Category: 2022

Baz Luhrmann | 2hr 39min

For all his bombastic flash and glorious excess, Baz Luhrmann’s narrative fascination has always lain in historic tragedies, riding waves of frantic joy before extinguishing them with romantic poignancy. After taking on William Shakespeare, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and concocting a lavish tribute to love stories in Moulin Rouge, Elvis Presley’s bright but truncated career only seems like a natural fit for as passionate a cinematic maximalist as the Australian auteur. His pacing through decades of his subject’s life is relentless, as much a rebellion against the restraints imposed by traditional artistic conventions as Presley’s own musical defiance, glancing off life events with the same zealous frenzy that defines his restless but magnetic stage presence. This kineticism infects every inch of the singer’s body, and even in one early scene that follows his discovery of blues music while overhearing Black musicians sing and dance, he undergoes a physical, full-body experience not unlike a possession, shaking uncontrollably. “He’s with the spirit,” one man declares to Elvis’ friend, and from this point on it seems that the spirit never leaves him.

Intercut with this birth into the world of music, Luhrmann skilfully weaves in Presley’s birth as a celebrity, whereby future manager Colonel Tom Parker first recognises his potential for profit at a Louisiana Hayride performance. This sort of parallel editing across decades of Presley’s life is a stroke of brilliance from Luhrmann, and this is not the last time we see him pull it off in Elvis, later stepping it up in a performance of “That’s Alright” which effectively unifies his later career, an early studio recording, and his musical roots in African American blues, colliding them through dexterous cuts and split screens until they all merge into one. Between scenes, Luhrmann’s transitions glide through playful wipes, camera spins, and match cuts, at one point turning the clockwise motion of a Ferris wheel into a spinning vinyl record, which then becomes a circular neon street sign. In effect, he enthusiastically plays his editing like a rock ‘n’ roll song, harmonising separate narrative strands and effortlessly sliding from one set piece to the next with all the vigour of a rowdy Elvis Presley concert.

This level of stamina is one that is quite unique to Luhrmann as a filmmaker, though Austin Butler proves himself to be an excellent fit in the pure energy he projects both on and offstage. What starts as an extraordinary impersonation with that deep, resonant voice, wiggling dance moves, and slow, suave mannerisms gradually evolves into a more rounded portrait of an exasperated musician, frustrated with the constraints that keep clipping his wings. As woefully miscast as Tom Hanks is as Parker with his poor Dutch accent grating ears in each voiceover, Luhrmann at least formally sets his character up in opposition to Presley’s unsatiable desire to keep expanding his horizons. Where Parker tries remodelling him in the image of a clean-cut, all-American boy, the music icon in turn asserts an individualistic mindset that refuses to sink to middlebrow culture.

Still, for all his rebellious acts, Presley can’t quite bridge the gap from entertainment into civil rights activism. Luhrmann’s nimble editing once again comes into play as he cuts between a live musical performance and a political speech taking place elsewhere, separating Presley’s sphere of influence from the one which Parker holds him back from. In the battle for post-war America’s identity, these two characters come to represent either ends of a generational revolt – on one side, young, cultural innovators pushing for progress, and on the other, older conservatives looking to maintain the status quo, casting a heavy shadow over their idealistic children.

Even without looking at his screenplay, it is not hard to guess which side Luhrmann is behind. Along with his vivacious pacing is an active camera that eagerly flies through cities in long takes, and which punctuates Presley’s hip shakes with short, sharp zooms, as if overtaken by the same hysteria which sends the women in his audiences wild. Though at times it might seem that Luhrmann is trying to move a few steps ahead of himself with outrageous exaggerations, it remains remarkable how consistently in control he is over such vibrant chaos, refusing to submit to the same variation of any cinematic device more than once. Flashbacks to Presley’s childhood become newspaper comics that depict him as his favourite superhero, Captain Marvel Jr., and later when he tries breaking into the film industry, his own life becomes a 1960s Hollywood extravaganza. This constant reinvention of Presley’s image is vital to Elvis’ understanding of him as a dreamer, letting his creative ambitions flourish on film where he could not manifest them in real life.

Further challenging the form of this historical biopic is Luhrmann’s integration of modern pop and hip-hop songs around Presley’s rock ‘n’ roll music, revealing the star’s extensive influence upon contemporary artists from Doja Cat to Kanye West. Curating such an anachronistic soundtrack is not unusual for Luhrmann who played with similar creative choices in Moulin Rouge and The Great Gatsby, but it especially instils Presley’s cultural persona here with a universality that looks to both the future and the past. In piecing together artefacts of American history littered throughout the past century, Luhrmann effectively melds his music, camerawork, and imaginative editing together into a vibrant collage of immense artistic and political passion.

