agency | the m0vie blog

421. Snow White – Ani-May 2025 (#—)

Posted on June 1, 2025 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, this week with special guests Luke Dunne and Ciara Moloney, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every second Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode between them.

This week, Mark Webb’s Snow White.

In a magical kingdom, an evil queen plots the murder of a beautiful young princess, who is forced to flee into the woods and find shelter with the most unlikely of allies.

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the worst movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

Continue reading →

Filed under: The Bottom 100, This Just In | Tagged: 2025, adaptation, agency, audience expectations, celebrity PR, characterizations, Christopher Nolan, ciara moloney, cinema, conspiracy theories, creative collaboration, cultural implications, cultural significance, disney, evil queen, female agency, film artistry, film critic, human experiences, imdb, Irish diaspora, luke dunne, mark webb, Mary McDonough, PhD completion, podcast, polarizing reactions, production history, Rachel Ziegler, representation, snow white, social issues, socio-political dynamics, storytelling, The 250, The 250 podcast, themes, tom cruise, traditional characters | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On The Finale of “The Last of Us”…

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Darren

I am doing weekly reviews of The Last of Us at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Sunday evening while the show is on, looking at the video game adaptation as the show progresses. This week, the show’s finale.

The Last of Us wraps up a phenomenal season with a decidedly small-scale season finale. Look for the Light is one of the shortest episodes of the season, and is remarkable for its tight focus and narrative efficiency. The series remains tightly focused on Joel and Ellie, building to a climax that is at once tragic and inevitable. The result is a very satisfying wrap-up to a very impressive debut season.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: agency, autonomy, ethics, finale, hbo, morality, the escapist, the last of us, themes | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Video! On How “Black Widow” Demonstrates the MCU’s Humour Problem…

Posted on July 27, 2021 by Darren

So, as I have mentioned before, I am launching a new video series as a companion piece to In the Frame at The Escapist. The video will typically launch with every second Monday’s article, and be released on the magazine’s YouTube channel the following week. This is kinda cool, because we’re helping relaunch the magazine’s film content – so if you can throw a subscription our way, it would mean a lot.

With the release of Black Widow earlier in the month, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at the film. In particular, the use of humour in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general and in Black Widow in particular. In its best moments, the Marvel Cinematic Universe uses humour to enrich and deepen its themes. However, in Black Widow, it undermines them.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: agency, black widow, comedy, humour, improv, in the frame, jokes, natasha, omar ahmed, the escapist, video | Leave a comment »

New Podcast! The Escapist Movie Podcast – “Will Black Widow Have Us Russian Back to Cinemas?”

Posted on July 13, 2021 by Darren

The Escapist have launched a movie podcast, and I was thrilled to join Jack Packard and Richard Newby for the twenty-first episode of the year. With the release of Black Widow on streaming and in cinemas, there was only one movie to discuss. So we went for a deep dive into Marvel’s interquel, its character-centric movie for a dead Avenger.

You can listen to back episodes of the podcast here, click the link below or even listen directly.

Filed under: Movies, Podcasts! | Tagged: agency, black widow, box office, comedy, feminism, films, humour, jack packard, Marvel Cinematic Universe, mcu, Movies, podcast, prequels, richard newby, the escapist movie podcast | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: The Hobbit – Battle of the Five Armies

Posted on December 11, 2014 by Darren

It has become a stock criticism to suggest that Peter Jackson did not need a full trilogy to adapt The Hobbit for the big screen. That said, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug was an unexpected pleasure – a movie not all hindered by the pacing concerns of the trilogy and instead interested in its own central narrative. You could cut the opening scene from The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies onto the end of The Desolation of Smaug and you would have pretty much everything that you need.

While this approach benefited The Desolation of Smaug, it puts Battle of the Five Armies at something of a disadvantage. It is debatable whether there was enough material to support three full films based on The Hobbit – even drawing from other sources in the Tolkien canon – but this is clearly not the best way of structuring those three films. There is a sense that Battle of the Five Armies suffers from the decision to extend the planned duology into a full-blown trilogy.

The not-so-magic dragon…

To be fair to Peter Jackson, he does avoid the ending issues that haunted The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. However, he does that by editing Battle of the Five Armies as a brief epilogue to the previous two films, following by a massive battle sequence. This is quite impressive from a technical standpoint, but there is a sense of fatigue to it all. As the title implies, this is a five-way battle involving thousands of participants; both organic and computer-generated. A lot gets lost in the shuffle, and the plot – as it stands – could be explained in two sentences.

More than that, Battle of the Five Armies is hindered by its status as a prequel. The fact that everybody in the audience has likely seen The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring means that they know all this spectacle is really for nothing. The first two films in the trilogy largely avoided the problem by pitching the story as a working-class version of The Lord of the Rings, allowing characters to engage in quests that are deeply personal even as they ripple to larger events.