Visually stunning and manages to step up the formal experimentation in cinematic animation that made INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE so outstanding. Miles (Shameik Moore) has a strong arc that does more than recapitulate the first film.

The taut script and one-shot cinematography build tension terrifically in the first half. Like Philip Barantini’s BOILING POINT, it feels as if the rooms are filling up with too much gas and will inevitably burst into flames. This rising tension underscores the film’s expression that all of this is important: even a regional hairdressing competition is life or death to the people in it because it matters to them. As Cleve (Clare Perkins) says, they may not have A-Levels but they can cut hair and that makes all their emotion, all their tension, all their rage and all their love justified.

I love mountains and have a real weakness for mountaineering documentaries. What distinguishes TOUCHING THE VOID from American-produced documentaries about Nepalese or American mountaineers is its attention to detail and its emotional rawness. This isn’t about what Margaret Grebowicz in her excellent cultural critique of mountaineering culture refers to as “[t]he image of climbing-as-success” naturalising capitalism’s “relentless drive for more”: this is about two men who admit to personal flaws, get annoyed with themselves, admit to irritations with each other even when it deflates the image of the ruggedly determined young (white male) mountaineer. It makes for a more human story than even FREE SOLO.

Just fine. A whodunnit murder mystery comedy that doesn’t stand up to recent takes on the genre like KNIVES OUT or SEE HOW THEY RUN but manages to skate along nicely on Jon Hamm’s charm and screen presence. It could definitely have been goofier with its comedy and leaned into Hamm’s comedic skills: he’s long overdue a meaty comedic role and the character of Fletch just isn’t it. The film doesn’t seem to know who it wants Fletch to be or what tone it wants to take so it comes across as toneless. Nice to see Kyle MacLachlan.

After ALIEN, ALIENS put the franchise on a path that it didn’t have to take. There was a path available where ALIEN 2 continues with the New Hollywood feel of ALIEN, where it explores the mysterious cosmic Lovecraftian horror of LV-426 and the alien creature, where it leans into the elements that made ALIEN such a masterpiece. Instead, like STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN, ALIENS pulls the blossoming franchise into the black hole of blockbuster action films and starts what my co-host Jim Ross refers to as the franchise’s ongoing identity crisis. ALIENS is a very good action movie: solid production design, a terrific screenplay (apart from some corny James Cameron dialogue), and great performances across the board. But I mourn for the ALIEN sequels that we never got because of what this film is.

Beautifully shot, joyously inventive and subversive, emotionally real. Most importantly, RYE LANE captures the messy energy of South London, a place I called home for the better part of a decade. It’s not just the places in Peckham and Brixton that I walked past a hundred times, it’s the people that the film depicts who all have that ineffable South London quality that makes the place a real community within a metropolis. Capturing that spirit on film is nothing short of incredible.

A film where the central thesis—that visual language in cinema, primarily shot composition, both perpetuates and is produced by patriarchal ways of seeing women that contribute to the mainstream cinema industry’s excess of economic discrimination against women and sexual assault against women—is obviously and inarguably true but the presentation of that thesis severely hampers the power of the film. Rather than a recorded lecture, this would work better as a montage piece, allowing the juxtapositions and repeated cinematic structures speak for themselves. There’s a lack of confidence in how the film uses ominous music to direct the audience and several examples are more nuanced than Menkes allows.

Following on from GUARDIANS’s focus on the human, the overarching theme of the Guardians films is represented in the moment when Ego (Kurt Russell) tells Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) that while he’s alive Peter is a god and if Peter kills him he’ll be just like everybody else. Peter replies, “What’s so wrong with that?”. It reveals the Guardians films’ existentialist theme of killing your gods—be they Ego, Thanos, the High Evolutionary or anyone else who claims that their act of creation bestows power over you—and embracing your imperfect, broken self. Simon Zek on Kermode & Mayo’s Take this week puts it beautifully by saying that we’re not Avengers, “[i]n fact, we’re all Guardians: a ragtag rabble of misfits and freaks: a broken family with failings and foibles but we all have our place in the family[.]”

One shot that hit me this viewing was the quick shot towards the end of Dey (John C. Reilly) returning home after the obligatory Marvel third act battle to his family, his partner and his daughter. John C. Reilly has about four minutes of screentime in this film and thirty seconds of that is seeing this minor character happy with his family who are alive because of the Guardians. It’s a moment of groundedness among the cosmic that serves as a synecdoche of what James Gunn (and on this first film, Nicole Perlman) achieve with the Guardians of the Galaxy films: a respect for characters, even minor ones, and an emotional understanding of the human (/ Xandarian) concerns behind the smashy-crashy action.

My reaction to this film was heavily influenced by the fact I last saw the Guardians characters in the Avengers films where they were done dirty. And so it was very notable to me what a script can do with the characters when the writer/director sincerely engages with them as characters rather than as IP to be smushed together. This direction and emotional sincerity also plays out in the performances and Gunn gets much better performances from Chris Pratt and Dave Bautista than in either of those Avengers films.