Such intense excitement cannot live forever though, as Presley’s downfall into substance abuse and depression becomes just as much a tragic piece of his legend as his monumental musical influence. The final years of his life is also where Butler properly solidifies the complexity in his performance, running off on drunken tirades against his manager while sweating beneath bright concert lights, and offstage becoming a quiet, lifeless shell, dressing in glitzy imitations of the man he once was. In making selfish deals behind his client’s back and prioritising money over all else, Parker stands as an unsympathetic depiction of the pressures that brought this icon crashing down.

There is almost something cyclical to the nature of such cultural figures as this, and Luhrmann does not let the parallels to A Star is Born go amiss, especially given Presley’s near-casting in the 70s adaptation opposite Barbra Streisand. Reality might dictate that his rise and fall was not so straightforward as what Elvis depicts, but this film is not some fact-driven biography of one man’s life as played out in history books. In understanding this man through a retrospective lens of ardent appreciation, Luhrmann arrives at something uniquely sincere – a fervent, cinematic celebration adopting the form of Presley’s own creative expression, defying standard conventions to reach a wilder, more rebellious understanding of his ideals and impact.

Elvis is currently playing in cinemas.

Alex Garland | 1hr 40min

There is little wonder that Alex Garland’s most recent dive into elusive, arthouse horror has been met with a polarising reception, given how far it departs from the realm of conventional plotting in favour of lush stylistic flourishes and absurdly puzzling imagery. Whatever flaws emerge in its unevenness can hardly be held against it given the cinematic ambition that runs deep in this nightmarish allegory, ever so gradually edging closer to a disturbing culmination of the patriarchal archetypes threaded through its fable-like narrative. In this way, there is a distinct flavour of European folklore that creeps into Men, haunting the green English thickets and cobbled stone roads of Cotson, the tiny rural village to which Harper retreats following the suicide of her abusive husband, James.

It becomes evident early on that there is something up with the men in this isolated town, being that they all share the same face. Perhaps Harper is just imagining this, warily holding them all with equal mistrust, though at no point in the film does she acknowledge this strange phenomenon. Maybe then they actually do all look alike, and she is failing to pick up on the red flags laid before her. Either way, the shared visage of the men in this seemingly womanless village is not mined so much for outright horror than it is for its eerie symbolism. We might initially believe them to be in some sort of clandestine fraternity, though later they manifest more as a shape-shifting ghost representing the many forms of toxic masculinity, from the repressed sexuality of a vicar, to a gaslighting police officer, and a young boy’s bitter reaction to rejection.

As Garland intersperses flashbacks to the day of James’ death, we begin to pick up on these personality traits in his own narcissistic persona, drawing implicit lines between her past and present. Within their London apartment overlooking the River Thames, Garland fills the space with a burning orange light, almost apocalyptic in tone and contrasting heavily with the verdant greens of the present-day narrative. The minutes immediately preceding and following his jump from an upper-storey balcony play out non-linearly in her mind, but it is the vision of his plummet which stands out in devastating slow-motion, as he passes by the window at the exact moment Harper is looking through it. The split second that they make eye contact horrifyingly stretches into oblivion, but perhaps the most surprising thing about it is the fear and regret written into his expression.

With a catalyst as specifically gut-wrenching as this to motivate Harper’s getaway, and the darkly spiritual examinations of gender that follow, Garland evokes Lars von Trier’s Antichrist as a significant stylistic and narrative influence, right down to the twisted Adam and Eve parallels flowing through both films. At first, the symbolism in Men is exceedingly blunt with the forbidden fruit being written into the dialogue between Harper and the owner of the holiday house, Jeffrey. It may remain obvious as well when we move to Cotson’s forest that glows with green hues, like the Garden of Eden where man fell from grace and placed the blame on women. Nevertheless, the formal consistency is admirable, and only goes on to manifest in more grotesque visual representations from here. The hand that James ripped on an iron railing during his fall is echoed through the other men Harper encounters, bearing resemblance to the forked tongue of Satan’s serpentine disguise in the Garden. And finally, the pain of childbirth exacted as a punishment upon women climactically plunges the film into subversive, absurdist body horror, provoking equal reactions of revulsion and incredulity.

The pagan spirituality existing alongside the Christian symbolism also becomes a source of mythological horror in Men, indicating thorough research on Garland’s part into the iconography of ancient European cultures, particularly in the appearance of one naked, demonic figure who stalks her and becomes more treelike with each appearance. Similarly, rock face carvings are threaded through Harper’s stream-of-consciousness montages, calling back to legendary figures of folklore which seem to flicker with life as light and shadows move across their finely sculpted ridges.

