World of films

      You wake up on a giant spaceship called the Avalon, heading towards an off-world colony, with 4,999 fellow travellers still in cryosleep. Your pod has malfunctioned: there are 90 years left of a 120-year journey, and you’re entirely alone, save for an android bartender which can only simulate empathy, and bears this creepy resemblance to a never-more-dapper Michael Sheen.        The budget is big for this whole hypothesis, and you’re Chris Pratt , so you get to wander around the empty corridors of what looks like a broken strand of DNA gliding through the cosmos, fully equipped with bay-window pool, holographic dance-offs and a large number of cleaning robots. How long before you attempt suicide?      Pratt’s character in Passengers , a scruffy mechanic called Jim, quickly exhausts the entertainment options, which luckily, for his own sake, aren’t limited to in-flight viewings of Passengers. Within a year, h...

        Fewer beasts, more crimes. This second adventure in JK Rowling’s movie series about unworldly young magizoologist Newt Scamander, engagingly played by  Eddie Redmayne , takes the inevitable darker and more sombre turn. The storyline is initially clotted with sneaky narrative about-turns, reactivating characters from the last film, rescuing them from apparent destruction or memory loss; there are unresolved mysteries and a general sense of disquieting forces and intricate implications that may take many films to sort out.         Rowling’s Wizarding World epic includes specific references to the Hogwarts universe that we already know and love, younger versions of the old characters, and so in some ways has a more prequelised look, with hints of an origin myth. But as so often with fantasy adventure, the stormclouds are rolling in and the story is inexorably weighted towards a titanic battle of good and evil. It is just as s...

     First of all,  Maleficent (2014) is one of my favorite live-action Disney movies  . It was probably my favorite until Aladdin came out this year. So I was really excited for this sequel. Part of me wondered how and why they’d make a sequel to the movie, but it was everything I’d hoped it would be. Completing the story about how the story of “evil Maleficent” we know of in Sleeping Beauty spread. There were a couple of great nods to the original Disney movie which I loved. And so many great new things.        This story takes place five years after the first Maleficent story. Aurora and the Prince Phillip (yes, that’s a different actor, but just as cute) have been together for five years now and right off the top we know in true fairy tale style, a wedding is on the table. But things quickly take a turn for the worst and they keep getting worse and worse. This movie is much more action-packed than the first installment. Fille...

      It’s hardly surprising that this, perhaps the most “Tarantino-esque” of all Quentin Tarantino’s movies to date, is a love letter to Hollywood. Who has been more vocal about his passion for the movies, in all their glorious (and inglourious) variety, than Tarantino? And who has been more promiscuous with his affections, flirting with everything from grindhouse and exploitation flicks to martial arts, westerns and second world war adventures?     But cinema is a notoriously fickle mistress. And Tarantino is a man who clearly relishes the concept of revenge. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a film that is as much about the movie industry as it is about the Manson family crimes that rocked it, is a work of infatuation, certainly. But if it’s a love letter, it’s the kind tinged with the grasping anguish and stab of bitterness that comes from knowing that the object of affection is almost certainly eyeing up a new favourite.   ...

Joker  is a 2019 American  psychological thriller  film directed by  Todd Phillips , who co-wrote the screenplay with  Scott Silver . The film, based on  DC Comics  characters, stars  Joaquin Phoenix  as the  Joker . Joker  was produced by  Warner Bros. Pictures ,  DC Films , and Joint Effort in association with  Bron Creative  and  Village Roadshow Pictures , and distributed by Warner Bros.

      Memory is as much shaped by who we are as who we yearn to be. What we live isn’t so easily catalogued; it mutates, skitters, and fades in the face of the prevailing story we dictate about who we imagine ourselves to be. But what happens when memories long forgotten and inescapable come to the forefront? Who do we become then? It’s this emotional bramble of yearning and personal storytelling that is the engine of director Andy Muschietti’s   It Chapter Two .         The film’s focus on memory sometimes works to its advantage, reminding us in plentiful flashbacks that what illuminated and elevated its predecessor was the tender, sparkling chemistry of its young cast. The film draws a distinct line from the hurts of the characters’ younger selves to the wounds they carry as adults 27 years later when the film picks up. They drop their respective lives in order to return to Derry and finish the battle that they started long ...