“Finally, it’s acceptable for children to be murdered in movies again!”

“If there’s one thing about the recent state of film that we can all agree on, it’s that the lack of kid-killing has been a real bummer. Then here it comes and makes everything right.”

“Did you say ‘it’ or It?”

“Does it matter? Whoa, Rob. Better yet: Does It matter? Get it?

“Yep…”

“Now whenever I say ‘it’ I’m going to wonder if I’m unintentionally saying something clever about the movie.”

“It only ever happens unintentionally, Eric.”

​“I want to point out that I agreed to see this movie with you because, (A) I thought it was going to be terrible, and (B) the last movie we saw together, Her, also had a single-syllabled pronoun title, and the idea of only seeing pronoun-titled movies together was mildly amusing to me.”

“Oh yeah. That was good.”

“That? Haven’t seen it, but I’ll put it on the pronoun-titled movie IMDB list I’m going to whip up when I get home.”

“Can’t wait to not read that list of like… four movies. But, now that you mention it, I’m going to make a list of ’80s movies where they kill kids.”

“Pretty sure you’re going to end up on some kind of list yourself for that.”

“Back in the day, you could have a kid die in the cold open and still get a PG rating.”

​“Yeah, what a time to be a child! As children of the ’80s, it’s amazing we didn’t turn out to be serial killers.”

​“And then came the Dakota Fanning-ization of American cinema …

“True. Wait. Why are we blaming Dakota? Were you pulling for Sean Penn to go Of Mice and Men on her at the end of I Am Sam? Dark, dude. Maybe the ’80s did mess us up...”

“I’m not sure what changed. Did it take blockbusters like Hunger Games to re-normalize kid-killing this for the modern era? Maybe real life is just so awful now that people are like, ‘Fine. Dead kids, whatever.’ Either way, dead kids are squarely in Stephen King’s wheelhouse, and It may be the most famous example of that.”

“To be clear though, killing animals on film is still totally unacceptable, unless used as the impetus for Keanu to go on a totally justified killing spree. I remember there was some internet outrage—shocker!—about It being ‘remade’ like the TV miniseries/made-for-TV movie was some sort of masterpiece. But all I can remember is Tim Curry being terrifying and then the giant stupid spider at the end.”

“It doesn’t hold up well.”

“Besides dead kids, what else did you like about this iteration, or should I say, It-eration, of It?”

“All around, the performances from the kids were great. I’m not sure why it took Netflix making cult hit Stranger Things for studios to realize that you can (and should) cast child actors who look and behave like real humans, but I’m all on board with that. It even has that one wiener kid from Stranger Things, 14-year-old Finn Wolfhard.”

“That’s his real name? Oh my god, I need that to be my name. He’s funny and super likable here as a foul-mouthed kid, but I was most impressed with Sophia Lillis’ acting. She plays Bev, the lone girl in this gang of geeks and has the nostalgic look down pat—big-time Molly Ringwald vibes. But her performance really sells how equal parts wonderful and crappy it is to be a teenager in this limbo between childhood and adulthood, where you fully understand and are dealing with heavy stuff but are largely powerless to do anything about it.”

“Going back to Stranger Things for a second: Beyond the whole ’80s nostalgia thing, It takes a lot of cues from the show, both tonally and thematically. I can’t really delve too far into that comparison without dropping spoilers, but both are built around the ‘otherworldly creature versus gang of tween boys and one girl’ genre, and they both feature old-school BMX bikes, ruthless bullies, and lax supervision by adults, who are either evil, loony, or clueless.”

“The adults and bullies in this movie suck! And I mean that as a compliment to their performances. I think It would have worked even better if it focused on the coming-of-age story even more: Wonder Years with a small side of demon clown. It touches on how adults mess kids up and could have even made a stronger connection between the kids’ fears in the film and what they’re dealing with in their lives. Or maybe even what is actually happening to them versus how their minds perceive it as some sort of coping mechanism. Like, Bev’s dad is a scumbag and maintenance worker of sorts who looks like he could and might be spending time in the sewer doing unsavory things to kids. Now, it’s not like I wanted some dumb new twist for the sake of twists where it turns out Pennywise is just an adult snatching up kids and the children see him as a clown to cope with it, but I thought there might be some parallel there to each of the kids’ perception of Pennywise and the things they’re dealing with at home and school, but it’s never fully baked. Hell, maybe that’s stupid, but so is the idea of an inter-dimensional creature who takes the appearance of a clown and wakes up every 20-something years to eat kids in Maine.”

