Reviews

Dream Scenario Review

A famous quote from Oscar Wilde says that there are two tragedies in life- not getting what you want and getting it.

This quote, in its essence, is the theme of Dream Scenario, a surreal absurdist comedy by writer-director Kristoffer Borgli starring Nicolas Cage.

Paul Matthews, a meek evolutionary biology professor, feels unnoticed and unappreciated. He discovers that a colleague is publishing a book based on ant intelligence, a premise he first came up with when they were in school. He meets to confront her about stealing his idea but at the last minute, begs to be credited.

Paul's life is irrevocably changed when he discovers he's the subject of people's dreams worldwide, turning him into an instant celebrity. While delighting the attention, Paul is upset to hear that he behaves passively and does nothing in the dreams...

Nicolas Cage delivers an impressive performance, unleashing all his acting tools, and transforming an otherwise plain and passive role into an engaging presence.

Everybody laughs at Cage's bad B movies but misses that it's the secret to his madness. The fact is, Cage chooses his parts for his reasons beyond what's written in the script. It's in these crazy indies where he practices loud crazy experimental performances to fine-tune his acting sensibilities.

He brings those sensibilities to express the film's concept, a Kafkaesque allegory about manifesting what you want in life and being ultimately disappointed by it.

As Paul Matthews, Cage captures an everyday dissatisfaction, that deep fear of not living up to your potential and being recognized or remembered for something, heck, anything!

It's a technical performance consisting of body language and unspoken gestures. In one crucial dream sequence, Paul Matthews' eyes and demeanor physically change into a superhero's.

Writer-director Kristoffer Borgli beautifully weaves through themes like social media, trends and cancel culture, and how fame chasing can lead one to miss life's forest for the trees. The film has a literary vibe, like a satirical novella immediately written to reflect our current times.

I thoroughly enjoyed Dream Scenario for its originality and bizarre tone, riveting that I had no idea where the story was going. It switches from whimsical, hilarious, tragic, and upsetting. Also, the dream sequences were all detailed and hilariously spot-on.

I walked out deepened, not upset, by the film, pondering how we've all been Paul Matthews at one point or another. We have all yammered about chasing our dreams and wishing for recognition, without taking enough action.

It is a scary and potentially depressing truth to confront about life, and I'm glad Dream Scenario brought us there in such a witty thought-provoking fashion.

What's the key to living a happy life? Is it success, money, love, family, or pleasure?

Perfect Days, a reflective slice-of-life arthouse drama from Paris, Texas, and Wings of Desire director Wim Wenders, explores this philosophical question through the life of Hirayama, a soft-spoken toilet cleaner living a quiet life in Tokyo with a simple routine.

Every morning Hirayama wakes up, buys a coffee from a vending machine, and drives his truck to clean two public toilets, which he takes great pride in. For the rest of the day, he rides his bike, indulging in photography, looking at nature, and listening to his cassette collection. At night, Hirayama reads a book before he sleeps.

Perfect Days is a poetic meditative experience. Slow-paced with little plot beats, writer-director Wim Wenders thrusts the audience into Hirayama's life quietly, observing the minute details of how he lives his life, and eventually holding up a mirror to how you are living yours.

Lead actor Koji Yakusho's performance is seamless and natural, immersed into his character in every frame and physically shows Hirayama's whimsical private thoughts with no deliberate scenery chewing or saving it for the close-up.

On paper, Hirayama's life looks awesome. He works approximately 5 hours per day, does what he loves for the rest of it, and keeps to simple inexpensive pleasures. Happiness is simple in concept, but perhaps not easily achieved.

Upon reflection, it does come at a cost. This monk-like simplicity takes tremendous mental fortitude to withstand loneliness. Hirayama lives in solitude with no companion or friends or any attachments that may require a higher income or responsibility.

The story lightly refers to what may have happened in Hirayama's past, but screenwriters Wim Wenders and Takuma Takasaki prefer to leave it open. Or perhaps this is the filmmakers' statement on life itself! Perhaps there is no such thing as 100% happiness; there's always some dissatisfaction... and we must accept it.

At times, all this empty space reduces Hirayama into just being an idea instead of a developed character. The lack of a plot does take something away at the very end. The final shot, a long take of Koji Yakusho smiling, felt like a director's closing statement to wrap everything up. It's an unearned character moment that plays vaguely and left me desiring more of an emotional punch.

Jim Jarmusch's Patterson, a similar film in story and tone, struck a better landing by comparison.

All that said, Perfect Days is a rewarding watch. The visuals, jukebox soundtrack, and quiet intimacy rubbed off on me and I enjoyed reflecting on the film's themes afterward.

Having a deep interest in stoicism, it was doubly cool to see a fully realized example of a stoic living in modern society. The film reignited a forgotten awareness within me to just let go, take life as it is, and just enjoy it all.

With outstanding performances from Adam Driver and Penelope Cruz, Michael Mann's Ferrari delivers an intimate and complex biopic that leaves a lasting impression of its subject, Enzo Ferrari.

Michael Mann makes a directorial breakthrough, moving away from his trademark realistic high-def crime dramas and turning his meticulous eye into recreating a tiny slice of Ferrari's life, transcending the typical Hollywood biopic reenactment.

The story covers Enzo Ferrari's life in the summer of 1957, dividing between his professional and private life.

At home, Enzo and his business partner and estranged wife Laura are grieving the loss of their son, Dino, who passed away a year ago. Meanwhile, Enzo's mistress Lina pressures Enzo to give their illegitimate son Piero the Ferrari name.

The Ferrari car manufacturing company is financially suffering as he's prepping his Formula 1 racing team for the Mille Miglia, an open road, endurance-based thousand-mile race. To keep his company running, Enzo is forced to merge with Fiat and must convince Laura to sign over her half of the company shares...

Admittedly, I walked into Ferrari with low expectations. Michael Mann previously went down a rabbit hole of making crime films with high-definition cameras, peaking at Collateral but lost his touch with Public Enemies and Blackhat. Now, I happily stand corrected.

Michael Mann's direction is in top form, masterfully walking the line between documentary realism and drama, allowing the audience to follow Ferrari through perceivably the most dramatic day of his life.

It's an immersive watch. The scenes are written with screenplay economy but are filmed with a realistic lingering time, following Adam Driver walking and driving through town, which gives everything a tangible weight.

Mann captures the essence of Enzo Ferrari, what the man was like, how he lived his life, and perhaps what it felt like to stand next to him.

Adam Driver inhabits the part with a real-life complexity and is convincingly Italian, showing the visionary engineer and entrepreneur, a husband locked between his wife and his mistress, and a father grieving the loss of his son.

The easy cliche approach would have been to play Enzo Ferrari as an autistic, as a shorthand to display his engineering mindset and lay out the highlights sequentially.

Penelope Cruz is electric as Laura, giving the film weight and stakes as the film's centerpiece. Cruz and Driver play a brilliant tennis match in their scenes, creating a strikingly raw dynamic that feels like they've been fighting for years.

