a British screenwriter and television producer. He also wrote this swashbuckling tale of a swordsman roaming the countryside in search of bloodsuckers. Coming to a settlement, Captain Kronos (Horst…
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