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It’s weird to call an adaptation of a long running, moderately popular show a sleeper but that’s where we are. The Bob’s Burgers Movie is a throwback to the old school simple comedy theaters used to run on hot summer days. It’s modest with low stakes and a very chill energy level. Yet is it weird I enjoyed this more than almost every other franchise movie we got this year. Marvel hasn’t touched the heights of a family trying to float a single payment.
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The third feature film of writer-director Robert Eggers isn’t a horror film much like The Witch or The Lighthouse were, but the way in which Eggers brings you into his worlds whether it be through the usage of old age English or the elaborate sets – when considering the historical settings of his films, is nothing short of impressive. It was easy enough to see that from The Lighthouse onward, Eggers certainly would have found himself growing to become more ambitious as a filmmaker and it’s perhaps best reflected by what you’re seeing in The Northman, which may just as well be his most visually stunning film to date. Yet to Eggers, it’s not simply about mere aesthetic, it’s all about transporting the audience back through time, which I believe he succeeds at beautifully in here.
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Amidst Disney’s own trend of live-action remakes of their most popular live action films, surely enough it took a while before they decided to go ahead and catch up with rebooting one of their own animated series. With director Akiva Schaffer taking the helm at bringing Disney’s beloved chipmunks to the screen to a completely new generation of viewers, what he brings out with Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers seems to be born out of a parody for how they’ve continuously seen their animated fare as of late – but even knowing that this is still under Disney’s own noses, they can’t fully reach the levels of lampooning that you know the material at hand would be opening themselves up to.
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Princess Mononoke is arguably Hayao Miyazaki’s largest film by scale since 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and it is also his second greatest achievement as a director. There aren’t many animators who bring so much life to their worlds quite like how Hayao Miyazaki does it, but for every bit as imaginative as these movies can get, the impressiveness of how immersive these films are is reflected beautifully through their real-world parallels. In Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki finds himself taking upon a very complex moral standing through a war being waged between nature and humanity – and every moment of it is as beautiful as one could ever hope for it to be.
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The first film to be released under the Studio Ghibli name, Castle in the Sky may be among Hayao Miyazaki’s more straightforward films but that never takes away from how thoroughly exciting it is from beginning to end. Much like Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service, Castle in the Sky was a film that had been a favourite of mine when I was very young but it was also one that I never came back to until just recently. As I watch the film again as an adult, Castle in the Sky doesn’t only hit me again with that same magic like it did as a kid but I’m still in awe at how perfectly constructed it is – which is just about everything I could ever want from any of Miyazaki’s films.
Kiki’s Delivery Service is a film from my childhood that I had not revisited for so long, but to watch this Miyazaki classic in its native language for the first time after having been used to watching the dubbed version provided by Disney for so long only made the whole experience feel almost new to me. But all these years of having not seen Kiki’s Delivery Service have also made me look at the film under a new light; for something about it seems to click with me more as an adult now versus what I saw it to be as a kid. If that’s indicative of anything, it’s everything that one could expect from Hayao Miyazaki, and in a largely wonderful body of work, it’s yet another masterpiece.
Although not technically the first Studio Ghibli movie, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind set the foundation for everything that we have come to love most in their long body of work from over the years – we nonetheless still recognize it as one of their films. Being only the second feature film directed by Hayao Miyazaki as well as the first to have been based upon his own property, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind not only has not aged a single day in time but like all the best of Studio Ghibli’s movies, its message is one that still resonates with the way our world moves today. Above all, the hopefulness that Miyazaki creates within such a bleak setting results in one of the most beautiful films ever made.
It’s finally over, the Skywalker saga that began in 1977 with George Lucas’s Star Wars (or otherwise known as A New Hope), has finally ended with J. J. Abrams returning behind the camera to bring forth The Rise of Skywalker. One would already find themselves wondering where could the saga have gone following Rian Johnson’s radical approach to the series with The Last Jedi, which had divided many fans for betraying their image of the characters or the approach after having been reintroduced to them in The Force Awakens. In an attempt to hand the series back to those fans following the reception of The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker concludes this long saga on a sour note.
I remember first watching Watership Down in fifth grade under the assumption that it was a cute animated film about rabbits. If you were one who had watched Watership Down during your youth making that same mistake that I had made at the time, you would already have been left with frightening images in your head after your first viewing – yet it still presents itself as one of the most beautiful animated films of all time. Written and directed by producer Martin Rosen in his directorial debut, Watership Down beautifully translates the debut novel of Richard Adams to the big screen in the most imaginative sense possible, something unlike most other animated films of the era with many of the classics of Walt Disney Studios having preceded what Martin Rosen makes you witness in Watership Down.
J. C. Chandor’s filmography has only been shifting in scale in some sense but maybe not always to the most consistent of results. His fourth feature, being his first one in five years since A Most Violent Year happens to be his most expensive project yet, sadly also happens to be his worst feature to date. With how much Margin Call and All is Lost have managed to accomplish with what little they had around them, and despite A Most Violent Year showing promise for Chandor to go for much bigger projects, it seems like the increasing scale may also have gotten the worst of him too. Triple Frontier if anything seems so much more like a film that’s overwhelmed by its incredible scale rather than one that is able to work properly within what’s been given to Chandor, but there’s almost no control over what it is that he wants to show us here – so much to the point it even makes its more dramatic moments feel as if they’re not even capable of carrying any weight.
Cinema from the Spectrum 
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