Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) – 4K Ultra HD

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) – 4K Ultra HD

****/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B+
starring Matthew Broderick, Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Jeffrey Jones
written and directed by John Hughes

by Bill Chambers I often begin these autopsies of John Hughes’s oeuvre by regurgitating some lore about how the film in question came to be. In the case of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, I want to correct a faux pas I made on Twitter. “I find it fascinating,” I tweeted, “that in test screenings they all hated Ferris Bueller’s girlfriend and John Hughes figured out it was because of one line where she criticizes him. They cut it and her likability quotient skyrocketed.” (“Fascinating and depressing,” I added in a follow-up.) In actuality, the line had nothing to do with Ferris’s girlfriend cutting him down to size. I should’ve refreshed my memory of the incident beforehand, say by rereading this passage from A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away (reviewed here), the 2019 memoir by the movie’s editor, Paul Hirsch:

Kathryn Newton in Lisa Frankenstein

Lisa Frankenstein (2024) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

*½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B-
starring Kathryn Newton, Cole Sprouse, Liza Soberano, Carla Gugino
written by Diablo Cody
directed by Zelda Williams

by Bill Chambers During what I suppose constitutes the climax of Zelda Williams’s Lisa Frankenstein, the “UK Surf” remix of The Pixies‘ “Wave of Mutilation” cues up on the soundtrack. It’s broadly fitting–three people have been mutilated over the course of the picture, and our antiheroine is preparing to claim a fourth victim with an axe–and period-appropriate. (“Wave of Mutilation” came out in 1989, the year in which the movie takes place.) It’s also, like a lot of the creative decisions driving Lisa Frankenstein, amateurish in its literal-mindedness, derivativeness (anyone who knows anything will tell you that “Wave of Mutilation” (UK Surf remix) belongs to Pump Up the Volume), and clunkiness, with the song fighting a losing battle to be heard through the prophylactic of Isabella Summers’s score. Lisa Frankenstein is the brainchild of writer-producer Diablo Cody, her first horror comedy since Jennifer’s Body, a film I didn’t care for in 2008 but suspect I was wrong about, having watched it back then as some sort of Megan Fox litmus test instead of as its own thing. I’m prepared to accept that I’m similarly wrong about Lisa Frankenstein–that I’m too old and male for it, that it will endear itself to me over time, the way today’s trash turns into tomorrow’s treasure. I dunno, though. I don’t think demographics are the issue–Cody conceived it as a distaff Weird Science (hence “Lisa”), and that’s kind of my wheelhouse–and I don’t think Lisa Frankenstein is epochal enough to age like anything other than milk.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (2023)

Humanistvampire

Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant
**/****
starring Sara Montpetit, Félix-Antoine Bénard, Steve Laplante, Sophie Cadieux
screenplay by Ariane Louis-Seize, Christine Doyon
directed by Ariane Louis-Seize

by Angelo Muredda Puberty is a vampire in Ariane Louis-Seize’s Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person, a stylish but flimsy debut that has little to say on the subject of either depression or vampires in spite of its title. A likeable, low-stakes coming-of-age allegory about the growing pains of being an outsider (among other barely scratched subjects), the film slots in nicely next to spooky-adjacent young adult romances like “Wednesday” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina”, for whatever that’s worth. It also makes a nice calling card for Louis-Seize’s likely future in franchise television, her comic world-building better suited for a sitcom with genre notes than a feature, where her characters are reduced to the sort of easily summarized traits that would make them stand out in a pilot.