Given the large patches of Men which stretch on without dialogue, a great deal of storytelling is accomplished in its slow, meditative editing, blending the past, present, material, and symbolic worlds in a mesh of eerie rhythms that erode any clear grounding in reality. This, along with the unnerving vocalising and chanting in Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s otherworldly musical score, leads us to a reckoning with our primal, gendered instincts, moving deeper into a traumatised mind that sees these in their purest conceptual forms, divorced from anything remotely tangible.

A sharp, shallow focus thus becomes Garland’s primary visual device in depicting this immense loneliness and disconnection, aesthetically carrying Jessie Buckley through scenes that gorgeously soften backgrounds into obscurity and keep us firmly in her troubled state of mind. Minus a few dodgy pieces of CGI that transpose Rory Kinnear’s face onto the body of a young a boy, Garland wields impressive command over his visual compositions, particularly in those forest scenes that bounce reflections of the foliage off puddles and rippling ponds. The large, gaping arch that leads into a tunnel within this setting is a particularly effective set piece as well, framing silhouettes of Buckley and Kinnear as they enter the mass of darkness between them, and reverberating musical calls and responses in unnerving echoes.

Pairing such mysterious imagery with a sound design that offers warped drones and chants in place of dialogue consistently holds us in the grip of Garland’s disturbing tonal journey through Harper’s mind, crafting the sort of fever dream that invalidates questions of whether it is all real or not. The psychological space that Men inhabits keeps its terror just out of focus, refusing to offer justifications for its surreal mysteries and mythology, and it is ultimately all the more unsettling for it.

Men is currently playing in theatres.

Joseph Kosinski | 2hr 11min

Delivering a sequel for a beloved 80s action movie is no foreign concept in this era of collective nostalgia and intellectual property-based movies, so it is even more gratifying when one such film can stand on its own merits as well as Top Gun: Maverick. It is a little worrying at first when it opens with the exact same expository text as its 1986 predecessor and goes on to reheat the slow-build montage of jets preparing to take off on a runway at sunrise against the instantly recognisable ‘Danger Zone’. By the time we are up in the air though, it is evident that Joseph Kosinski is interested in pushing its adrenalising aerial sequences just a little further than what Tony Scott previously achieved. With fully transparent cockpits, the landscapes outside the fighter jets tumble around aviators in gravity-defying acts of grandeur, as sharply present as the actors themselves within the epic scope of its IMAX cameras.

While Top Gun: Maverick maintains a charismatic Tom Cruise at its centre, the film otherwise sees an almost complete turnover in its cast, filling in familiar archetypes with younger characters who never let their mere plot functions hold back their sheer charisma. It is this ensemble of fresh faces which Pete Mitchell A.K.A “Mav” is tasked with training for a stealth mission in a foreign country, after being pulled from his post as a U.S. Navy test pilot where he has willingly sat without promotion for decades. Though he has come to terms with the death of his wingman and friend, he evidently still harbours some guilt over it, and it is not long before we learn of the tension between him and Goose’s son, Rooster, following in his late father’s footsteps as an incoming Top Gun recruit. Around them, we meet pilots Hangman, Bob, Phoenix, and Payback among others, rising as the new generation to play beach volleyball, sing along to ‘Great Balls of Fire’ – and of course, deal with the life and death stakes of their dangerous line of work.

With a clear deadline guiding this narrative towards its thrilling conclusion, there is a tightness and direction to Kosinski’s storytelling that supersedes the original, and there is no doubt that his acute, dynamic editing plays a large part in this. In one training scene that sees the pilots run a simulated course, Kosinski skilfully intercuts between the failed run and the disappointing debrief down on the ground afterwards, detailing the team’s weaknesses both visually and verbally. Not only this, but here we also familiarise ourselves with the obstacles and steps of the key mission, foreshadowing some thrilling later developments that keep on driving up the suspense. Across all Kosinski’s aerial sequences, the precise coordination of the fighter jet stunts and communication between each pilot makes for some heart-pumping scenes that never lose sight of individual characterisations, least of all Maverick’s hubris which constantly pushes him just that little bit further than what convention dictates.

In combining its character work and action, Top Gun: Maverick’s energetic pacing flies by with ease, though at times to the detriment of Maverick’s redemption arc. Little time is spent dwelling on his lowest point before he quickly picks himself back up again and gets back in a plane, breaking rules with gleeful abandon just to prove a point. Still, there is otherwise a strong foundation to this emotional journey in his relationship with Rooster, with whom he shares a troubled personal history. There is a tension between them right from the start that keeps them from speaking to each other, but in the air this cold remoteness manifests as outright competition, each trying to get one up over the other.