The race sequences are nail-bitingly intense, viscerally showing the speed and danger of racing firsthand in the 1950's.

Ferrari is a great film, perhaps even amongst Michael Mann's best. It has the misfortune of being too niche and released in a year where its subject matter is not in the zeitgeist. In another time or place, the film could have been nominated for acting, writing, and directing in this year's awards season.

While lacking the broad commercial appeal of previous Studio Ghibli classics Castle in the Sky or My Neighbor Totoro, Hayao Miyazaki continues to mature his craft in The Boy and the Heron, a surreal odyssey that soul searches through Miyazaki's personal childhood experiences as a fever dream.

Mahito Maki loses his mother Hisako to a hospital fire in Tokyo during World War II. Mahito's father Shoichi moves them back to their family estate in the rural countryside and marries his mother's younger sister, Natsuko.

Struggling to adapt to his new home and school life, Mahito meets a mysterious heron that leads him to an abandoned tower built by Natsuko's architect granduncle, luring him with the opportunity to reunite with his mother. When Natsuko disappears, Mahito follows the heron into the tower to rescue her...

The Boy and the Heron is best enjoyed for its surrealism, visualizing grief and trauma as dream symbols. Hayao Miyazaki draws the fantastical creatures from a deeply personal place, conjuring his own Jungian and Freudian archetypes, and mixing folklore, and Eastern and Western views of the afterlife.

For example, the heron resembles a stork, normally the trusty deliverer of babies in popular folklore, but is now subverted into a monstrous trickster with occasional body horror moments.

It's up to the audience to interpret the meaning behind the dream motifs and extrapolate what Miyazaki is attempting to say, like learning the context behind a painter's life before judging a self-portrait.

The pacing picks up once Mahito crosses into the fantasy world where there's lots of location-hopping with numerous characters. It's trippy and a bit too much to take in all at once, but it was fun to be lost in all of it.

Studio Ghibli's animation is gorgeous and lifelike, patiently pulling the viewer into its reality step by step. Miyazaki is a master at capturing the eccentricities of human movement, especially the subtle ways people sway and shift their weight.

Do the Studio Ghibli animators ever get self-conscious walking around the office, knowing that the boss is observing their little movements?

The film's original Japanese title translates to "How Do You Live?" A more fitting English translation of the film's message would be "How Do You Live On?" .

The film explores grief head-on without any cartoon cuteness. The Mahito Maki character is realistically presented as a quiet boy who's haunted by the memory of his mother dying, visualized as a nightmarish inferno. Mahito's determination to face his demons alone was unexpectedly moving.

The Wind Rises, Miyazaki's previous feature that was also an autobiographical soul searching piece, could be viewed as a thematic companion piece. The Boy and the Heron is the superior work; it's imaginative and magical and likely will be more memorable over time.

Wonderfully uncomfortable and wickedly complex, Todd Haynes' May December is a slow-burn psychological drama that explores the nature of an illegal relationship, featuring three standout performances from Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, and Charles Melton.

In 2015, actress Elizabeth Berry travels to Savannah, Georgia to research the lead part for an independent film. Elizabeth is portraying Gracie Atherton-Yoo, a school teacher who was caught having sex with a 13-year-old Korean American Joe Yoo while working together at a local pet store in 1992. During her prison sentence, Gracie gave birth to Joe's child. They've since been married for 23 years with 3 children.

As Elizabeth interviews the Atherton-Yoo family and their friends in town, the married couple begins to buckle under pressure...

Todd Haynes intricately explores the uncomfortable subject of statutory rape by presenting the aftermath and patiently examining trauma in the life after.

Screenwriter Amy Burch frames the story brilliantly, allowing these characters to be deeply studied under a sanitized non-violent setting. The audience can imagine the past crime, but its explicit details aren't required. It's not about the story of the crime, but rather taking an icky uncomfortable walk in the characters' shoes.

Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman play off each other in perfect cadence in a wonderful game of subtext. The pretense behind their interaction, a diabolical case of acting on top of acting, is entertainingly cringeworthy.

Julianne Moore communicates her character's anguish physically in quick hysterical micro-expressions and uncomfortable pauses, slowly imploding beneath the surface.

Natalie Portman brings a quiet vampiric edge to Elizabeth, who is feeding off the intimate details of Gracie's life to make art. Elizabeth claims to honor Gracie truthfully despite the situation being unavoidably exploitative. In one pivotal scene, Gracie teaches Elizabeth how she dons her make-up in the mirror and it is eerie in a David Cronenberg-esque way.

Charles Melton steals the show as Joe, delivering a raw portrayal of a victim locked in arrested development since the affair and is just starting to deal with the unusual nature of his marriage.

Todd Haynes presents the situation as it is, looks at its characters in three dimensions, and peels the proverbial onion, never judging or asking the audience to sympathize with the culprit or the crime. It's rewarding as it goes down the layers, stirring the line between black and white into the murky grey.

As such, the film provides no answers, letting the audience draw their conclusions.

May December deepened my perspective of sex crimes and illegal relationships and the rippling damage it has on the party involved, and that love might not be enough to justify it all. It had me thinking about the importance of boundaries and the price one pays for crossing them.

I remember the moment I connected to Zack Snyder's aesthetic. It was a slow-motion shot from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice of a flood survivor reaching her hand desperately to Superman, cape billowing in the sky.

Initially, I thought, is it unnecessary to hold a visual for that long? Wouldn't it be more economical to have a montage of Superman saving people from the flood instead, like how Christopher Nolan might do in his more left-brained approach?

Then, it hit me that Zack Snyder's artistic intention is akin to a still painting, or a comic book splash page, and the audience is meant to bask in the prolonged moment and imagine the story behind the image, filling in what happened before and after.

I've since accepted Zack Snyder's visual storytelling style and his alternative way of thinking, even its flaws, and have retroactively enjoyed his films on a whole new level. Zack Snyder's Justice League is his best work to date.

Snyder's latest film released on Netflix, Rebel Moon, is an uninspired space adventure that indulges in long stretches of world-building and showcases its characters like a collection of action figures, before getting the audience to care about them.

Rebel Moon, pitched as "Seven Samurai set in the Star Wars universe'", originated as a story treatment Zack Snyder wrote in film school and was unsuccessfully pitched to Lucasfilm as a Star Wars movie. Following up on his partnership with Netflix after 2021's Army of the Dead, the story pitch has been reworked and released as an epic two-parter.

The film's biggest sin lies in its unoriginality. The script does little to repackage or find alternative original moments of its own. It feels like stepping into Zack Snyder's subconscious and seeing everything he's a fan of all clumped together.

Its cinematic influences are so blatant that film fans will immediately spot which movies the script is pulling from. There are droids, lightsabers, the Mos Eisley Cantina, its own version of Han Solo, and a familiar sequence from the first Avatar.

As the screenwriter, Zack Snyder also has a perplexing understanding of "show, don't tell". He can compose fantastic breathtaking visuals but still chooses to give exposition through words in the most boring way possible.