“Speaking of, let’s talk about the clown in the room: Bill Skarsgård as Pennywise the clown.”

“Tim Curry’s are some big clown shoes to fill.”

“I think Skarsgård turns in a pretty solid performance, and he wisely avoids attempting to mimic Curry’s raspy-voiced, creepy-old-man take on the dancing clown. And it must have been tempting to go that route, considering how Curry was really the only aspect of the original miniseries worth remembering. While Curry’s Pennywise calls to mind a sadistic New Jersey tollbooth operator in pancake makeup, Skarsgård lands somewhere between Gollum and a B-minus version of Heath Ledger’s Joker, alternating between wacky and demonic at the drop of a blood-stained fright wig. (And I mean that as a compliment!).”

“Yeah, Skarsgård makes it his own. He gets a ton of screen time, too—maybe too much, especially in those poorly thought-out and executed visual scares where he seemingly teleports toward the camera. We see him so much it raises some questions about the rules of what Pennywise can and can’t do. At times he seems all-powerful and at others he seems to be able to barely hold his own against a few kids.”

“Yeah, it feels kinda funny to bring up things like internal logic in a discussion about a movie starring a demon clown, but it never really feels like the ‘mythology’ of Pennywise is fully defined … but I’m sure we’ll get to that in the (SPOILER ALERT) … SEQUEL!!!”

“Ugh, I literally turned to you and swore when I realized that’s what we were doing here. Let’s talk other things that It doesn’t do so well.”

“The bathroom-cleaning montage: WTF?”

“The bathroom-cleaning montage was way jarring. The tone pulls a complete 360 from one second to the next. I hurt my neck whipping around so fast to look and see if you were seeing this train wreck too. As surprisingly not terrible as It is overall, I think this is the most turn-to-face-your-friend-and-give-a-WTF-expression neck twists I’ve had in a movie since Suicide Squad.”

“Despite being down to clown, I have to acknowledge that at least 85% of this movie was goofy as hell. Also, Pennywise’s last line made me laugh out loud, and I don’t think that’s what they were going for.”

“Also, without spoiling anything, at least one of the kids definitely kills someone and seems to face no consequences for it. Still, I think It was more good than bad—even if some of the scares fall flat—and it will probably hold up much better than the old miniseries. There are some really strong elements: the acting, the score (which is always at 11), and some smaller pieces, like the children’s TV show on in the background throughout the movie and the projector scene, which sounds dumb on paper and starts out feeling like a Japanese horror film cliché but actually ends up being pretty creepy. Your final thoughts?”
​
“I’d say that aside from the acting, the thing that keeps It afloat (get it?!) is its pacing. Pacing is critical in horror, and it’s so easy to screw up, especially when your source material is a 1,000-plus-page novel. This was perhaps the greatest undoing of the 1990 miniseries, which ran for a plodding 192 minutes and spanned over two VHS tapes. But the new version sticks to a much more effective tempo, and despite several digressions into some pretty silly territory, you never really feel bored. It’s almost like the filmmakers realized that a movie about a demonic clown doesn’t need a ton of slow-burning setup.”

There is a seductive quality to being a teenage superhero. An age when you are aware of injustice, yet can do little to stop it; capable of great optimism but familiar with despair—adolescence has become an enduring trope for good reason. As a mutant pubescent do-gooder, you’re in parts unbound from one, but much more susceptible to the other. Though one essential notion of being a teenager superhero remains the same, an ethos Spider-Man: Homecoming embraces, it could be so much fun.
 
Where I’m no arbiter of such things, is this the Spider-Man we’ve always wanted? It’s a gale of fresh air by any summer movie standard, not just the unwieldy design of superhero pictures. Refusing to take itself seriously in a way Deadpool never grasped, Homecoming is a joyful mixture of gold standard hero creation and genre antidote. And that's the word: joy. An unbridled joy, equally endearing and relentless.
 