The dynamic shift that takes place between them does not come easily, but in echoing the spirit of their departed friend and father, Kosinski does draw out a shared grief between the two, driving them forward in their careers. It is ultimately in this intersection of drama and sharply executed, thrill-seeking action that Top Gun: Maverick takes flight, building on the original and resolving its lingering threads of guilt with sensational, breathtaking vigour.

Top Gun: Maverick is currently playing in theatres.

Mimi Cave | 1hr 57min

In a way, even knowing the title of this film is a spoiler. It isn’t until thirty minutes in that first-time director Mimi Cave transforms the rom-com thriller conventions of Fresh into full-blown horror, announcing loudly with its opening credits what exactly this story is going to be about. Up until then, the horrendous exchanges that Noa has had with men through online dating run an undercurrent of tension beneath the story, though not without some hope that she may eventually meet a more ideal match. Then, one day in a grocery store, she meets Steve. Perhaps he is a little odd in the way he phrases things – “I just don’t eat animals” could simply be a roundabout way of saying he’s a vegetarian – but unlike so many other men, he is funny, charming, and seemingly harmless.

By the time he tells Noa explicitly what his intentions are with her, the heavy foreshadowing has well and truly done its job. Close-ups on his chewing mouth, lingering shots on bared flesh, and his frequent conversations about food only barely conceal his covert cannibalism. Or perhaps industrial cannibalism is a better description, given his day job of kidnapping women, cutting them up, and sending the pieces off to wealthy men with perverse, ravenous appetites.

In his luxury home deep within a forest, he has cells for keeping his captives chained up, an operating theatre for taking pieces of their body, and cold rooms for meat storage. Within these walls, Cave crafts a visually sumptuous atmosphere of red lighting and production design, bleeding through the carpet, décor, and even large art murals against which she stages her actors in arresting compositions. There is a slight Italian giallo influence in this colourfully expressionistic imagery, consistent with the sensationalist gore that Cave savours with macabre delight. This disgust which she so effectively provokes goes beyond visceral reactions to the butchery, but develops further into a revolted moral outrage as she flicks through montages of Steve’s affluent customers dining on their gruesome deliveries.

Within Noa’s disorientated perspective, her prison is a sinister, upside-down dating game that she must play against her captor to stay alive. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan establish an alluring chemistry between both characters in their strange dynamic, with Noa playing the part of a compliant love interest to slowly earn his trust. Cave’s metaphor for abusive relationships is skilfully constructed in these interactions, particularly when Noa begins to adopt his dark sense of humour and share in his cannibalistic meals to reclaim some power for herself. As for Steve, Cave never lets the terror fade from his character even when he is at his most charming, turning his operating theatre into a funhouse of mirrors that fragment and multiply his intimidating figure all through the space.

From a narrative standpoint, there are several plot beats in Fresh where the Get Out influence encroaches a bit too far in on its own originality, letting it come off as derivative in those overly familiar horror conventions. It is partially this reason which makes the final act feel rushed in its execution, brushing over all the expected developments one might expect from a horror of this ilk while letting a handful of other narrative threads go unresolved. Cave’s immaculate crafting of atmospheric tension through her camerawork and visual design may exceed her ability to craft a wholly original story, but in the end that is all Fresh needs to succeed as a thrillingly feminist tale of subjugation and vengeance, pulling us along in its tight, repulsive grip.

Fresh is currently streaming on Disney Plus.

Daniels | 2hr 20min

There is an implicit promise made in the title Everything Everywhere All at Once that is about as equally ambitious as it is precarious. The story moves fast and with little regard for rationality, and yet there is also an absurd, internal logic which holds together this medley of styles, characters, and alternate universes, each one building out the bizarre tapestry of experiences that make up all of human and non-human existence. How exactly an individual can handle a perspective that encompasses what the film’s title suggests is not just the primary question this directing duo, the Daniels, seek to resolve. It is the challenge which they put to themselves as a grand cinematic statement, opting for a bizarre brand of maximalism that loudly announces itself in its editing, genre blending, and massively ambitious structure.

It all starts about as small and mundane as you can get. Evelyn is a middle-aged Chinese-American immigrant running a laundromat, trying to balance the mounting pressures of her father’s visit, her daughter’s growing emotional distance, her husband’s proposition of divorce, and a looming audit by the IRS. In the sound design of chaotic plucked strings that underscore this messy clash of priorities, Punch Drunk Love reveals itself as the first of many films whose influence the Daniels wear proudly on their sleeves. When an alternate version of her husband, Waymond, contacts Evelyn from another universe and tells her the entire multiverse is being threatened by an omniscient, omnipotent entity known as Jobu Tupaki, it might as well just be another trivial inconvenience for her to add to a growing list of errands. Very quickly though, she finds herself sucked into an existential war, at which point Everything Everywhere All at Once blasts off into a wildly outlandish probing of multiversal possibilities.