Poltergeist (1982) + The Lost Boys (1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

Vlcsnap-2022-10-25-13h40m42s064Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

POLTERGEIST
****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras B
starring JoBeth Williams, Craig T. Nelson, Beatrice Straight, Heather O’Rourke
screenplay by Steven Spielberg, Michael Grais & Mark Victor
directed by Tobe Hooper

THE LOST BOYS
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Corey Feldman, Jami Gertz, Corey Haim, Dianne Wiest
screenplay by Janice Fischer & James Jeremias and Jeffrey Boam
directed by Joel Schumacher

by Bill Chambers Although Walter Chaw’s already written definitive reviews of Poltergeist and The Lost Boys for this site, so much time has passed since they were published that I feel obliged to say something original about these films before moving on to the Blu-ray portion of this review. Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, each celebrating milestone anniversaries this year (fortieth and thirty-fifth, respectively), have aged unusually gracefully. Partly this is due to the Star Wars-festooned bedroom of Poltergeist and the comics-store hub of The Lost Boys being evergreen–though what was once indicated by Robbie’s C-3PO lightswitch cover (his middle-class privilege) and Sam’s pedantic knowledge of Superman lore (his lack of social life) may not come across as clearly to a generation of viewers that has grown up with Jedis and superheroes as the inescapable sum of pop culture. Moreover, these are not naïve films that invite condescension, and any doubts about their sophistication (aesthetic and otherwise) are laid to rest by the instantly dated attempts to drag them into the 21st century: Gil Kenan’s remake of Poltergeist and the dtv sequel Lost Boys: The Tribe.

Dear Evan Hansen (2021)

Dearevanhansen

ZERO STARS/****
starring Ben Platt, Julianne Moore, Kaitlyn Dever, Amy Adams
screenplay by Steven Levenson, based on his stage play with songs by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul
directed by Stephen Chbosky

by Walter Chaw Dear Evan Hansen is the Canadian-girlfriend grift, emerging from insecurity and good intentions–that mythological girl from a place far enough away for high-school kids that it might as well be Narnia or Middle-Earth, whose phantom existence affirms you are not as pathetic and alone as you really are. And when your Canadian girlfriend dies by house-fire or moose misadventure, perhaps there’s a vein of pathos to be mined there for whatever profit grief allows. It’s the illusion of depth for an immature, troubled, frightened kid, common enough that the “Canadian girlfriend” has entered the pantheon of urban fairytales. How ’bout if Dear Evan Hansen had been about the social pressures that harangue Evan Hansen (Ben Platt) into exploiting the death of a deeply unbalanced and complete stranger instead of how Evan Hansen’s own terminal thoughts and attempted suicide forgive his sociopathic manipulation of a grieving family and school community? Aye, there’s a movie for you–the one where Evan Hansen is a victim and not the hero, and the bad guy is not the truth of his unforgivable deception being discovered, but the overwhelming stricture to conform that weighs especially heavy on adolescents. The sneakiest thing about Dear Even Hansen is that at the end of it all, it’s not actually okay that Evan is an outcast. The premise itself is the bully.

Lisa (1990) – Blu-ray Disc

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****/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Cheryl Ladd, D.W. Moffet, Staci Keanan, Tanya Fenmore
written by Gary Sherman & Karen Clark
directed by Gary Sherman

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s cheesy, right? He stakes out beautiful women, breaks into their apartment while they’re out, and decorates their place with enough candles for a Meat Loaf video. When they return home and check their messages, they hear one from him: “Hi, this is Richard. I’m in your apartment. I’m going to kill you.” Then he pounces, doing exactly what he promised to do. I went to see Gary Sherman’s Lisa with a friend on opening weekend in May of 1990; we had planned on going to Ernest Goes to Jail but were late for the matinee. We were late for everything, in fact, except Lisa, and the only competition for a seat was the tumbleweeds–a reflection of the skeletal marketing budget and maybe Siskel & Ebert’s downcast thumbs. Anyway, my buddy and me, both 15 at the time, were snorting derisively at Richard’s M.O.–the media has christened him, ooh, the Candlelight Killer–as Lisa got underway, mainly because it involved the type of aesthetic jive we put up with for a flash of nipple on late-night cable. (Did I mention the saxophone music?) Then came the introduction of the title character, a 14-year-old girl who lives with her florist mother Katherine in a cozy little womb of a loft, and any residual laughter took on a nervous edge. Safe to say that Scooby-Doo-ish frisson of siccing a sociopath on the territory of Apple Paperbacks worked like a charm: We were on tenterhooks for the next 90 minutes or so, like air-traffic controllers monitoring the progress of Lisa and Richard’s inevitable, inexorable collision.

Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) [John Hughes: 5-Movie Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

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***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Eric Stoltz, Mary Stuart Masterson, Craig Sheffer, Lea Thompson
written by John Hughes
directed by Howard Deutch

by Bill Chambers “Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world. In order to criticize a movie, you have to make another movie.” John Hughes may have had this famous Jean-Luc Godard quote in mind when he embarked on the screenplay for Some Kind of Wonderful, a gender-swapped version of his heavily-compromised Pretty in Pink that came out less than a year later. But Some Kind of Wonderful did not start out like it ended up: The script that director Howard Deutch originally signed on to direct was about a citywide first date between a social pariah and the prettiest girl in school that notoriously called for the Blue Angels flight demonstration squadron to put on a private show for the couple. A broad comedy, it opened with its hero masturbating into a pillow. If you’ve seen Some Kind of Wonderful, this will all sound pretty incongruous.

Willy’s Wonderland (2021) – VOD

Willyswonderland

½*/****
starring Nicolas Cage, Emily Tosta, Ric Reitz, Beth Grant
written by G.O. Parsons
directed by Kevin Lewis

by Walter Chaw Kevin Lewis’s high-concept Nicolas Cage-vs.-Chuck E. Cheese thriller Willy’s Wonderland misses because it believes it can’t miss. Star Cage has built a career for himself as that weirdo who will do stupid movies, and here he is playing The Janitor, a man of no words who cleans things up. A real contempt for the audience roils off this garbage, the belief that there need be no real effort expended in the creation of this product as long as there’s enough Nic Cage doing dumb shit as bizarrely as possible. It’s lazy. There’s one long exposition dump towards the beginning of it, delivered by a somehow and sorely overmatched Emily Tosta, about Satanic rituals and stuff at the local theme restaurant, and honestly, it was all done better in that video game “Five Nights at Freddy’s”, where the reason for the robot characters springing to homicidal life isn’t really addressed at all. It’s painfully bad, Willy’s Wonderland, in exactly the way things are bad when a bunch of bros get together to capitalize on a phenomenon they can’t begin to understand and couldn’t be bothered to interrogate. Cage + animatronic monsters? As William Hurt once asked, “How do you fuck that up?”

Sundance ’21: We’re All Going to the World’s Fair

Sundance21wereallgoing

***/****
starring Anna Cobb, Michael J. Rogers
written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun

by Walter Chaw We spend our teen years–and, if we’re not careful, our entire lives–imagining ourselves a player in a grand, romantic storyline where everything that happens has meaning, every misdeed receives justice, and every moment of grace is returned in kind. We need to feel like there’s more to this than just chaos and meaningless suffering. Most of all, we need to believe that we have some control over how things turn out on both a personal level and a cosmic one, too. The alternative, after all, tends to be despair. I suspect the reason Boomers are the majority demographic in the Q-nonsense is their fear of a world in which they suddenly understand nothing requires some sort of recourse, no matter how tortured.

Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020); Freaky (2020) [Killer Switch Edition] – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

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Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

FREAKY
**½/**** Image A- Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finneran, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon

by Walter Chaw “You’ve gone strange on me,” Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression that’s impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isn’t himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though he’s surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, he’s vulnerable to the mistakes he’s made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning “parts” or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I haven’t been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I don’t think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelow’s nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.