Shockingly, every character is introduced exactly the same. As the two farmers set off to recruit its ensemble of warriors across the galaxy, the routine quickly becomes repetitive.

Enter character. The character displays fighting ability and their backstory is verbally told. The character says yes. The recruiters move to recruit the next warrior on another planet. Repeat.

Snyder's trademark slow-motion shots didn't work as there was no emotional attachment to any of these characters or any substance behind the story for the audience to truly bask in. And at times, I was eagerly waiting for the next shot.

Rebel Moon re-highlights the lesson of Sucker Punch: Zack Snyder works better when he's working with a screenwriter, namely to do the plotting and keep him from his worst tendencies.

Ironically, or unironically depending on how you look at it, the film plays out exactly like what it sounds like on paper: Star Wars fan fiction. It truly can be enjoyed as the more mature and violent version of Star Wars.

That's how I ended up enjoying Rebel Moon. It's gotten up to 63 million views on Netflix within ten days of its release, so I cannot be alone. Certainly, there must be lots of people enjoying it in this way as well.

George Lucas' idea behind manufacturing toys was to allow fans to tell their own stories in the Star Wars universe. Admittedly, I wrote Star Wars fan fiction as a 12-year-old in a Creative Writing class, which were John Woo movies set in the Star Wars universe.

Rebel Moon would have certainly satisfied my 12-year-old self. Donna Bae, Snyder's version of a Jedi, wielding dual red laser swords battling Jenna Malone as a villainous arachnid cybernetic alien is truly metal.

All that said, can I say Rebel Moon is great and everybody should see it? No.

Did I enjoy it? Yes, I found enough pieces to enjoy it for what it was, though I still cannot defend it.

Will I watch Part 2? Yes, but only as more Star Wars fan fiction.

There's a shot from the Goldfinger teaser that got me wildly excited: a close-up of Tony Leung biting a cigar smugly laughing with gold Mardi Gras raining down all around him.

Tony Leung's cheese-eating grin came across as an attempt at something new, different from the usual shy side smirk from his repertoire of introverted characters. Leung is creating a high-energy chaotic character, a performance we haven't seen yet.

In The Goldfinger, Tony Leung plays Henry Ching, a fictionalized version of real-life businessman and financial criminal George Tan who ran the Hong Kong conglomerate Carrian Group which collapsed from a corruption and fraud scandal in the 1980s.

Henry arrives under mysterious circumstances in Hong Kong in the 1970s, working his way up to founding the Carmen Group. The sudden collapse of a billion-dollar company due to a stock market crash draws the attention of ICAC prime investigator Lau Kai-yuen, who begins an investigation on Ching.

The Goldfinger is a disappointment. It pains to say...

Writer-director Felix Chong, one of the writers behind the Infernal Affairs trilogy, gets lost in an overbaked plot and delivers a flashy run-of-the-mill rise-to-fall crime thriller that sinfully misuses its two leads Tony Leung and Andy Lau.

Felix Chong gets caught up in window dressing the plot, using a non-linear structure of police interrogations conducted by Andy Lau's ICAC officer to fill in Henry Ching's past and set up the mystery behind Henry's secret money backer. It's a plot that Chong never gets the audience to care about.

The audience's priority is quite simple: to see Andy Lau and Tony Leung chewing scenery.

Infernal Affairs fans who are eagerly anticipating Tony Leung and Andy Lau's reunion will be let down. First off, Andy Lau is in a supporting role as the ICAC investigator. Secondly, Leung and Lau's scenes are procedural and plot-serving and lack the dramatic scene-chewing quality like the rooftop finale in Infernal Affairs.

As for Tony Leung's performance, it's an unsatisfying half-creation that lingers between the Tony Leung we're all familiar with and something brand new. The script positions Henry Ching as a mysterious cipher for so long that Leung never gets the screen time to properly develop his part.

Decked out in flashy expensive suits and tinted sunglasses, there are glimpses of the chaotic flamboyant Tony Leung that the trailer promised, but it's too few and far between, only appearing in montage moments-just enough to cut into a trailer!

What remains is Tony Leung's usual persona. As a result, the performance becomes an unfortunate case of the costume wearing the actor, like a cosplay.

Andy Lau is stuck in a bland stock hero role who's delivering exposition and driving the story, or rather investigation, forward. Lau is given a family subplot involving a disgruntled wife who's mad at him for neglecting his family for his job, but it goes nowhere.

It all fizzles out awkwardly at the end. As the end title cards are showing the fate of the characters, you realize the whole film is a string of historical facts.

I walked out of the theater bored and exhausted, contemplating how I got so excited over a trailer. Trailers lie. Lesson relearned.

With its impressive production values and epic battle sequences, Ridley Scott's Napoleon is a riveting history lesson for the uninitiated, covering Napoleon Bonaparte's rise from general to the ruler of France, his glorious victories on the battlefield, and his romantic relationship with Joséphine de Beauharnais.

Dariusz Wolski's cinematography is stunning and impressively diverse, infusing shadowy grittiness into a classical painting aesthetic. The cinematography adds solid weight to the period costumes and sets, with candlelit scenes that luminously call back to Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.

The Battle of Austerlitz and Waterloo war sequences are superbly staged and photographed with a kinetic sense of danger. The Fire of Moscow sequence was jaw-dropping.

Having no previous knowledge of history, Napoleon had me on the edge of my seat. Biopics usually wrestle with the subject's life not being dramatic enough for an exciting story, but Napoleon's is the rare exception.

Joaquin Phoenix carries the film sufficiently but doesn't get a handle on the role. It's like Phoenix is instinctually hunting for the ultimate moment to explode and iconize his Napoleon in a single scene, but that perfect moment never arrives and gets caught up in quirks. What remains is an inert ball of energy awkwardly vibrating.

What was Napoleon driven by? Was it his love for his country? Was it a thirst for power? Was it a need to prove himself to the world? It's a murky blend of all of the above.

To quote Gary Oldman in Mank, "You cannot capture a man's life in 2 hours. All you can do is to leave an impression of one."

And therein lies the problem. The script's box-ticking approach leaves no lasting impression of Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon is a larger-than-life figure no doubt, however, there was nothing to take away from the film other than the historical events.

Vanessa Kirby is magnetically captivating as Empress Josephine, committing wholeheartedly to her role as written, even pulling in the seemingly overthinking Phoenix. Their scenes are on fire and the highlight of the entire film, above all the impressive battle scenes.

Historians have accused the film of being inaccurate, but I feel the film could have been more ruthless with its liberties. I wanted something more daring from David Scarpa's screenplay, hoping it would seize what it wants to say and present Napoleon boldly, instead of reenacting the events chronologically.

Ridley Scott, by reputation, has always been known as a shooter-type director and his films have always succeeded and failed based on the quality of the scripts.