The other immediate quality of Homecoming, it uses its brain. Jon Watts and company find a clever way to nudge every expected element of Spider-Man. With each subtle shift in perspective, fresh blood trickles through the reboot weary franchise. From the opening sequence, a series of Peter Parker’s frenetic smartphone videos, the film establishes itself as something rambunctious. No origin story, bougie Aunt Mae (Marissa Tomei), a riff on Spidey’s city dependence, it’s built on solid beats. Perhaps not always unfamiliar, but like an exceptional pop song, the mix is beautiful. Concepts are balanced, relationships make sense, and above all, the film has a good heart.
 
To that end, the stakes make sense. Peter Parker, as embodied by Tom Holland, attends Midtown Tech. A high school science academy and diversity cavalcade of hyper-intellectual youths, *handclaps* this is the future liberals want! It’s the weeks leading up to homecoming, and Peter has Spidey problems intermingled with teenager problems, but nothing is the end of the world.
 
Homecoming plays as much the teen movie—Hughesian in a way, but never a pastiche—as it does a superhero film. Academic Decathlons, ATM robbers, crushes, super weapons, they all coexist, each one’s priority as fluid as any concern of a high schooler. And in a cinematic universe where apocalypses are a dime a dozen, Spider-Man’s tangle with arms dealers feels just as pertinent. Where the scale may sound puny, the connections pulling our characters into the central conflict are personal. Saving an entire Eastern European capital, a’ la Avengers: Age of Ultron makes for grandiose cinema, but a tightly woven story with visceral heroes and villains offers something far more human.
 
And the humans in Spider-Man: Homecoming are rad. With a battery of high-caliber talent to deploy, the film manages to give something substantial to each player. Donald Glover and Hannibal Buress, with four scenes between them, are as effective as co-star Zendaya’s angsty Michelle. We get Martin Starr out there reminding us that protest is patriotic. Even a disembodied voice emerges as a memorable sidekick. And, somehow, the requisite appearances of other Marvel characters are largely tasteful. One such instance is punctured with, for my money, the best joke in the picture. Though, with all the warm pork bone broth goodness this picture pours down your gullet, I couldn’t help but feel the nag of one loose thread. I know, I know, it's always a loose thread with me, but the presence of Bokeem Woodbine as one of our Spidey foils cemented the connection.
 
It’s a moment from FX’s serialized Fargo where ambitious criminal Mike Milligan (as played by Woodbine) ascends in the organized crime world. An enlightened man of the 1970’s, Mike has a higher purpose, justification for each bloody handprint left up the ladder. Yet it’s Morning in America, and the multinational is the new kingpin. The enforcer’s reward is a small office outfitted with a word processor. He’s instructed to ditch his oxblood western suit, cut his afro, and learn to golf. Always golf. And on the dawn of Spider-Man: Homecoming—our Sony, Disney orgy of corporate interest—I can’t help but feel Marvel, a once weird, bankrupt, scrappy, visionary, has traded it all in to be just another corporate stooge.
 
This is not some phony righteousness on my behalf. Hell, if they existed, I would depression-lunch-rage-eat loads of McDoubleCrunchwraps, but some hellish union between McDonald's and Taco Bell does not a positive make. I’m not a fan of Hollywood’s current climate—especially Sony “lending” Spider-Man to Marvel, an echo of bad studio system politics—but the onus is to evaluate what happens between the margins, and Homecoming is a joyful place. So, for the sake of my beloved, beleaguered editor, there ends the need to grind this, my favored axe.

Spider-Man: Homecoming is good, but consolidation of creative enterprise under the penumbra of one megacorporation, well, that’s bad. Should the latter be wielded against the former? No, but they are inextricable.  

—By Monte Monreal

​Trying to unpack the many identities of DC’s newest Wonder Woman is like pulling apart layer after layer of a matryoshka. The large, welcoming exterior is an above-average superhero film, and the smallest doll nested in the center is a bittersweet note where realities of and hopes for our world converge. In between there are contrasting pieces each bearing their own questions, each requiring a peek down to the next level. If this seems like an aggressive rubric on which to grade a summer tentpole, there is a pervasive feeling Wonder Woman is required to save the world both on and off the screen. I’ll attempt to peel back the layers left to contemplate, but if this extended analogy has them eyes rolling, I’ll spare you: Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman is a film powerful enough to carry both words in the title.
 