Possessor (2020) + Freaky (2020)

Freaky

Possessor Uncut
****/****
starring Christopher Abbott, Andrea Riseborough, Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Jason Leigh
written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg

FREAKY
**½/****
starring Vince Vaughn, Kathryn Newton, Katie Finnernan, Alan Ruck
written by Michael Kennedy & Christopher Landon
directed by Christopher Landon

Please take every precaution if you insist on risking your health and that of others to see Freaky in a theatre. Wear a mask (over the nose, too, sport), practise social distancing, and don’t be a dick.

by Walter Chaw “You’ve gone strange on me,” Ava (Tuppence Middleton) says to her boyfriend Colin (Christopher Abbott) one morning when he, frisky in the kitchen, reacts to her rejection of his advances with an expression that’s impossible to read. Colin has gone strange. He really isn’t himself. Ava is the daughter of a wealthy and powerful man, John Parse (Sean Bean), who has earned wealthy and powerful enemies, and though he’s surrounded himself with all of the things wealth can buy, including a reasonable level of separation from the rabble, he’s vulnerable to the mistakes he’s made as the bad father he knows himself to be. I appreciate that his name derives from a word meaning “parts” or, colloquially, a deconstruction of a whole into the small, individual components of which it is composed. Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor has both nothing and everything to do with Ava and John and Colin; it is a multitude I haven’t been able to shake for days, and so I watched Possessor a second time to try to exorcise it from me. I don’t think it worked. Time will tell. Possessor is a science-fiction film the way Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a science-fiction film, and a horror movie the way Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a horror movie, but what it most resembles is Kathryn Bigelow’s nightmare chimera of the two, Strange Days. All of these movies make you sick (heartsick, soulsick, sick-sick), but Possessor has about it the massive, impersonal nihilism of Philip K. Dick. We are cogs in a machine, and the machine is broken. But also it never worked in the first place. The picture is a true fable of our deconstruction.

Pretty in Pink (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

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**/**** Image A Sound A+ Extras B-
starring Molly Ringwald, Harry Dean Stanton, Jon Cryer, Andrew McCarthy
written by John Hughes
directed by Howard Deutch

by Bill Chambers John Hughes made his mark with screenplays that had straightforward, saleable hooks. National Lampoon’s Vacation is about a suburban family on a cross-country drive to a theme park. Mr. Mom is about a husband and wife switching places as the breadwinner of the family. Sixteen Candles is about a girl turning 16 whose family forgets her birthday. The Breakfast Club is about five high-school students serving detention on a Saturday. Weird Science is about a couple of geeks who Frankenstein themselves the perfect woman. But Pretty in Pink, inspired by though not based on The Psychedelic Furs‘ song of the same name, is an outlier in Hughes’s early filmography in that it’s merely an ode to his muse Molly Ringwald, its collection of feeble pretexts for shining the spotlight on her hardly constituting a premise. It’s a movie that operates on the somewhat shaky assumption that Ringwald, like Anna Karina before her, is cinema, her most mundane gestures becoming iconic through the simple act of photographing them. The ultimate irony, of course, is that when Hughes transposed every non-event that happens in Pretty in Pink onto Some Kind of Wonderful a year later, it resulted in what was arguably his most high-concept project yet: the boy version of Pretty in Pink.

Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020)

Neverrarelyalways

**½/****
starring Sidney Flanigan, Talia Ryder, Ryan Eggold, Sharon Van Etten
written and directed by Eliza Hittman

by Walter Chaw In Eliza Hittman’s Never Rarely Sometimes Always, a young woman seeking an abortion finds one. There’s not much controversy in my mind as to whether or not she should have it, since the film suggests, in a lovely, oblique way, that her pregnancy is the product of abuse–maybe probably definitely absolutely through an incestual relationship with her creepy stepfather (Ryan Eggold). Hittman doesn’t say that this is so, but she doesn’t say that it isn’t so, either. From what we glean of the stepfather’s meanness and cruelty to the family dog, and then from the way our hero, Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), reacts to questions about the father of the MacGuffin, we, you know, put things together. Mostly, what we put together is that Never Rarely Sometimes Always is less interested in those details than it is in painting a portrait of how terrifying men are, which is utterly true and also not exceptionally revelatory, as revelations go.