I couldn't help but wonder if Scott picked up on the power of Vanessa Kirby's performance in production and reworked the Napoleon-Josephine relationship further as the centerpiece and ruthlessly cut out the excess scenes. Devoting more time to that emotional anchor would have given Napoleon that much-needed final punch.

Apple TV has announced an upcoming 4-hour cut and I look forward to it in the hope there's more of the Napoleon-Josephine story.

Putting a loved one into a care home is a difficult predicament. There's the powerlessness and guilt of not being able to do more than you can. Knowing that they're waiting for the inevitable end alone, the hope is your loved one person is in the best hands possible.

In Broad Daylight is a slice-of-life social issue drama that toys with that very notion in a thought-provoking fashion. Based on a real-life scandal of the Cambridge Nursing Home, whose staff was caught water hosing the elderly in groups on an open rooftop in 2015 and later exposed for physically abusing their patients.

Investigative reporter Kay receives an anonymous tip and goes undercover into the Rainbow Care Home, an elderly home that is allegedly physically abusing and mistreating its patients behind the scenes.

In Broad Daylight is a heavy but worthy watch. The film forces the audience to confront difficult ignored feelings, empathizing with the elderly being alone, neglected, and becoming an unwanted burden on their families. And for younger people, there's the abject terror of living in an elderly home when you get old one day.

Jennifer Yu leads the movie adequately as the journalist and is wonderfully supported by a strong ensemble cast of veteran actors, including Shaw Brothers' David Chiang and Bowie Wu as elderly patients and Bo Pui Yue as the scary abusive nurse and a scene-stealing Bowie Lam as the care home's warden. Rachel Leung and Henick Chou also shine as two mentally disabled patients. I expect acting accolades for the majority of the supporting cast come awards season.

Writer-director Lawrence Kwan Chun Kan presents the everyday ins and outs of life in the elderly home, peeling the onion layers and examining the situation from all sides, even from the perspective of its supposed evil staff.

In the film's highlight moment, Bowie Lam's warden delivers a bone-chilling monologue on how society neglects the elderly. And he is right.

The film emphasizes that it's up to the press to expose these scandals further to end them, ending on a slight dissonant note. That might be true, but as the credits rolled, my mind gravitated towards the fate of the abused elderly patients-specifically all the actual abused patients out there that the film is representing. That's a much more compelling thought to end on.

That minor quibble aside, In Broad Daylight achieves its goals effectively, almost like a wake-up call to anyone with a parent living in a care home, reminding them to spend more time and perhaps even to examine their living conditions. This movie is bound to leave a lasting impression.

Wonka is solidly entertaining as a reimagined origin story for Willy Wonka from Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Timothée Chalamet is charming and sympathetic in this lighter sanitized interpretation of Wonka, singing and dancing in glitzy musical numbers in a story that details his beginnings and eventually built his famous chocolate factory.

Director Paul King keeps things light and moving along swiftly. The musical numbers are well choreographed and upbeat and there are good laughs. Hugh Grant hilariously steals every scene as the Oompa Loompa.

All that said, this is not the Willy Wonka character as I'm familiar with. Willy Wonka's darker nastier side, the part of him that's okay with the five spoiled kids getting hurt (or dying) for messing around in his factory and cracks cannibalism jokes, is fundamentally missing.

That said, I don't think I'd want to watch Timothée Chalamet, with his delicate and sensitive demeanour, playing that darker side, in this 2023 vision of the story would break people's hearts-Adam Driver just popped into mind. I suspect 2023 parents now probably would keep the 1971 Gene Wilder film away from their kids and would have stuck to reading Roald Dahl's book...until now.

This quibble aside, Wonka does competently fit itself properly in our current sensitive times as solid family entertainment. In fact, it is a cut above all the message-heavy Disney films this year.

I recommend it for the whole family.

A David Fincher film is always an event. With his infamous reputation for perfection and requesting, he has earned what every aspiring filmmaker wishes for: the proper time to get every element right. There's always glee and eager anticipation seeing his latest, knowing the film is in the reliable hands of a strong director.

For The Killer, David Fincher brings his trademark eye for detail, delivering an arthouse action thriller that moves with clockwork precision with its smooth camera moves and sharp edits, oozing cinematic coolness to the point of being completely cold.

Returning to acting after a 4-year hiatus doing F1 racing, Michael Fassbender fits his performance like a cog to a well-oiled machine. He acts through body language and voiceover, wryly playing a version of the director as a meticulous monologuing professional hitman who strictly abides by his own set of rules.

The Killer doesn't deliver the action thrills of a Jason Statham film or the psychological study in Collateral. It's in between and it rests on the audience to color in the meaning behind everything.

Is The Killer a deconstruction of the lone assassin film? Is it subverting all its tropes? Or is it a character study? Is Fassbender's killer even a sociopath?

Andrew Kevin Walker, the writer of Se7en, puts the audience in the assassin's head through an inner monologue, as he recites his rules and muses negatively about humanity.

The script doesn't provide a character to care about or even like. There's a particular moment when Michael Fassbender says "Hi!" like a normal person and it's darkly comic. For the common viewer, this can easily be an empty and cold experience.

The meaning I gleaned from the film, was the irony between what people say to themselves to create their identity, code or philosophy and how real life, indifferently by and chaotically, puts that to a test.

The technical details are what make this film.

It's the day in the life of an assassin, showing the mundanity of waiting for the perfect moment for the kill shot, the routines to stay incognito, the neat safe rooms, the dozens of passports in ziplock bags...

The decor of Michael Fassbender's home was striking, a big hollow living room with billowing veils where every corner is immediately visible.

The climatic hand-to-hand fight was impressive, well choreographed and shot. The moves had weight and the audience could feel the pain.

Zodiac is still Fincher's best film, as it has everything that he does best, making little factual on investigative details hugely significant and great natural performances chiseled from tiring the actors after multiple takes-I do wonder how many shots in Fincher's films are, in fact, the final take.

With Mank and The Killer, David Fincher seems to be entering a new phase of pursuing smaller niche topics experimentally and having cinematic fun for himself. Comparatively, The Killer seems like a fetishizing of obsessive compulsive behavior.

The best way to enjoy The Killer, I think, is to follow suit. Be OCD for 2 hours and see how many little details you can spot.

A popular Internet meme depicts a group of friends sipping Martinis on a pier laughing at a girl hanging on the plank edge, not seeing that she's tied to a bunch of sinking rocks pulling her down the ocean. It's titled, "You never know what someone is going through. Be kind. Always."

This, in essence, is the mantra behind Monster, a contemplative and poignant arthouse drama from director Hirokazu Kore-eda.

Saori, a single mother, notices strange behavior in her son Minato. His hair has been cut short. There's a cut on his ear. He's muttering about whether he's a "monster", even occasionally singing "Who's the Monster?" to himself.

After pushing his son for an answer, Minato reveals that he was physically abused by his teacher Mr. Hori. Saori confronts Mr. Hori at school for an answer, but to no avail, despite the insincere apologies from the reserved principal Fushimi...