Superheroes
Where this may be the least meaningful of the film’s accomplishments, you heard it here first, folks: DC is out of detention. Yes, between the frenetic joy of The Lego Batman Movie and the  successes of Wonder Woman, DC has finally managed to post bail. Where I wish I could tell you this film subverted and rebuilt the genre—with its many cataloged problems—we never quite ascend to a tier where films like The Dark Knight dare tread. It’s more of a foundational story concern, all tropes and elbows, but this world of color and empathy purges the grueling self-seriousness that has long shackled DC to inferiority. Though, Wonder Woman does get damn close, and it’s for this exact reason all of this may prove so polarizing.
 
Representation
I took a friend of mine to see the screening, and she quite liked it. This is not a person I would remotely describe as an ardent lover of superhero pictures, or even action films, but Wonder Woman won her over. After the film had a couple of days to settle, I asked her—acknowledging the predictable story beats—if our lead was another dumb dude would she have felt the same? Her response? "I liked watching a woman kick ass." And she’s right, slicing straight to the nut with brute truth.
 
I’m loathe to spoil anything, but in an early sequence we see a crew of Amazons whoop up on some Kaiser-loving bros. A full throated, acrobatic beat down, and it’s doooooope. Yes, specifically because a big budget brawl featured women expressing their physical dominance, this picture is special. I can’t recall another sequence like it, and so goes the complexities of representation. Many of us have come of age through summer after summer of blockbusters, but the list of successful female leads can be counted on one hand. As women make up, like, just gonna throw out a number—half of the population—the disparity is beyond troubling. It’s bizarre. But does plugging a woman into an otherwise perfunctory exercise in hero movie making warrant high praise? I believe it does, because new perspectives, no matter how rote, can transform walls into doors. This begs the question, “Is Wonder Woman a feminist movie?” To which my aforementioned friend replied, “Does it need to be?”

Politics
One element of Wonder Woman I wish they had really dug into was the backdrop of WWI. As this is a film about the ideological evolution of Wonder Woman—or Diana as played by Gal Gadot in an exceptional turn—a moment where industrial warfare, absurdist futility, and a new century converge in the trenches of the First World War is fertile ground. Where this could have been a bold parallel track to run, Wonder Woman turns over a few stones, but never tries to piece it all together. And this is where the politics are at times laser precise, and other moments so very muddled.
 
There is a really thoughtful moment where Diana tries on a number of outfits made available to a woman in 1917 London. She finds them, in a word, constricting. In a brilliant gesture, Diana eventually sports a sensible hat, jacket, and long skirt, an ensemble plucked straight from the black and white photos of London suffragettes marching for the vote. In another deft move, Diana dresses down a quorum of serious men in an impressive dark wood war room. They are predictably aghast, but the subtext is what matters; there is no reality where Diana believes she can’t make her voice heard. It is never said, but it is there, smart and incisive.
 
In other moments, Wonder Woman can’t help but truncheon you with its ethics. Varying comments on racism and sexism and war are spilled on screen through chunky dialogue. They become something without nuance, and ideals without dimension can be reduced to a consumer good. Especially when folded into what is ostensibly a product expected to return a profit. So is this a feminist film? Does it need to be? Both answers warrant their own breathy write-ups, but either way it’s a tremendous expectation to pin on a multinational conglomerate’s franchise installment. There is no box office smash, or failure, that can validate a movement. Wonder Woman does offer a distinct victory for the representation of women in major motion pictures, but is important to remember, this, if anything, is the trailhead, not the destination.
 
Norms
That brings me to the biggest disappointment offered in the film, a distinct inability to think beyond the obvious. Look, if you get me in a room with Chris Pine—the dashing Steve Trevor—I’m gonna try and gin up some sexual tension, but that’s a given. Wonder Woman falls into this and so many other dull traps. Whether it is the endless commentary on Diana’s looks, or the need for coupling, or big romantic speeches (which our picture almost writes its way out of in a near transcendent moment), these norms become inescapable. There’s a goofy dick joke! And where the easy comment might be is that this is simply how things are, that sort of thinking is how they stay that way.
 
