Because Everybody Else Has One

Rolling with the positivity of my American Animals review, here are some thoughts on a couple of other good to great films on circuit right now that I haven't covered yet. I actually don't have too much to say about Ant-Man and the Wasp  - but I actually mean that as a compliment. After the sheer hugeness of Avengers: Infinity War and its less than upbeat ending, this sequel to Marvel Studios' smallest film (in every sense of the word) is the perfect tonic. I loved the hell out of Infinity War and I can't wait for the still-untitled fourth Avengers film, but this is a nice reminder that Marvel's films don't have to be epic to be tons of fun. Ant-Man and the Wasp offers just more of the same as the first film but with a better semi-villain and more Morrissey (and solo Morrissey at that!) jokes, as well as a nicely expanded role for Evangeline Lilly, who proves, once again, that she really should be a much bigger star than she is. Michelle Pfeiffer, Lawrence...

Another year, another big-screen Spider-man reboot. Things are a bit different this time, though. For all that people love complaining about the plethora of superhero films, this year has been a rather interesting showcase for why we should be glad they aren't going away soon. For a start, despite appearances to the contrary, superhero films are not the only "tentpole", big budget blockbuster being released, it's just that - for this year at least - they seem to be well on their way to being the only good ones (update: as of a screening I saw today, that's no longer the case!). While the Mummy brought us a stale take on a well-established property, Logan gave us the most genuinely mature take on a "Big 2" superhero to date. As King Arthur lived down to its director's worst tendencies, comics' most classic female superhero got a film of her own that not only more than did justice to the character but deservedly became the biggest movie of the...

Not as good as it should have been, but way more fun than it could have been. This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about A young orphan girl, raised by her very specialized orphanage to be a master assassin, finally gets her chance to be a regular teenage girl when a mission gone wrong allows her to fake her own death and enter herself into a foreign exchange program where she gets to live with a perfectly “average” American family. Escaping her past, however, proves to be a lot harder than it looks. What we thought Barely Lethal is, frankly speaking, a truly brilliant title for a movie. It's the kind of title that is so good that an entire movie can spring out, fully formed, from nothing more than those two little words. It certainly wouldn't surprise me if that was the case here. It's not particularly surprising that the actual film is never as good as its punny moniker might suggest but even if it does feel like a very real missed oppo...

The Faultier in Our Stars, perhaps? This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about Mia Hall is your average teenage girl about to graduate high school: juggling boy problems, trying to get into the college of her dreams and figuring out where she, a classical-music-loving cellist fits into her hip, punk-rock family. After being involved in a major car crash and with her life hanging in the balance, she has is suddenly confronted with the most crucial question of all. What we thought It's all but impossible not compare If I Stay with The Fault in our Stars when the two films, separated by a mere couple of months, have so much in common - at least on the surface. Both films are based on highly successful young adult novels, both feature the struggles of a teenage girl at their centre and both deal with themes of love and loss, when superimposed against life and death. They're also both, as it so happens, the work of newcomer directors as Fault'...

I know I already harped on enough about how Silver Linings Playbook deserved all those Oscar nominations, but here's a film that just might have deserved to be included even more. And, oh yes, this is going to be a long one - but the film deserves a more in depth discussion. As adults, we have a habit of looking back at our adolescent years with a mixture of embarrassment and contempt as we scoff at problems that seemed so big then but seem so small now. And yet, for all that we may cringe at our past predilections for over-inflated emotional outbursts and many, many laughable pretensions, in a sense we are never more real and more honest than we are as teenagers.  Like the best coming of age stories, The Perks of Being a Wallflower hones into this truth with expert precision as it beautifully and perfectly captures the tempestuous mix of egotism and idealism of the average Western teenager, while never overlooking the real pain, awkwardness and red-hot e...