[IMAX]
Returning for one final ride, James Gunn's threequel offers the most emotional, most heart-wrenching and yet most joy-affirming entry in his Guardians of the Galaxy series, shedding light on Cooper's Rocket's origins as the Guardians face off against Chukwudi Iwuji's High Evolutionary and giving us one last adventure with this band of rogues and the equally eclectic acquaintances in a beautiful, heartwarming, triumphant closing chapter and Marvel's finest production.
[IMAX 3D HFR]
In the thirteen intervening years, James Cameron has made the world of Pandora even more beautiful and intoxicating in another aptly timed eco-centric feature, but fails as a storyteller. The antagonists are as cardboard as before and cause an eye roll at their world-limiting introduction, while the excessive runtime, especially in the climax, leads to a repetitive narrative. This may be Cameron’s most beautiful film, but, poetic around Christmastime, it’s a Christmas tree bauble: Shiny and pretty, but hollow inside.
[IMAX]
The long-awaited sequel to 2018's hugely impressive Into the Spider-Verse, it cannot be understated the beauty and skill gone into making this dazzling animated sequel, opening up the world and worlds to a far greater extent than ever before, if suffering from a narrative purposefully unfinished but deceptively marketed as being its own complete entity, leaving an empty feeling of unresolved plot threads despite the captivating viewing experience while on.
Daily Decade Films | A Letterboxd History 2023
A beautiful tale of summer, Éric Rohmer's romantic comedy where Arielle Dombasle's Marion, after a divorce, takes her cousin, Amanda Langlet's Pauline, to the family's vacation home, where Marion encounters her old flame in Pascal Greggory's Pierre in a sprawling story of love, loss, deceit and reconciliation.
If Infinity War was the culmination of ten years’ hard work by Marvel Studios, Endgame is a celebration of Marvel itself; a chance to spend time with old friends in one last hurrah in a film that gives new meaning to the word “epic”. For that, it is a technical masterpiece, making every single frame count and edited to perfection as Feige, Markus, McFeely and the Russos’ vision is fully realised in this capping-off point to twenty-two films’ worth of story as the universe moves on to a bright and unknown future.
There are few instances nowadays where a film can be classed as an event, but Marvel’s Infinity War, even for its strange inclusion of 4 sub-villains with no previous introduction and the film’s importance likely being retconned within a year’s time, is an event; from the “10” in Marvel Studio’s logo, this has been the culmination of the studio’s hard work that pulls no punches with its heroes for the most noteworthy Marvel film in the studio’s short existence of producing their own films.