Hope
Ugh. See that dopey sub-header? I know, but you’ve come this far, so screw it. Let’s open the old heartlight a bit. We deserve it! And therein lies the crux of the film, what we think we deserve versus what we believe. I believe the world is dying. I believe we have turned the page to yet another dark chapter in collective human history. Diana, 100 years ago, looking across the trenches of World War I sees the same. And when she is confronted with this internal crisis—carnage soaked evidence of a world so far gone—Wonder Woman rejects the crushing blow of despair. Instead, she does what heroes do, super and otherwise, she finds something worth fighting for. 

​—Monte Monreal

So, I went down this weird wormhole trying to discern how many years have passed in Jack Sparrow’s life from Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. By the breadcrumb trail I’ve pieced together across a troubling number of Wikipedia entries, I’ve arrived at a number: 100 years.
 
If the first one begins vaguely, “in the late 17th century,” and if this new one features a guillotine—first used publicly in France in 1792—this has been a long, strange century for Jack and company. I mean, someone on the island where our fifth Pirates installment begins has a Herschel telescope. Homie didn’t even invent the 40 footer until 1789! And it’s not like this kind of technology (see: guillotine) quickly disseminates to remote island colonies. So, yeah, a century in-universe. Come at my numbers.
 
Anyway, what does this matter? It doesn’t! And by extension, how much more is there to say about this or any other Pirates movie? To adopt the pirate affect, she be what she be. The assertion is POC:DMTNT is the end of the adventure, though one of the two (two? two.) credited directors has already teased that this is merely the beginning of the end of the adventure. But as we all understand the current climate in Hollywood—N.F.E.R.D. or No Franchise Ever Really Dies—a new branch of critique has emerged in my reconnoitering of films. A mixture of defeatism and pleasant surprise, all hail the arrival of, “it’s better than it needs to be,” cinema!
 
So, the good news is that POC:DMTNT is better than it needs to be. The bad news, is this real life? I can’t claim to have invented this rubric, but last summer around the release of The Legend of Tarzan (which is so much better than it needs to be that it’s actually almost mostly good) my friends and I started to use the descriptor more and more. How can a movie possibly be better than it needs to be? Well, certain properties are going to perform no matter what happens between the margins.
 
Do you remember how ghastly bad the last Pirates movie was? It did, and you’ll want to sit down for this, On Stranger Tides did $1.045 billion—with a B—at the box office. By this measure, why bother making a good movie? Like, why fuss with rewrites and reshoots and so on if a massive turd is going to yield gold bricks? I know this is profoundly cynical, and undercuts the many good people working hard on these movies, but if you see those numbers, what is the incentive to raise the bar? But hey, old man Monte will creak his sad, unfranchised bones off of the soapbox and talk some Pirates, because that is what this is about. Right?!
 
There are some the goods in this one. First and foremost, the gold star goes to Kaya Scodelario. Her turn as Carina Smyth is the highlight of the cast of characters. Her damsel is distress proofed, a hero, thinker, astronomer, and general swashbuckling badass. Also, if you ever need to class up the joint, add a Javier Bardem. You’re already trending in the right direction. But the meat and potatoes for any Pirates film are the set pieces, and this one has a couple of real gems. Going into greater detail would ruin the explosiveness, but there is some zeal injected back into these pirate-y hijinks. Also, big shout out to runtime. Where the 168 minute slog of At World’s End is a distant memory, it’s noteworthy that Dead Men Tell No Tales checks in at a nice, sober 142 minutes. The picture moves at a brisk pace, and it’s digestible, never bogged down in overlong sequences or explanatory chicanery.
 
The bads? Let’s remember Johnny Depp as he was, shall we? Young, lithe, and not yet an inescapable parody of himself. The sea has him now. Also, Paul McCartney. Just...why? You didn’t need to offer more evidence as to why you’re my least favorite Beatle, but why? You don’t need the money. Just, but…why tho? Youngface. Youngfacing—the hottest new Hollywood trend as utilized by Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 and POC:DMTNT—is where we take a moment to digitally recapture how handsome working actors over 50 used to be. Sorry ladies! And where I call to remember Johnny Depp as he was, I did not mean like this. The script. The character dynamics are cursory at best, and at times downright silly. Overall, the story is pretty limp. Ultimately, when we’re brought to our moment of emotional catharsis, we’ve been asked to make almost no investment in the players or their conflicts. As such, the payout resonates accordingly.
 
