WILDWOOD is a masterpiece of stop-motion animation. The kind of cinematic achievement that takes your breath away with each painstakingly handcrafted scene, culminating in a gigantic battle sequence that rivals the work seen in “Game of Thrones” or “The Lord Of The Rings.” It’s the peak of everything LAIKA has been building over the past 20 years and the crown jewel in their remarkable, ever-growing legacy. An exquisitely conceived and wildly imaginative fantasy adventure that plays out like a warm, cozy bedtime story your parents used to read to you when you were a kid, filled with darkness, wonder, humor, enthusiasm and a tender emotional core that makes you care about its characters. I was left speechless when it concluded, in awe of everything each department accomplished from the immersive sound design, to Dario Marianelli’s majestic score, the seamless visual effects and the astonishing production and costume design. It represents a new pinnacle for the medium and stands firmly as the finest animated film of the year.
RAY GUNN, Brad Bird’s passion project for over thirty years, is as fully realized as any of his other iconic animated films with memorable characters, thrilling action set pieces and a pure love for cinema, particularly gumshoe noir and classic sci-fi, that makes it an enjoyable experience from beginning to end. The animation itself feels a bit dated but it’s brought to life by Bird’s exuberance, the quality voice acting from Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and especially Tom Waits and Michael Giacchino’s bouncy, breezy score along with some standout songs written by Kimbra and performed by Johansson. A clever and fun way to get younger audiences (but not too young) interested in film noir.
THE SOCIAL RECKONING is an old-fashioned investigative journalism drama from Aaron Sorkin examining the dangers and manipulations of Facebook, as they prioritize profits over people at an alarming rate of growth. As usual with Sorkin, it moves at a good pace, plowing through facts and figures at a mile a minute while delivering colorful dialogue that occasionally makes you laugh, though mostly because you know there’s no world in which actual human beings, either online or in real life, would ever talk like this. Thankfully, the film doesn’t simply recycle what worked in the far superior 2010 film (Alexandre Desplat’s score is entirely original), allowing it to stand on its own. That doesn’t mean the comparisons will stop but the far greater problem is that what’s here is neither particularly interesting nor revelatory. The performances range from fine to mediocre, while the material feels like it’s arriving five years too late. An eye-rolling film with good intentions but will probably not receive many likes or re-shares.
After over a hundred years, both Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures are done as independent film studios as the merger between the two is complete with the official formation of SKYDANCE under David Ellison
*sigh*
ARTIFICIAL is Luca Guadagnino’s telling of the origins of the AI boom and where it may one day lead us. As entertaining as it is terrifying, it’s a brilliantly written human story about power, control, ambition, and greed that might be the most urgently relevant film of our time. Andrew Garfield delivers one of his most unsettling and transformative performances as Sam Altman, equally capturing his disarming charm and unnerving malice. Yura Borisov is magnificent as the brilliant mind behind OpenAI, wrestling with the moral implications of the creation he has helped unleash upon the world with intelligence and empathy. Damon Albarn’s electronic, atmospheric score perfectly sets the mood for this tech-driven narrative, while Guadagnino’s cinematic flourishes are bountiful, resulting in what may be his funniest and scariest film to date. Provocative, engaging, and downright horrifying, it’s the movie of the moment that we may not even be able to look back on if the vision of the future it presents comes true.
A STATEMENT combines actual transcripts from a 1980 meeting of scientists and experts attempting to craft a statement on climate change with original written material, resulting in an entertaining, intellectually stimulating, and increasingly enraging chamber piece. The entire ensemble gets individual moments to shine, with John Turturro, Amy Ryan, Zach Woods, and Evan Peters delivering the standout performances, for me. It’s a collection of egos, ideas, perspectives, and disagreements, where the pursuit of compromise gradually becomes its own form of paralysis. The end result is dissatisfying by nature, limited by design, and not necessarily revealing anything we don’t already know. Yet it’s still a story and a message that needs to be told, as redundant as it might be, even if, in the telling, it eventually spins its wheels before fizzling out.
BEHEMOTH! is a dynamic and handsomely crafted but peculiar film from Tony Gilroy. It’s his most stylish work to date, but also an uneven one, hurt by inconsistent rhythms and some narrative shortcomings. Pedro Pascal is at least delivering a beautifully modulated, grounded performance that never overplays itself, finding considerable emotion in even the lightest of notes. It’s his best film work to date. All of the supporting characters make the most of their screen time but all feel underutilized. The real highlight, though, is the score, with nine elite composers crafting a collection of beautifully textured orchestral pieces across different styles, providing momentum to an otherwise flat character study of a passive man who finally finds something worth caring about again. It comes close to greatness several times but ultimately fails to heed the advice of its own lead character: pick a lane and stay in it, like a train. Instead, it chooses to be a river, drifting between various tones and ideas, sometimes smooth and comforting and other times rocky and rough.