Yuji Sakamoto's screenplay is structured like a turnstile, spinning back to the beginning, retelling the narrative from a new character's perspective, and revealing the bigger picture exclusively to the audience.

The revealed truth differs from the series of competing subjective accounts identifying the culprit like in Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, nor evokes the dramatic gasp of a grand plot twist like an M. Night Shyamalan film, Kore-eda is fascinated with the inner truths and secrets that reside within his characters that nobody else can see, and examining how people end up neglecting each other.

The ensemble cast delivers strong performances, most notably the two lead performances from child actors Soya Kurokawa and Hinata Hiiragi. It's beyond a kiddie cheek-pinching type performance and finds a beautiful balance between dramatic acting and slice of life like we are peering into their lives.

There's a glowing warmth to Hirokazu Kore-eda's films. He tackles heavy uncomfortable subject matter head-on, but with an unassuming sincerity towards the unsung, the unexpressed, and the unseen.

Kore-eda's inspiringly positive vibes rubbed off on me. Since then I've carried a tiny awareness for people around me, particularly people you greet every day but don't know a thing about, like bus drivers, security guards, or colleagues. In the blink of an eye, I sneak the same thought, hoping that that person is doing fine.

Under the Light is a modern crime drama from Zhang Yimou, director of Hero, The Great Wall and Shadow.

After a disastrous bus bombing incident in the fictional city of Jingang, police officer Su Jianling, son of Mayor Zheng Gang, conducts a crime investigation with the help of his ex-girlfriend and fellow officer Li Huilin. The clues lead towards rich businessman Li Zhitian, an associate of Zheng Gang, uncovering a bigger conspiracy.

Director Zhang Yimou unleashes his trademark color play, gorgeously dressing the city of Chongqing into a neo-noir neon cityscape punch-drunk with an array of bright fluorescents, mirror surfaces, and lens flares. All that visual intrigue, however, is wasted by the on-the-nose dialogue that gives everything away, erroneously placing the audience one step ahead of its story.

Chen Yu's script doesn't trust the audience enough to follow through the intended convoluted plot. It was intriguing in the first half and then progressively loses momentum with the characters explaining everything away and it all immediately becomes routine. All the moral murkiness created from the bright Blade Runner-like visuals is wasted.

Full River Red, the last Zhang Yimou film released earlier this year also written by Chen Yu, had a lot more bite and wit, giving effective narrative twists and turns. Perhaps Zhang and Chen are more confident working in the historical action genre as their grasp of crime film tropes seem greener.

All in all, I'd rather watch Full River Red one more time.

Asteroid City, the latest comedy from director Wes Anderson, is a series of fleeting moments of whimsy told through his signature style of balanced dolly shots and deadpan delivery from an impressive all-star cast.

The multiple storylines do not build to anything substantial. The film borders on self-parody, to the likes of the popular YouTube video, "What If Wes Anderson Directed X-Men?" In that same vein, Asteroid City could be titled "What If Wes Anderson Directed ET?"

That said, Anderson's precise execution of rhythm is still delightfully enjoyable, like watching a perfectly arranged model train set and admiring the colors, the designs, and the entire presentation moving in clockwork.

Wes Anderson will always make films in his trademark style. For Asteroid City, the style has taken the front seat from the substance, as I couldn't articulate what the story was about thematically and what Anderson was getting at.

There are fuzzy little hairballs floating about that could mean something, like the family rebuilding itself and grieving the death of the mother. There's something about people meeting at life's crossroads and changing each other's lives before moving onwards. At times, the story seemed to be about quarantine during COVID.

The meta-story-within-a-story structure, a documentary making-of about a fictional play, doesn't pack the same narrative punch as in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

I walked away with nothing but Freight Train by The Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group and Nancy Whiskey, a catchy Skiffle song that plays through the end credits, stuck in my head.

In the end, Asteroid City felt less like I watched a film, and more like a film had just passed through my body.

Chang'an is a Chinese animated film that gloriously celebrates the Tang Dynasty, the golden age of Chinese arts and culture, paying tribute to Tang Dynasty poetry.

The story chronicles the lifelong friendship between Li Bai, China's most famed poet, and Gao Shi, a general and politician, during the Tang Dynasty from its cultural peak until its eventual collapse from the An Lushan Rebellion.

With a wonderfully written script, Chang'an reaches its ambitions, viscerally showing daily life in the Tang dynasty, its flourishing culture, and communal appreciation for poetry-reciting up to 48 Tang poems throughout the film.

Poetry was an art form shared socially. On a night out drinking, poets would compose a poem on the spot to capture a moment of joy, similar to taking an Instagram selfie now, and the latest composition will be passed on verbally appreciatively from town to town in chin-stroking joy.

It was momentous when the film recited Li Bai's "Quiet Night Thought", the definitive poem that every Chinese person recites in school. It was wonderful learning the context behind how it was composed. Every Chinese teacher will be playing Chang'an clips for years to come.

The animation is used meticulously to recreate the capital city of Chang'an and allows an aesthetic freedom to switch between various tones and subgenres, easily switching from historical slice of life drama, wuxia, war film and into the imaginary.

At 169 minutes, Chang'an earns its long runtime with its rich story. I was transported back in time and seduced by the Tang way of life. Seeing a society so enveloped in art and expression was infectious and inspiring. The Li Bai and Gao Shi's friendship is also well developed and quite moving. Towards the end, when the Tang era was over, I felt a sorrow for a great time long gone.

Chang'an is one of the best films of 2023. I highly recommend it to everyone.

Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese's historical crime drama, is riveting and challenging cinema that deeply confronts American cultural trauma in 1920s Oklahoma, featuring three awards-worthy performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, and newcomer Lily Gladstone.

Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese's screenplay does a wickedly brilliant switcheroo, telling the story from the villains' perspective, framing them as protagonists and the Native American victims as the antagonists.

Scorsese has used this trope before. The gangsters from Goodfellas and Casino are anti-heroes who are funny and charming to be around, in movie terms. In Flower Moon, the characters are downright despicable irredeemable villains and it delivers a completely different experience.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro's on-screen personas, which we recognize as heroic and likable faces, are completely subverted 180° degrees. As the story takes their perspective, the audience subconsciously becomes complicit with their villainy.

Leonardo DiCaprio fits his portrayal of Ernest Burkhart in sync with Scorsese's role reversal approach-perhaps the most precise he's ever tuned his performance to a film's aesthetic. DiCaprio deep dives into the morally grey, morphing his face into a perpetual grimace like a Greek tragedy mask and becoming gradually murkier and murkier like a vat of white paint and black paint being slowly stirred for 3 hours.

I didn't know how to feel about the Ernest character the entire time. Does he love his wife and children? Or is he doing it just for the money? What does he want? Does he even know what he wants? Is he just foolish?

I kept guessing and flip-flopping until the end, and the question remained unanswered. The character frustrated me in a way that I've never been frustrated before from a film, which was quite the achievement.