The science-fiction key to the abundant martial arts scenes driving the film’s action rests on a single, Matrix-inspired concept. By tapping into the minds of alternate versions of oneself, any number of skills can be downloaded into one’s brain, whether that be adopting the lung capacity of a singer or the dexterity of a chef. To get there, one must find the appropriate jumping pad – that is, a completely random action one must take which slingshots an individual across universes to arrive at the correct destination. In placing an emphasis on the small actions from which new universes branch off, the narrative never feels starved for direction, effectively setting a series of mini-objectives for characters to achieve while in the thick of combat.

Again, much like The Matrix, the stunt work itself is a mix of traditional martial arts and transcendent, superhuman feats, both of which are tightly choreographed with jaw-dropping kineticism and resourcefulness. Early on, a bum bag becomes the sole weapon through which a man takes down a squad of security guards, and from there the Daniels go on to make superb use of Michelle Yeoh’s physical screen presence, letting her indulge in different styles of combat inspired by the alternate lives Evelyn could have led.

It is certainly worth noting the skilful use of slow-motion and rhythmic cutting that lines up with the actors’ motions in these action scenes, and yet that would only be scraping the surface of the film’s greatest stylistic accomplishment. Everything Everywhere All at Once would simply not achieve the imposing maximalism it is aiming for without playing to virtually every editing technique in the book, and landing them all with vigour and purpose. It starts with a lightly comical visual style akin to Edgar Wright in its perfectly timed beats, whip pans, and fluid transitions, most notable of all being the very first shot of the film moving us from one location to another through a mirror that might as well be a portal between universes.

Soon, the Daniels begin to weave in creative split screens, depicted as a fractured lens through which a single universe branches off into two alternate paths. What immediately follows might seem like the point that Everything Everywhere All at Once takes the dive into the deep end of its stylistic ambition, and yet the next two hours only continue to ramp up in pacing and absurdity, rapidly firing off montages with sharp nimbleness. As Evelyn’s mind continues expanding to different versions of herself, the Daniels flit through hundreds of close-ups, accelerating until these single-frame portraits morph into a mind-bending composite of each. The effect it has is akin to the strobe lighting we witness in other scenes between Evelyn and Jobu Tapaki, pulsating in disorientating, hyperactive rhythms.

With new universes opening up, parallel stories begin to unfold in tandem between them, and the Daniels’ deft intercutting lets the Wright similarities fall away and give way to Christopher Nolan comparisons. It is hard not to think of Inception here, whereby individual characters exist across multiple settings and narrative layers, each one in harmony with their counterparts. Inspired match cuts fluidly move them between prisons, forests, kitchens, offices, theatres, and streets with such remarkably smooth precision, it almost seems effortless, barely waiting for the audience to catch up to the new location before it pulls us into yet another one. It is equally a triumph of staging in these transitions, blending realities through shared motions as simple as a head tilt or a tight embrace.

Cinematic influences mount across the subtle and more obvious references (2001: A Space Odyssey gets a particularly irreverent nod), and so the Bong Joon-ho flavour we begin to pick up on in the uncompromising amalgamation of genres feels particularly appropriate. It goes beyond the comedy, action, and science-fiction premise of the film on its broadest level – in one universe the Daniels specifically evoke the elegant neon stylings and yearning romantic dialogue of Wong Kar-wai, setting up a delicate romance between Evelyn and Waymond in a universe where their relationship never worked out.

That these affecting character interactions can play out directly next to scenes that parody Pixar movies and feature a world where evolution gave humans hot dog fingers speaks to the truly peculiar talents of the Daniels to unite such clashing tones within a single film, though this isn’t to say that they consistently and flawlessly pull it off. If Everything Everywhere All at Once is to be faulted, it is for missing the mark on a number of jarring comic beats, choosing to run with expired gags, and on occasion defusing the central dramatic stakes. That is the risk filmmakers take when they throw so many ideas at the wall hoping something sticks, so it is still at least to the Daniels’ credit that much of this chaos lands with a keen precision.

Certainly the film’s formal segmentation into three chapters (or perhaps two and a bit if we’re being picky) helps it along in its structure, with each division landing on the same frame of Evelyn sitting in her laundromat sorting through messy piles of documents. Each return sees a new colour take over the costuming and décor, subtly suggesting a shift in universes where the red ornaments of one are replaced by the blues of another. Foreshadowing also weaves through scenes where sign spinners and bagels are placed in the backgrounds of shots, vaguely hinting at the directions this wild narrative may head, but perhaps the most powerful visual motif is the menacing, black circle that crops up in hairstyles, on receipts, and behind mysterious, white veils. In that symbol is the simple, nihilistic concept of zero – the relative value which everything holds if all of existence were to matter equally.