All of this mills out to a pretty average film, but Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell no Tales is better than it needs to be. Though the question persists, is this or any franchise willing to put in the work to be its best self? To aspire to something beyond a crudely drawn caricature to be passed off as complete enough to return a profit? Only time will tell, and let’s hope it doesn’t take Jack Sparrow another century to find out. 

The logical self and the emotional self—these are the two elements pitted against each other in Marvel Studios’ newest installment Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. And by that, I mean "installed," a perfunctory act complete with an instruction manual. As with so many things in this life, the rational mind—with its shrewdness and well-defined goals—curtails the heart’s ambitions. GOTG2 roots around in this idea instilling it in every place from character design to conflict, but it also inadvertently (or very purposefully) articulates the going concern with all films of this ilk: can the heartlight ever outshine the strictures handed down by the cinematic universe superbrain?
 
Through this lens, I can say I unequivocally enjoyed the first Guardians more. Where I found it incrementally less enjoyable with each ensuing watch, I still think the first installment deserves a ton of credit for being a buoyant, ephemeral moviegoing experience. The soundtrack was better, the film felt scrappier, and the little Marvel franchise literally no one cared about was spun into pure gold. But what was once an ascendant property is now burdened with Atlas-like stature. You can feel more hands in the pie, and you can see the weight of expectations hung around the film’s neck like a millstone.
 
With much fan servicing to be done, many characters to prop up, and fleets of franchises to launch, there is barely room enough to squeeze an actual movie between the opening and closing credits. Did I cut and paste that exact criticism from an older Marvel Studios review? I dunno, but let me know when it stops being true. Oh! And do stay till the end of the credits if you want to get a sense of how many turds Marvel thinks you’ll gleefully choke down. I’m talking Ozymandias levels of, “Look on my works ye mighty and fuck you.” We are beyond tail wagging the dog. That implies some lesser appendage run amok. Guardians 2 feels more inline with Marvel handing out a model 'Summer Tentpole' kit, and shouting at James Gunn as he walks out the door, “but hey, when you’re done, paint it any color you like.”
 
And all of this is a damn shame because GOTG2 is a solid, occasionally superb film. When the checklist of demands moves out of the forefront, the movie bursts with joyous cinema custom tailored for the big screen. Gunn and company understand the unique advantages offered them with the mixtape trope, and to that end, Guardians 2 offers some exquisite music and cinema moments. The picture can be visually delicious and impassioned and just downright likeable, but it cannot escape the template. Not to read into things too aggressively, but when a problem is posed by an eternal brain—the ultimate symbol of rationale over feeling—inextricably bound to its self-imposed purpose regardless of consequence, I can’t help but see it as a kind of mea culpa and meta-self-satire deftly snuck past the bosses.    
 
Perhaps I’m giving James Gunn too much credit, but he’s a very gifted filmmaker. The core talent is as endearing as ever, and Kurt Russell and Pom Klementieff make fine additions to the roster. Yondu, Rocket, and Nebula are awarded some heavier lifting. The Star-Lord, Gamora will-they-won’t-they is taken to some sweet spots, pacing appropriate to a sequel. And Dave Bautista’s Drax, where one note, man that cat can blow.
 
Though, as with any ever expanding universe, the more sentient beings you introduce, the more relationships there are to satisfy. After a hasty count, I think there are at least eight inter-character dynamicsGuardians 2 tries to sift through in 138 minutes. Combined with the laundry list of other franchise prerequisites, subtle examination must have been left on the cutting room floor, or maybe nuance just didn’t focus group well. Make a mental note of the times all aural chaos falls away and one character delivers an incisive, punchy line to another. By my math, you should arrive at the exact number of complex interactions satiated with a cursory, “that should do.”
 
This kind of hurried, hollow sentiment is what frustrated me most this go round. It’s one thing to openly acknowledge none of this is about characters or story—these are blockbusters, not drawing room dramas—but for relationships to be serviced in such a cheap way is cynical. Manicured and oversimplified, the wildness of feeling something deeply is exchanged for an emotional reaction similar to a gag reflex. It’s procedural. When our core emotional connection feels so broadly manufactured, the whole exercise is rendered inessential.