Robert De Niro delivers his best performance since The Irishman in his most wicked character yet (and he's played the Devil), cleaning the slate of all his comedy grandpa roles of late. The William Hale character is abhorrently nonchalant about his evil towards the Native Americans, viscerally giving the depths of what people can do when they don't regard others as human. It's chilling to watch.

Lily Gladstone delivers an understated performance, acting completely with her eyes and body as the audience avatar, letting the story context work by itself and letting the audience's sympathies pour into her character.

The musical score by the late Robbie Robertson is eclectic and minimal, incorporating Native American music, blues and electric guitar. It is all scored suggestively. The Heartbeat theme is a pulsing suspicion-rousing Native drum beat has one looking over their shoulders and Robbie Robertson's solo vocal Still Standing was moving and heartfelt.

I loved this film. It's a near masterpiece and I don't use that word lightly.

The 3-hour 26-minute runtime, the film's most common criticism, was worth it. Could this have been a shorter film? Absolutely. If one needs to use the restroom, judge the right moment and just go.

In Scorsese's capable hands, I was fully engaged and was transported into a historical period and was shocked, moved and even laughed out loud at a few darkly comedic moments. The ending was especially brilliant, like a concert conductor whipping his baton to a dramatic finish and artfully launching the audience into contemplating the story immediately.

Based on the Southeast Asia fraud factory incidents in 2021, No More Bets is a solid tense Chinese crime thriller that presents the world of online scams in an eye-opening fashion, delivering unnerving suspense and shock with hard-hitting truth.

Through a promising overseas job offer, computer programmer Pan Sheng and model Anna Liang are lured into a fraud factory, trapped permanently in a slave labor camp where they are forced to commit cyber fraud in an online gambling scam. As the criminal network expands, Pan and Anna conspire to contact the police...

Director Shen Ao balances the multiple storylines well and maintains tight pacing, taking the audience through the logistical pipeline of a scam from beginning to end. The narrative kaleidoscopically presents the phone scam from different perspectives, ranging from the crime boss running the fraud factory, the computer programmer coding the scam app, the model fronting the gambling matches to the unfortunate victim taking the bait.

What draws the audience to No More Bets is knowing that this all happened in reality. It was shocking to think about how as technology develops, crime networks naturally become sophisticated and better organized too. The film incorporates the factual to its advantage, finding a style between documentary and fiction, like a dramatic film that's completely composed of the re-enactment scenes out of a true crime documentary.

There's been an exploding trend of crime films from Mainland China, with the immediate emergence of subgenres this year, like pulp crime with Lost in the Stars, crime procedurals like Dust to Dust, and neo-noir with Zhang Yimou's Under the Light. Government regulations seem to have opened up, allowing the depiction of gangsters and crime as long as public service announcements are tagged before the credits, specifically, title cards detailing every perpetrator's prison sentence and a public message discouraging committing said crime.

Come to think of it, Hollywood had a similar phrase with the Hayes Act from 1930 to the 1960s with its set of do's and don'ts in cinema. I hope this is a step towards more possibilities for Chinese cinema, opening up more fresh stories in new genres being told.

The Creator, a sci-fi adventure from Rogue One and Godzilla director Gareth Edwards, is a thinking man's action movie, exploring big ideas about our technological future against a gritty dystopian backdrop.

In 2070, after a nuclear bomb has been detonated in Los Angeles, a war between mankind and artificial intelligence ensues. Ex-special agent Joshua Taylor is recruited to find The Creator, an AI architect who has created a mysterious superweapon that can end the war.

The film is superbly cast with an unique ensemble of character actors that never would have worked together otherwise.

John David Washington continually solidifies his place as a leading action star post-Tenet, with both the physicality for the action and vulnerability for drama. Allison Janney's robot-hating villain steals all her scenes, notably one particularly chilling interrogation

The world building and production design are meticulously detailed and gorgeous. The CGI buildings mesh seamlessly with the natural landscapes, standing convincingly with solid weight.

However, the film falters in its narrative details and ends up creating a fascinating world that it doesn't do enough with, resulting in an entertaining but flawed movie that's shy of being great.

For every artistic detail that would bring me into the world of The Creator, there'd be other ones that would frustratingly take me out of it.

As much as I admire Gareth Edwards' eye for detail, his influences would stick out and take me out of the narrative. For example, the AI robots have Japanese written across them. Why would a sentient robot race label themselves at all? We assume they can read all human languages. The only explanation: Gareth Edwards loves Japanese animation.

Ken Watanabe's role was occasionally distracting. Why is there a Japanese robot who only speaks Japanese leading a group of Vietnamese robots? It's not like there can't be a Japanese-speaking robot living in Vietnam. I try to rationalize it, but it still begs for more explanation. Wouldn't it have been easier to set the story in Japan instead?

The script leaves a crucial gap in the AI backstory that would definitely clear up whether they are friendly or hostile, which the story merely hints at and leaves it open for interpretation. This was dissatisfying to be ambiguous with such a crucial plot point and leave it unanswered and unexplored.

All that said, I still enjoyed The Creator very much. It was refreshing to watch an original big-budget sci-fi film that's not an established intellectual property that had no corporate reason preventing any characters from dying nor an end credits scene teasing a sequel. Anything could have happened throughout the movie. That brought me back to a time when all movies used to be that way.

As a fan of Gareth Edwards' work, The Creator left more to be desired. Since so much of the film was well done in such good taste, I can't help but hold it to a higher standard, wishing it hit harder and ended stronger.

Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms is a sprawling epic fantasy adventure, the first chapter of a set trilogy adapted from the 16th-century fantasy novel Investiture of the Gods.

With seemingly unlimited resources and movie extras, Kingdom of Storms fully honors the sprawling multi-character mythic aspects of its source material. Visually exhilarating and action-packed, Wu'er Shan's vision is ambitious and earnest in visualizing the mythology in the highest possible quality.

Set at the end of the Shang dynasty, Prince Yin Shou is bewitched by fox demon Su Daji, who helps him ascend to the throne by orchestrating the murder of his father King Yi.

This act of unholy murder upsets the natural order and sets off a great curse upon the Shang kingdom, bringing famine and drought across the land. King Shou announces he will self-immolate on a sacrificial pyre to remove the curse.

Jiang Ziya, a disciple of the Immortals of Kunlun, sacrifices forty years of immortality training to deliver the Investiture Scroll to a worthy leader in the human realm, accompanied by guardian deities Nezha and Yang Jian. Anyone who opens the sacred scroll has the power to restore order to the realm and stop the Great Curse.

Upon receiving the scroll, King Shou discovers that it is powered by dead souls to help the ruler win any battle and now wants the power for himself, flip-flopping on his proposed sacrifice on the pyre. Realizing that the king is unworthy to wield such power, Jiang Ziya escapes with the scroll out of the palace and becomes a fugitive running from the army...

