I’m thrilled to be launching movie and television 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 five-minute film review of The Flash, which was released in cinemas this weekend.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: continuity, dc, dc comics, Ezra Miller, flash, review, the escapist, the flash | Leave a comment »
We’ll be running weekly reviews of Secret Invasion at The Escapist. But first, a review of the episodes that were previewed for press.
For months, the gossip has been that Marvel Studios have seen Secret Invasion as their answer to Andor, a show that could revitalise interest in a franchise that has been in something of a slow and steady decline, with disappointments like Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Unfortunately, Secret Invasion really doesn’t live up to that potential. It offers glimpses of a show tht aspires to push the shared universe outside of its comfort zone, but lacks the necessary killer instinct.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Television | Tagged: andor, disney, marvel, Marvel Studios, secret invasion, streaming, the escapist | Leave a comment »
We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. With the recent wrap-up of shows like Barry and Succession, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at what makes a great television finale.
Interestingly, from The Sopranos to The Leftovers, one of the hallmarks of a truly impressive television finale is the way that it leaves room for the audiece. After all, television shows involve considerable investment from viewers, and offer a chance for the audience to really get to know and understand the characters and the themes of this world. The best of these finales are clear endings to the story being told, but which leave room for the viewer to reach their own conclusion about these characters and their journey.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Television | Tagged: arcs, audience, Barry, endings, finale, out of focus, Succession, Television, television show, the escapist, the leftovers | Leave a comment »
I published a new piece at The Escapist yesterday. We’re doing a series of recaps and reviews of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is streaming weekly on Paramount+. The second season will premiere later this week.
Strange New Worlds is an inherently nostalgic piece of Star Trek, a throwback to a kind of franchise storytelling that was inexoribly rooted in the realities of nineties television. Indeed, given the decline of the franchise during Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise, there is a solid argument to be made that this mode of storytelling was specifically tied to the medium of syndicated mass media broadcast television during the nineties, which makes it an awkward and uncomfortable fit for the modern age of streaming media.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Star Trek | Tagged: Broadcast, format, medium, star trek, star trek: strange new worlds, strange new worlds, streaming, televison | Leave a comment »
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. Given the summer blockbuster season will see the release of Fast X, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Part One, it seemed as good a point as any to ask a seemingly simple question with a surprisingly complex answer: what even is a movie these days?
In theory, it has always been relatively easy to define a film. Not only is that the name of the medium itself, it has always historically been a self-contained unit of narrative. There is a palpable difference between a film and a television show, or a film and a stage play. However, in recent years, those boundaries have become a bit more porous, and it’s come to feel just a little bit like blockbusters are just very long and very expensive instalments in long-runing television shows.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: cliffhangers, dune: part two, fast x, film, format, medium, mission: impossible - dead reckoning part one, spider-man: across the spider-verse, Television | Leave a comment »
I published a new piece at The Escapist yesterday evening. With the release of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at Michael Bay’s Transformers films.
Bay’s Transformers films are not good. It’s important to stress that. However, they are a fascinating piece of blockbuster cinema, the work of a genuine action auteur who bends an intellectual property so completely and so thoroughly to his artistic sensibility. It’s something that could only have happened at a particular moment in Hollywood, in the transition from director-driven blockbusters to brand-driven mega-franchises, and exists as a historical quirk on the bubble between those two trends.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: auteur, Filmmaking, franchise, hollywood, intellectual property, mark wahlberg, michael bay, toys, transformers, violence | Leave a comment »
Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and with special guests Graham Day and Deirdre Molumby, This Just In is a subset of The 250 podcast, looking at notable new arrivals on the list of the 250 best movies of all-time, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users.
This time, Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.
Sixteen months into his career as Brooklyn’s one-and-only Spider-Man, teenager Miles Morales is reunited with his old friend from another universe, Gwen Stacy. However, Gwen brings word of a team of multiversal spider-people headed by the mysterious Miguel O’Hara. Miles quickly discovers that things are not as he expects, and that membership of this team may come at too high a price.
At time of recording, it was ranked the 19th best movie of all time on the Internet Movie Database.
Filed under: This Just In | Tagged: animated, belief, comic books, coming of age, defund the police, deirdre molumby, god, graham day, male bodies, miguel o'hara, miles morales, multiverse, Oscar Isaac, podcast, politics, sony, spider man, spider-man: across the spider-verse, Spidey, superhero, The 250, The Talk | Leave a comment »
I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the release of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, it seemed like as good a time as any to reflect on one of the blights on modern big-budget blockbusters: the bland computer-generated third act throwdown in a big empty space with no sense of geography or texture.
In recent years, it has become increasingly common for these sorts of spectacles to climax with a gigantic final battle in a vast computer-generated wasteland, with no defining features or landmarks, but instead just a big empty space with no sense of where objects are in relationship to one another. Rise of the Beasts is perhaps the most egregious example of the trend, but there are plenty of others: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Avengers: Endgame, Avengers: Infinity War, Black Panther. It’s a hollow, empty, cardboard world.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: Battle, cgi, civilians, Computer-generated imagery, computer-generated wastelands, death, destruction, finale, in the frame, marvel, mcu, rise of the beasts, scale, spectacle, the escapist, third act, transformers, urban devastation, war on terror | Leave a comment »
I’m thrilled to be launching movie and television 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 five-minute film review of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, which was released in cinemas this weekend.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: 3mr, review, rise of the beasts, the escapist, three minute review, transformers, transformers: rise of the beasts | Leave a comment »
We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. With the release of the third season of I Think You Should Leave this week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look the show.
It is ultimately reductive to try to boil a sketch comedy show down to a single thematic idea. However, there is something fascinating in how I Think You Should Leave operates as a sketch show that isn’t just perfectly suited to internet distribution – short clips, memes, absurdist gags – but also how it feels like a show that is in some ways about the internet. Obviously, not in a literal sense, in that I Think You Should Leave is about awkward social situations. However, it captures the sense in which online spaces can truly break social interactions.
You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.
Filed under: Television | Tagged: comedy, escapist, I Think You Should Leave, internet, netflix, Online, out of focus, Sketch comedy, social media, tim robinson | Leave a comment »
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