If my opposing poles of praise and haranguing seem incongruent to the point of contradictory, know it is indicative of the gulf between the head and the heart. Overtly signaled by the characters of Ego and Mantis—one who is all frigid logic, the other an empath capable of feeling and altering others emotions—the concept expands in concentric circles beyond the characters, beyond narrative function, beyond the margins of the film, until it embodies an existential crisis. In its brain, the film knows it is merely a ribbon being woven around the Marvel maypole from which it would never dare sever or distinguish itself. But in those handful of moments where Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 flirts with the sublime, when genuine movie thrill cascades from the screen, you can feel it comes from the heart. 

​—By Monte Monreal

Can this just be my review for The Lego Movie? A chance to write the one review that got away? Can this be my treatise on one of the few truly exceptional films of the last decade? A missive so overwrought and spittle flecked you’d be convinced my baby cousin worked on the film?
 
No?
 
It’s just…you want The Lego Batman Movie only? Word, no, that’s cool. We’ll do Lego Batman. Which is pretty good and fun, but it is not The Lego Movie, that I can say. Well, let’s just call this my knowing nod to the decimation of the fourth wall, one of Lego Batman’s well utilized tropes.

Okay, how about: 
The DC Universe just got a lot bigger and significantly brighter with the arrival of Lego Batman, the not-quite-a-sequel spinoff of 2014’s magnificent The Lego Movie. And yes, as the second title card reveals this is part of the DC Universe, what our Will Arnett as Batman voiceover describes as, “The house that Batman built.” Is it canon? Legit, get a grip, no one cares, but of the film’s many accomplishments, the greatest achievement is a much needed reset for Batman and DC.
 
Where Trump’s America warrants increasingly miserable Zack Snyder helmed vanity projects, this is a sweet, meta breeze blowing through the dark© and gritty© world in which Superman and company have cloistered themselves. Where I decided I’d only go see the next installment of Suicide Squad if I was promised—in writing—that it would be more stupefying/consciously bad than the first, Lego Batman and the arrival of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson may signal a change. Because, call me crazy, but maybe, just maybe, Batman isn’t something to be taken so seriously.
 
I’d insert some sort of obligatory plot explainer here, but this film knows you know the story. All of them, for the last 78 years. And with encyclopedic knowledge and an endearing lack of mercy, Lego Batman comes after every iteration. A mixture of celebration and derision, the entire notion of Batman, from the self-seriousness to elaborate merchandising, is tweaked. Joker is at the forefront, and where angle of supervillain and superhero as equivalent necessities is pretty well explored, this picture ratchets it up to full blown codependence. And when it comes to Batman and a jilted Joker, that infamous line has never been more gossamer thin.
 
Lego Batman does carry an essential quality with it from The Lego Movie (the 2014 masterpiece from Warner Bros. Animation)—it’s joyful and frenetic. Like it’s drawn from the Bob Clampett playbook, the jokes are relentless, strung on an unbroken chain of high energy. Whether it’s off camera commentary, a sight gag, slapstick, or an in-joke, Lego Batman never relents. Admittedly, the high intensity style is gonna rub some folks wrong. Like, if you have a slight headache and are already pissed at the kids, the madcap fervor will push you over the edge. Because our little brick universe doesn’t stop at an aural assault—raining down joke-a-second heavy artillery— it offers some of the busiest animated pyrotechnics I can recall. Every frame is crammed with movement, except for scenes built on a deliberate lack of movement, a whiplash effect at every turn.
 
The one component missing is a nugget of profundity. It’s a big ask of any film, but the precedent had been set with 2014’s Miller and Lord chef d’oeuvre, The Lego Movie. Admittedly they enjoyed the exploitation of a universe with no set rules—where Batman is coated in lore to the point of being bronzed—but you can see this film aching for that sweet spot and never quite landing a precise touch. There are a couple of noticeable differences this go round. One, Miller and Lord have moved from the director’s chair to the producer role. Two, the list of accredited writers expands from four to six. It’s the fate of any property of this magnitude, but it certainly feels like more hands, visions, and voices in the pot.