Mandarin popstar Fei Xiang, AKA Kris Phillips, delivers a captivating larger-than-life leading performance. Fei Xiang walks the line gracefully between fantasy and the historical epic, embracing the melodramatic theatricality of strutting bare chested in open robes and subtly showing the king's inner descent into total depravity.

As Jiang Ziya, Huang Bo brings charming humor against the fantastical backdrop and brings a levity that keeps things entertaining. I hope to see more of him in the sequels. Li Xuejian steals the show as Duke Ji Chang, bringing gravitas as a tragic victim of King Shou's villainy.

Wu'er Shan shrewdly uses established comic book film language to tell the story. The gods have a battle mode, similar to how Marvel superheroes switch on their helmets, with set elemental powers and individual color schemes. Similarly, there are two end credits scenes setting up the next movie, just like a Marvel film.

This shorthand is great help for any viewer who's coming in clean with no knowledge of the source material. Unfortunately, like in most Mainland Chinese productions, the subtitles are shown in rapid fire. The screen is incredibly busy with its dialogue subtitles, location and character name title cards flashing at a blink-and-you-miss-it rate. Why does the words have to be taken down so fast?

Overall, I was in awe throughout Kingdom of Storms by its high production values and was whisked away into its world and story. It's doubly exciting for Chinese audiences to witness mythology finally visualized with this level of special effects. Only one particular demon character looked inferior to the rest of the CGI and I hope that'll be improved upon.

I eagerly await the second chapter.

With its dark atmosphere and gothic setting, A Haunting in Venice, the latest Kenneth Branagh Hercule Poirot mystery, deters from the previous whimsical saccharine tone and refreshingly ventures into the supernatural ghostly territory. Branagh delivers a more satisfying and efficient murder mystery, easily the best out of the series.

Kenneth Branagh has tremendous fun playing Hercule Poirot and is settling comfortably into the role, this time toning down the glamourous trademark mustache and the gags about his obsessive compulsions. Branagh's directing role takes the spotlight, building up the horror atmosphere in the Venetian mansion set, allowing the Poirot character to serve the central mystery more functionally as the detective, devoting less attention to his bag of quirks.

Branagh's less-is-more approach works well. This is a quieter, shorter film than its predecessors with a notably less star-studded ensemble. Sometimes, one can gauge suspicion by how big of a star is playing the suspect. As the two biggest stars in the ensemble, Michelle Yeoh and Tina Fey play their roles with restraint and never give away any clues.

The Agatha Christie locked room mystery formula is an all-time classic and I'm gullibly fooled by them every time, whether it's the novels, TV shows or movies.

Branagh's two previous adaptations, Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile have been made into films before. Being the very first film adaptation of Agatha Christie's novel Halloween Party, A Haunting in Venice was doubly fun for me not knowing who the killer was walking into it.

Overall, A Haunting in Venice is an entertaining fun time for the family, given the children are old enough to handle the occasional scary moments. Murder mystery fans will get a kick whispering their theories in the dark with their friends and eagerly await the reveal at the end.

Lost in the Stars is a Chinese Hitchcockian-style mystery crime thriller that grips the audience and keeps them guessing with endless twists and turns. It's pulpy, melodramatic entertainment that burns brightest in the moment, assaulting the audience with questions but never providing enough time or the breathing room to solve them.

While celebrating their first anniversary at a Thai island resort, He Fei discovers his wife Muzi has mysteriously gone missing. Unable to file a missing persons case with the police and his visa about to expire, He Fei wakes up to find an unknown woman claiming to be his wife and that all the photographs on his phone have been replaced.

Desperate for help, He Fei hires Chen, a renowned hotshot lawyer, to disprove the mystery woman's identity and find the real Muzi.

Directors Rui Cui and Xiang Liu hook the audience from the beginning and keep the plot moving like a freight train. Yilong Zhu, Ni Ni, and Janice Man tune their performances to serve the mystery like a cog in the machine, finding the sweet spot between who their character appears to be and revealed to be. Little inconsistencies spotted are actually all paid off later in a fun way.

The final reveal... is so ridiculous that it's technically a cheat. I notably laughed out loud as the film blatantly switches genres to engineer an unguessable reveal.

It's the equivalent of revealing Darth Vader is a woman so the audience has no chance of guessing he's Luke Skywalker's father, if that makes sense.

By that point, the fun had already been had. I already cared and can't take it back. The journey was in guessing what was happening at the moment, less in the reveal itself.

The best mysteries place the answer in plain sight and deceptively steer the audience from seeing the obvious the entire time. Lost in the Stars falls short of this; its mystery is ultimately not sophisticated enough to warrant a rewatch. The mood, intrigue, and soap opera melodrama of it all still make it an entertaining one-time watch.

Oppenheimer is a technically impressive production with a stellar cast supporting an award-worthy lead performance by Cillian Murphy. Director Christopher Nolan structures a three-hour biopic as a nail-biting thriller, a literal ticking time bomb. It's a brilliant spin on the biopic, even to its detriment when the story requires quieter moments.

Cillian Murphy captures J. Robert Oppenheimer's inner complexity, wrestling between moral dilemma, scientific ambition, and patriotism. This intimate character portrait viscerally shows the weight of the world on his shoulders, illustrating his need for love from multiple women, and is too occupied to return it.

It's psychologically unnerving to experience Oppenheimer's story from his point of view. I caught myself rooting for Oppenheimer and pinched myself, "Wait, no. He's creating the atomic bomb. I can't root for him." Then, I immediately remembered that the man had already finished the job. Thus, there was an immense dread watching the events unfold.

Robert Downey Jr. Morphs into Senator Lewis Strauss, a reminder of his acting talent before Iron Man. Downey drops his usual box of tricks, plays a non-showy, uncool part with no distinct zingers, and creates a fresh onscreen presence.

Unfortunately, the film doesn't spend enough time developing Senator Strauss for him to be an effective antagonist. His story builds to a climactic moment that is more head-scratching than shocking. Immediately after the credits rolled, I read up on Senator Strauss to verify whether his petty jealousy of Oppenheimer existed. Whether this Mozart-Salieri dynamic was true or false, it wasn't dramatized to full effect.

Oppenheimer is disappointingly a much chattier film than anticipated and never holds the audience's hands. Even with a basic knowledge of historical events and the key players, it was challenging to keep up with all the multiple characters and information firing at a breakneck pace for three hours.

While it can be argued that shooting dialogue on IMAX cameras immerses the audience in the drama, Hoyte Van Hoytema's IMAX photography was more of a marketing ploy as part of Nolan's brand than a storytelling tool. The bomb test sequence, which the entire film counts down towards, is an exhilarating cinematic set piece but it left a lot to be desired for the rest of the runtime.

The latter half oddly focuses on politics. Oppenheimer's guilt and the aftermath of the bomb, which I thought was the more dramatic and intriguing story, comes up short. The things that Nolan chose to visualize onscreen and the things he left offscreen were perplexing and undramatic.

Oppenheimer is far from being Christopher Nolan's best film. It's not a bad film, but it's the least entertaining and lowest in his filmography.