With the epic philosophical war raging between notions of limitlessness and nothingness, Everything Everywhere All at Once studies its equivalent within the scope of the tiny Chinese-American family at the centre of it all. There, it becomes a study of generational and cultural differences, in which a multi-tasking mother piles too many expectations onto her daughter, inadvertently driving her deeper into an existential despair. Characters travel all along this ideological spectrum through the film, wrestling with that inexplicable relationship between everything and nothing which plagues both heroes and villains of this story.

We find especially profound answers to such questions in one particular universe where life never formed on Earth, and for the first time in the film simply letting us sit in quiet, undisturbed peace. If there was ever a world where the paltriness of existence could be felt on a pure, tangible level, it is here, where we can take a few minutes away from the frantic pace of Everything Everywhere All at Once to reflect on both meaningless of it all and the silly, insignificant love between two rocks. Maximalist excess and crushing nihilism might be weapons wielded by the Daniels to overwhelm us into submission, but there is also a humbling enlightenment present in the midst of it all. Only after we have considered our full potential is it that we can understand what makes up our core essence – not that we are humans with opposable thumbs and free will, but that we are lonely, fleeting entities, endlessly seeking sense and compassion from swirling universes of chaos.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is currently in theatres.

Robert Eggers | 2hr 17min

The primal, pounding rhythms of The Northman are infused into its cinematic construction on almost every level. They are there in Amleth’s insistent chants, his prophetic words pointing him towards a destiny of vengeance. They are present in the ominous score of throaty vocalisations and percussive beats, hypnotising us into a state of submission. On a structural level, Robert Eggers even weaves them into his division of this narrative into segments, landing each chapter break on black frames with titles written in Scandinavian runes. Even as it embraces the spectacle of mythological storytelling, The Northman is as deeply researched as any of Eggers’ other films, and as such it is this historical authenticity which allows the tempo of his narrative to progress with such organic tactility.

It doesn’t take long into this story to recognise the Hamlet parallels written into the archetypes of murdered kings, evil uncles, and avenging sons, and yet Shakespeare is not the primary source of inspiration for Eggers here. It is rather the other way round – the Scandinavian legend of Amleth the Viking prince is in fact the basis of the Shakespeare play, its origins stretching far back into Medieval mythology. Aside from the emotional depth that Eggers allows both male and female characters equally, there are no major narrative subversions playing out here. Instead, it is in the textured, muddy world which he builds around traditional conventions that the raw essence of this Norse folktale comes alive, seeping through the detailed design of every crude wooden village and animal-skin costume.

Cinematically speaking, Eggers carries on the epic ambition of classical filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Werner Herzog, both of whom spent months shooting in unforgiving wildernesses to capture equally unrelenting directorial visions in Apocalypse Now and Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Just as those films tell tales of men coming to terms with their own humanity while on legendary quests through cruel environments, so too does The Northman set Amleth on a path of self-realisation, shrinking him against rocky Scandinavian mountains and heavy, overcast skies that weigh down upon low horizons. It is amid these fierce landscapes that he discovers an innate connection to the land, adopting the instincts of wolves and ravens through which he learns to survive.

Alexander Skarsgård absorbs this animalistic behaviour into his performance on a viciously carnal level. Even when he isn’t running on all fours, howling, and biting his enemies, he menacingly saunters through muddy battlefields with tightly hunched shoulders, standing out in crowds with his furrowed brow and dark, unsmiling eyes. “You are dogs who wish to become men,” growls Willem Dafoe’s court fool, and in Skarsgård’s ferocious transformation we believe every word of it. So too does he evoke Leonardo DiCaprio’s acting masterclass in The Revenant, as survival and revenge become all-consuming ideals for a man bearing the brunt of his mission psychologically just as much as he is physically.

The Revenant’s influence continues to make itself known in Eggers’ long tracking shots through astoundingly choreographed battles of flying arrows and swinging axes, crafting a visceral authenticity consistent with the painstaking sensory details that pervade his rugged production design. Whether softly illuminating desaturated exteriors or casting silhouettes of naked bodies against blazing fires, Eggers’ natural lighting brings an awe-inspiring majesty to both action and drama. Additionally, there is an even greater transcendence to those scenes which take place beneath the pale moonlight and Northern Lights, where fantasy doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility.

