I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the looming release of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, it seemed like a good time to reflect on how so much of the fate of the Marvel Cinematic Universe came to rely on he sequel to Doctor Strange.
Doctor Strange was a solid midtier entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It was warmly, but not raptuously, received by both audiences and critics. However, there is something fascinating in how the studio has positioned Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness as essentially the franchise’s first true “event” movie since Avengers: Endgame. Indeed, there’s a surprising amount riding on the film, following the performance of the previous three Marvel Studios films and the success of Spider-Man: No Way Home and The Batman.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new piece at The Escapist yesterday. One of the big news stories of this week concerned the apparent (albeit accidental) censorship of an episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier on Disney+.
While the matter was eventually resolved following news coverage and outcry on social media, there is something unsettling about how easily that mistake happened and how readily it could have been missed or overlooked. It underscores the risks of trusting companies like Disney to serve as the digital curators of their own legacy, particularly in a landscape where so much of film and television has alreayd been lost. In some ways, it suggests that the transition to streaming has rendered film and television truly disposable in a way that they haven’t really been in almost half a century.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the upcoming release of Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at one of the more inert major franchises of the past decade or so.
The success of the Harry Potter movies made the extension of the franchise inevitable; and the intellectual property has expanded into theme parks and stage shows. However, the attempts to expand the world into feature films has met with frustrating results. So far, the Fantastic Beasts franchise has felt a little lifeless and inert, a blockbuster franchise driven by exposition and apocalyptic spectacle, rather than allowing the audience to really immerse themselves in the world as they did with the earlier stories.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I’m thrilled to be launching movie reviews on The Escapist. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’m honoured to contribute a three-minute film review of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which is in theatres in the U.K. and Ireland on Friday and in the United States next week.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With The Batman continuing to perform well at the box office, it seemed like an opportunity to take another look at the film.
Much has been made of how much The Batman owes to David Fincher’s se7en and Zodiac. However, the film also owes a lot to the director’s work on both Fight Club and The Social Network. At its core, The Batman is a story about masculine violence and what happens when life is lived behind a screen. The result is a film that manages to riff on some of the most interesting films of the past quarter-century, filtering them through the lens of the superhero genre and reframing them for a modern context.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new piece at The Escapist this evening. We’re doing a series of recaps and reviews of Star Trek: Picard, which is streaming weekly on Paramount+. The third episode of the second season released this week, and it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the series.
One of the interesting aspects of the second season of Star Trek: Picard has been the way in which it has been drawing more overtly from classic Star Trek tropes, with the season taking a number of cues from Star Trek: First Contact. With the third episode, the season reveals some method to this approach, offering a reframing of the movie’s basic premise that places a greater emphasis on the familiar narrative template employed by Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new piece at The Escapist this evening. One of the big controversies this past week has concerned the critical reception to Turning Red.
The response to the film has been overwhelmingly positive, but there was one prominent review that argued that the film was “less universal” than previous Pixar films. It is interesting to unpack that idea, to wonder what it is exactly that makes Turning Red less universal and also to interrogate the power of cinema as a medium to generate empathy. In doing so, film has the power to take something very specific and render it universal.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist on Friday. With the release of The Batman this weekend, it seemed a good opportunity to take a look at the film, and what it says about the state of the superhero genre.
The superhero genre is arguably the dominant mode of American blockbuster cinema, the prism through which the populist form must be viewed in its present incarnation. Perhaps the superhero is best understood as a descendent of the classic pop archetypes like the cowboy or the gangster. However, very few superhero films actively engage with what that transition actually means, what makes the superhero a more modern American archetype than the cowboy or the gangster. The Batman is the rare superhero movie engaged with this question.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist yesterday evening. With The Batman releasing this weekend, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at Matt Reeves’ take on the Caped Crusader.
Reeves has discussed the influence of seventies cinema on The Batman. The film draws heavily from paranoid films of the era, movies like The French Connection, Klute and The Conversation. However, it is more than just nostalgia at play. The Batman finds an interesting thematic overlap between the seventies and the present day, particularly in its recurring fascination with voyeurism and surveillance. The Batman is many things, but it’s also a story about the importance of looking into the darkness, but realising that looking alone is not enough.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
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