Nolan's artistic highpoint is still in Inception, where he perfectly balanced exposition and spectacle, pushing the audiences' mental quota and even accurately predicting when the audience needed to be reminded whose dream it was.

Every film since Inception has leaned towards the experimental, tipping the scales over to spectacle with gradually less explanation of what's going on, trusting the audience will figure it out as they're experiencing it. What he used to do was just more entertaining; the cerebral aspect of his high concept ideas require more explanation and constant updates.

There's a trend of watching Nolan movies more than once to fully grasp his nonlinear complex narratives. Admittedly, repeat viewings were fun until Tenet, where understanding the plot felt like a logistical chore. Nolan's storytelling has leaned into complexity so much that it's become exploitative of the audiences' wallets. A film should be understood within one viewing. Can we all agree on that?

Back in the day, I'd rewatch Oppenheimer again in theaters with the humble assumption that I overlooked the story, technical details, or overall craft. This time, I distinctly felt there was nothing to reexamine at all. Oppenheimer just simply doesn't come together as well as his past films. It just didn't explode...

While it is technically impressive, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is a muddled middling effort that's best enjoyed as Harrison Ford's final bow in his most iconic role and less as a great adventure movie.

Director James Mangold does a great job balancing all the genre elements, returning to the franchise's roots post-Crystal Skull. He stays within Steven Spielberg and George Luca's established franchise parameters and brings his style, delivering a polarizing climax.

Walking in with low expectations, I wasn't expecting Dial of Destiny to top Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade (my favorite of the series). My only hope was that Destiny would be better than Temple of Doom and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And it was. It fits rightfully in third place.

On first viewing, it's decently entertaining. The opening segment featuring a de-aged Harrison Ford works seamlessly and flows naturally with the series. The action set pieces are fun even though the CGI action lacks the sense of jeopardy compared to the real stunts in previous films.

The film builds towards an insane climax that will likely divide audiences. It genuinely surprised me and I went along with it, appreciating its boldness and how rare it is to pull off shock in blockbusters these days.

However, upon reflecting on the details afterward, Dial of Destiny falls apart from the message-heavy political scriptwriting that's pervaded recent Disney productions.

As a big fan of Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's talents are better served by writing and acting in her material. Her presence in tentpole blockbusters as a female voice is a forced endeavor. Her character Helena's sole purpose is to disrespect and tear down the shrine of the franchise character. It's incomprehensible how this props her up as a strong female lead and why that is appealing to movie audiences.

The dynamic rang false. Why does Indiana Jones care for Helena so much when she's so awful to him? What's worse is Helena drives the action in the entire story. It's supposed to be an Indiana Jones movie. There were so much better things to do with the screen time.

I couldn't help imagining if Ke Huy Quan had won his Oscar two years earlier, Short Round could have returned as the sidekick instead. That would have had emotional resonance.

Harrison Ford keeps the film engaging and believable with effortless charm. There's a twinkle in his eyes whenever he's playing Indiana Jones, more so than in his other roles and it is infectious. Although the film addresses Ford's age, the magic is still there. It still feels like Indiana Jones can go anywhere and do anything.

It's too bad the film doesn't seem to think so.

The Flash is a solidly entertaining, funny, albeit messy multiverse superhero adventure. In its best moments, The Flash offers a glimpse of the DCEU with a fully established Justice League team, despite arriving too late to build meaningful momentum. For DC fans, it is a bittersweet farewell.

Like his work on the two IT films, Andy Muschietti skillfully strikes a balance between character-driven drama and big blockbuster spectacle and crafts a light-toned adventure that's unafraid of its profound darker moments. He places Barry Allen's emotional journey front and center and tells an origin story without having to start from the very beginning.

Screenwriter Christina Hodson populates the film with fan service moments that are unabashedly geeky and dare to be weird and obscure. The humor is well-timed and organic to the situations, not delivered rapidly to cover up sadness.

The story's emotional core, centered on Barry Allen's desire to save his mother, is effectively touching and it emotionally justifies its multiverse storyline over other recent multiverse stories.

Ezra Miller's performance is nuanced and multifaceted, showcasing a tremendous range between the comedic and dramatic moments. Michael Keaton owns the Batman role but is locked into repeating his signature lines like a house DJ. Sasha Calle brings a cool dark edge to her Supergirl but would have benefitted from more character development given a late entrance.

Plagued by behind-the-scenes problems, The Flash's troubled production sure could have used its hero's time-traveling abilities. With multiple leadership changes and Ezra Miller's controversies, there is a perpetual corporate presence that hovers over the film, most evident in its final act. There's a pressure to set up where the story goes next but paradoxically, everyone knows this is the end. It concludes as an odd little shrug, as if to say, "We don't know. We'll see."

Andy Muschietti's aesthetic design of the time-traveling special effects, intended to be plastic-looking, has gone over the audiences' heads, who are visually registering it as Playstation 2-level effects. The final climactic battle is set in a blank-looking desert that distracts from the main storyline of Barry saving his mother.

Overall, The Flash is an entertaining film with heart but ultimately falls short of being a great comic book film.

A firm plan makes all the difference.

Shin Kamen Rider is a fun kitschy throwback to the1970s style tokusatsu genre, a meta re-telling of the Kamen Rider origin story, as part of his Shin Japan Heroes Universe tribute series.

Shin Kamen Rider is a silly piece of nostalgic cheese that might not be for everyone. Hideaki Anno's straight-faced direction will come off as a quirky spin exclusively for fans who grew up on the old Kamen Rider shows. However, first-timers may feel completely alienated trying to get in on the joke.

At its two-hour runtime, the script is episodic, equivalent to roughly four 30-minute episodes on TV, each complete with its villain.

The deadpan acting style that Hideaki Anno has maintained through these 3 Shin films remains an odd choice; the actors seem to be performing experimental theater or in a Yorgo Lanthimos film.

Every feeling the characters have is blatantly stated out loud, and as a result, the film feels more told than shown, focused on the plot, not the characters. I don't recall the acting in old Tokusatsu shows being this way, so it's not a matter of tribute. It's as if Anno is stripping these established cultural icons to their bare skeleton and just presenting them through chilled museum glass.

This cold bland performance style does work better here for Kamen Rider than in Godzilla or Ultraman. Anno builds in quiet meditative moments of the Kamen Rider contemplating his power and responsibilities that worked well. If deconstruction was indeed Hideaki Anno's goal, this is the closest he's achieved it.

The magic kicks in during the action sequences. The old-school special effects, monster makeup, and the theme song all work together and in these short moments, I was whisked away back to my childhood. It was a simpler time when watching actors don silly masks and fight stuntmen dressed in rubber monster costumes on TV was sufficient entertainment.

Once it gets going, it doesn't matter that it's cheesy, the effects are shoddy, or that Kamen Rider uses the same technique to finish off the monsters every time. Those moments are quite fun.

Everything else in between, however, is quite the endurance test.