Even with all of these competing elements, The Lego Batman Movie succeeds. And, unlike other recent iterations of DC product, you want to root for it.  The film’s strength lies in knowing exactly what is. It’s a movie about Batman and Legos and relationships gleefully packed in cannon and blasted in bits of colored confetti across the screen.

​Your only lingering question may be, “do I need to see 2014 pillar of cinema The Lego Movie so I can follow Lego Batman?” And to that I say yes, because...you haven’t seen The Lego Movie?! It is SO GOOD!

​—By Monte Monreal

Some of the hardest things to explain to children—and by extension adults—are the stupefying incongruities of life. Having no children of my own (bless up!) I can only guess at it, but spending a few hours here and there as deadbeat uncle and/or much-older-half-brother, I catch the occasional glimpse. Light, dark, asleep, awake, yes, no; it’s easy to see how the binary can posses the developing mind. But as life continues to reveal itself, the thresher of complexity will invariably rear its nuanced jaws, and then what? A Monster Calls embraces this cusp in a young man’s life and manages an honest answer to this difficult question: it’s complicated.
 
As a piece of filmmaking, A Monster Calls is a little shaggy. It’s really quite plodding out of the gates, and a dour tone is omnipresent. Stylistically, the picture occasionally reaches for some naturalistic flourishes, but, as opposed to adding a lyrical touch, it’s almost like you can see the stitching on the film: odd stray shots, clumsy out of focus images, a less-than-remarkable score. But the emotional power of the film is unquestionable.

When my editor first sent out the notice for this screening, she appended a brief note, “You’ll cry buckets.” And she’s not wrong. [Editor's Note: I saw this at Fantastic Fest by myself and openly sobbed.] Usually commentary like “not a dry eye in the house” is a bit hyperbolic for my tastes, but unless there was a collective allergy attack in the theater, everyone around me was visibly moved. This film is very personally resonant for me—one moment in particular was seemingly plucked verbatim from one of my life-defining traumas—but we can only wait and see if the film will jerk tears en masse.
 
The third feature length film from director J.A. Bayona, A Monster Calls is an adaptation of a fantasy novel penned by Patrick Ness. Focused on the trials and tribulations of young Conor, our guy really gets trounced by the full complement of tough turns. His Mum—Felicity Jones, who is having a massive year—is gravely ill. His father lives across the globe. He’s relentlessly bullied at school. And he’s often left in the clutches of his stringent grandmother, Sigourney Weaver, trying to English accent her way out of this thing.
 
As pressure mounts and nightmares persist, Conor finally meets the Monster (Neesons!). The Monster’s aim is simple, to tell Conor three tales, and then Conor will tell the fourth tale, his truth. Where this may read like straightforward fare, A Monster Calls readily takes its place among the collection of melancholic, challenging “kids” movies. This film has an aching heart, and it guards it with suspicion and rage and confusion. It’s a kind of fairy tale, but only in the stock players. Conor has his otherworldly monster, and the monster tells stories to Conor about princes, witches, invisible men, apothecaries and so on.
 
Through this the film does its most thoughtful work. So many stories of this ilk are neatly portioned out into simple morality tales. The wronged prevail, the wicked are punished, and the good notch easy, indisputable victories. And as is the standard build, there is a beautiful gilt wall of “Happily Ever After” placed at the end, forever containing the purity of this narrative. But A Monster Calls understands that happily ever after is not punctuation, but a through point. As long as we draw breath, there is another chapter. Ill-intentioned good and well-intentioned bad swirl together in so many of the complications life sets in our path, no matter how much we crave a simple, tidy answer.

The Monster imbues Conor with these lessons, and Conor continues to arrive at junctures where these truths reverberate again and again. You can only take the jagged edges of the puzzle as they are and find the best way to piece them together, knowing they will always defy the well machined pieces of our ideal outcome. You’re left with something a bit rough and haggard, and therein lies not only the monster, but our monster. A friend, an antagonist, an ally, and a foil. It’s not an entity to be completely tamed, but one of many forces to fit into our lives.

​Because occasionally, when it’s as though your life has rejected you and the ground beneath you is rent asunder, your monster may be the only one who can save you.

​—Monte Monreal