The Northman flourishes in such depictions of magical realism, manifesting the ambiguous potential of Amleth’s destiny to be either a self-determined mission or a genuine prophecy. A cameo appearance from Björk as the mysterious soothsayer who foretells his fate makes for an especially brilliant piece of casting, emphasising her ethereal presence in her first role since Dancer in the Dark 22 years ago. It is her words which stick with us through Amleth’s journey, and which motivate further introspection on his part to reckon with his spirituality. It is left deliberately obstruse as to whether a haunting battle with a draugr, an undead Scandinavian creature, takes place in reality or simply in the mind of a man seeking religious purpose to his quest, and divine cutaways to a Valkyrie riding up into the Northern Lights similarly serve to underscore the glory which may lie on the other side of his quest.

Conversely, there is also the threat of Hel as the afterlife to which Amleth may be damned should he fail to avenge his father. Literalised as an erupting volcano upon which the final battle takes place, the set piece is a wonder to behold, filling the air with orange smoke and lava. Eggers knows when to hold a shot, and once again he brings great weight to the climactic moment by simply basking in its heated violence, refusing to cut until necessary. This aspect of his filmmaking may as well belong among those others mentioned above which pulse with fervent adrenaline, as these characters clash swords and let out guttural roars like primal orchestrations. The Northman may only reference horror cinema tangentially, and yet its thick, overpowering atmosphere is as potent as anything Eggers has directed before, delivering an awe-inspiring, sensory venture into Norse mythology.

The Northman is currently playing in theatres.

Richard Linklater | 1hr 38min

Stan was born in 1959 on the cusp of the Baby Boomers and Generation X, and at age 10 ½ this makes him just old enough to be drafted into NASA’s secret space program for children right before the moon landing. He is a proto-astronaut of sorts, testing the waters for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to clear up any technical issues that may arise. The fantasy element is obvious to us, but to Richard Linklater it might as well be a part of history. Above its whimsical dreams of traversing the cosmos, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood is a loving memory piece based in the late 60s Texas of Linklater’s youth, drawing heavily from the details of its entertainment, education, scientific industries, food, music, and politics to paint out a cultural landscape filtered through the eyes of a child.

The style of rotoscoped animation that Linklater experimented with in Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly makes a return here in the creation of this intricate setting, offering an uncanny authenticity to the facial expressions and movements of its characters. When Apollo 10 ½ turns to reconstructing archival footage, it shifts slightly into a more minimalistic style with a boxy aspect ratio, reserving the finer details and widescreen format for Stan’s first-hand memories. The complexities of political movements and affairs simply do not linger in our young protagonist’s mind. Instead, the film unravels like a continuous stream-of-consciousness, carried along by a ubiquitous voiceover from an older Stan who, while played by Jack Black, might as well stand in for Linklater himself.

It is often Apollo 10 ½’s editing which entrances us more than its visual beauty, flitting through montages that bridge one thought to the next with relative ease, densely packing in the idiosyncrasies and mundanities of Stan’s childhood. His mum’s resourceful reinventions of Sunday’s leftovers into dinner for the next four nights, his siblings’ cruel jokes about him being adopted, his disappointment with his dad’s unexciting low-level position at NASA, his nan’s regular trips to the cinema to watch The Sound of Music – for the first fifty minutes of Apollo 10 ½, Linklater exhibits little interest in plot, forgoing traditional narrative to bask in the authentic reconstruction of a cherished time period, much like he has done before in Dazed and Confused and Boyhood.

With this easy-going setup dominating the first fifty minutes of the film, the progression into Stan’s childhood fantasy barely feels like much of a shift at all. His obsession with NASA is all-encompassing, feeding his aspiration and wonder at what the future might hold, and its manifestation in his imagination carries about the same level of detail as anything else, with Black’s voiceover breaking it down to its most basic, humdrum details. In reframing the space race as part of an everyday routine, Linklater discovers a universal experience within it – the thrill of progress and discovery, not being reserved for scientists and astronauts on television, but rather being shared by every living being in a single moment of unity.

From Linklater’s perspective, these pioneers travelling to the Moon may as well be children given their tiny size within the grand scope of the universe, and with helmets blocking out their faces and identities, he happily indulges that prospect. Through Stan’s half-awake eyes, we see this hazy dream being born on the precipice of sleep. In that world, it is his face that looks out from behind the astronaut’s reflective visor, seeing mankind’s giant leap open up a whole universe of possibilities. If Apollo 10 ½ isn’t a fantasy, then perhaps it is Linklater’s alternate history, reflecting on the innocent ambition of the past and constructing a version that justifies its own naivety. For as idealistic a filmmaker as him, the future has never looked brighter than it does in the hands of a child.

Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood is currently streaming on Netflix.

Matt Reeves | 2hr 56min

The line drawn between the identities of Bruce Wayne and Batman has rarely been hazier. There is an inherent dissonance built into the character between the rich, orphaned billionaire and the justice-seeking street vigilante, and although Matt Reeves certainly takes the time to explore this aspect in The Batman, there is often the sense that between the two, it is the quiet, floppy-haired recluse living up in Wayne Tower who feels more uncomfortable in his own skin. Robert Pattinson barely even changes his voice when slipping into his crime-fighting persona, as with this rendition of Batman comes a brutal explosion of fury that is only barely contained beneath Wayne’s angsty demeanour. Forget about quippy, tension-diffusing one-liners – Reeves’ vision of The Batman is one of the darkest comic book movies in years, both thematically and visually, landing with the sort of psychological weight we haven’t seen since Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.

But where Nolan took Michael Mann’s sprawling urban crime dramas as his source of inspiration, capturing epic establishing shots of Gotham and crowds of extras with crisp IMAX photography, Reeves opts for a far more oppressive, grimier vision of the city, illuminating it with the dim, yellow glow of street lamps and headlights. David Fincher is the major influence here in both narrative and lighting, and cinematographer Greig Fraser deserves a good amount of the credit as well for capturing that noir-tinted visual flair which similarly defines the dingy aesthetic of such crime procedurals as Seven and Zodiac. It is through that angle which Reeves thrillingly teases out the mystery-solving detective side of Batman, leading him along a nocturnal trail of puzzles and ciphers left behind at grisly murder scenes by the enigmatic serial killer, the Riddler.

It is with these mysteries in mind that Reeves and Fraser resolve to obscure our view of this city even further, letting backgrounds and sometimes even entire scenes disappear from the camera’s focus. With an incredibly shallow depth of field, our vision often only extends so far as to make out the vague, hazy outline of silhouettes and objects in the background, at times even moving them across layers of the frame to come into view or alternately fade away. This effect gives the same impression as those shots that Reeves masterfully captures through dirty, rain-glazed windows, obfuscating our perspective with a gritty filter that keeps the answers we seek just slightly beyond our grasp. Even when the camera does pull back to reveal massive set pieces or the Gotham cityscape, there is still a sense of claustrophobia or intimacy between smaller ensembles. Perhaps this is just the impact of filming during a pandemic, but the impact is still tangible – The Batman is contained and surprisingly patient for an action film, taking the time to investigate each new mystery and examine the internal lives of its clandestine characters.

On this level, Reeves’ interpretation often nods in the direction of Martin Scorsese thrillers like Taxi Driver, giving Wayne a voiceover and numerous point-of-view shots that turn him into an uneasy, Travis Bickle-like icon. One of his foes, bigwig mobster The Penguin, even bears striking similarities to Jake LaMotta from Raging Bull, with an unrecognisable Colin Farrell plastered in lumpy, scarred prosthetics drawing heavily from Robert de Niro’s loud, boisterous performance.

Though he remains behind a mask for much of the film delivering unhinged monologues over online videos, Paul Dano’s wild envisioning of the traditionally camp Riddler takes a drastic turn into toxic internet culture, and as the film progresses a unique three-way relationship between him, Wayne, and Batman emerges. We have frequently heard other villains wax lyrical about that inextricable bond between them and Batman, but in the Riddler’s disturbing methods of exposing the corruption in Gotham’s wealthy elites, a compelling contrast is set between the two vigilantes, equally steadfast in their vengeful convictions.

Because as terrifying as the Riddler is at times, Reeves doesn’t hold back on setting up Batman as an equally frightening figure, lurking in shadows like a horror monster. Michael Giacchino contributes to this with one of the greatest superhero movie scores in years, driving home a minimalistic, four-note theme for Batman that pounds each beat with ominous force as he furiously advances towards his targets. He is relentless in his pursuits, particularly thriving in the darkness of one thrilling, pitch-black fight lit only by the blast of his enemies’ point-blank gunfire. At his most menacing, Reeves goes on to flip the camera and gaze fearfully upon Batman’s upside-down silhouette closing in on his trapped prey, backlit by a bright, yellow blaze.

There is something far creepier, or perhaps even spiritual about the Riddler’s justice-seeking ideals in comparison to Batman’s, rooted in his childhood at a rundown orphanage. Giacchino attaches the operatic ‘Ave Maria’ to this narrative thread, playing it diegetically a few times before weaving it into his score with subtle, minor variations, often in eerie anticipation of the Riddler’s murders. In these two primary musical motifs, he effectively captures two sides of violent retribution driven by deep-rooted beliefs, both of which form the basis of Reeves’ primary thematic concerns. And it is ultimately in those thoughtful examinations drawn out in a magnificently gloomy visual style and gripping narrative that The Batman emerges not just as a cinematic landmark of its franchise, but of the superhero genre in its entirety.

The Batman is currently playing in theatres.