Sundance ’20: Beast Beast

Sundance20beastbeast

*½/****
starring Shirley Chen, Will Madden, Jose Angeles, Courtney Dietz
written and directed by Danny Madden

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Slacking around in the common area shared by Elephant, Madeline's Madeline, and Skate Kitchen, Danny Madden's message-heavy melodrama Beast Beast would've been better served just being about the difficulties of adolescence without wading into the gun debate. Once this pretty decent hangout flick tries to gain some gravitas, it invites close scrutiny of the ways it's going about it. One side will start looking for reasons to discredit it, while the other will be burdened by this uneasy recognition that sometimes, undisciplined good intentions make the struggle harder. There's a fine line between a cogent argument, after all, and The Life of David Gale, and Beast Beast is further evidence that liberals tend to be their own worst enemy. It's too bad.

Sundance ’20: La Leyenda Negra

Sundance20laleyendanegra*/****

starring Monica Betancourt, Kailei Lopez, Irlanda Moreno, Justin Avila
written and directed by Patricia Vidal Delgado

by Walter Chaw Shot in black-and-white, Patricia Vidal Delgado's La Leyenda Negra is filled with good intentions. It's the story of El Salvadoran Aleteia (Monica Betancourt), a high-school senior studying with a "Temporary Protected Status" that's about to be rescinded under Trump's xenophobic, white-nationalist administration. She has a scholarship to UCLA, the film is quick to remind, but she still has to make it through graduation. Easier said than done when her school's curriculum seems set on teaching antiquated attitudes towards imperialism and the genuine evil of nations that have devastated whole populations in the name of Manifest Destiny. There's a classroom scene where Aleteia corrects her white teacher's pronunciation of her name before laying into her for perpetuating the party line. Aleteia is meanwhile developing a crush on Rosarito (Kailei Lopez–a budding star, perhaps), a shy girl in the sway of a monstrous bully, Monica (Irlanda Moreno), who does not approve of potentially losing an acolyte to the interloper.

Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (2019)

Scarystories

***½/****
starring Zoe Margaret Colletti, Michael Garza, Gabriel Rush, Dean Norris
screenplay by Dan Hageman & Kevin Hageman, based on the series by Alvin Schwartz
directed by André Øvredal

by Walter Chaw André Øvredal’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (hereafter Scary Stories) is a dulcet, autumnal picture balanced right there between the endless summers of dandelion wine and the interminable and harsh winters of brutality that lie ahead. A project based on a beloved series of children’s books by Alvin Schwartz, it transcends its source by understanding the true function of little nightmares: the stories we tell our kids to begin to toughen them up for lives spent in this hell. Scary Stories unfolds, essentially, in the days between Halloween, 1968 and Election Night (November 5th) of that same year, when Richard Nixon won the Presidency on a date that disrupted 36 years of New Deal expansion. Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic nominee, but only after Bobby was shot (just a short while after Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot); the beheading of the Democratic party’s progressive soul was now complete. George Wallace, a piece of shit still somehow not as repugnant as Donald Trump, carried five states that night by promising racial segregation. Old footage of Walter Kronkite delivering the results of the election provides the background for a young woman, Stella (Zoe Margaret Colletti), trying in vain to convince the adults that things are not going to be okay before calling her recently-widowed dad to tell him that all the disappointments of the world are not his alone to carry. It would be instructive to watch Scary Stories as the warm-up feature for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Both occupy the same dream-space, the same halcyon “the past” where everything is possible until it isn’t anymore. The surprise is that of the two films, it’s Scary Stories that is the less hopeful.

Fantasia Festival ’19: Darlin’

Fantasia19darlin

***/****
starring Lauryn Canny, Bryan Batt, Nora-Jane Noone, Pollyanna McIntosh
written and directed by Pollyanna McIntosh

Fantasia Festival 2019 runs July 11-August 1 in Montreal, Quebec. Visit the fest's official site for more details.

by Walter Chaw A promising and at times exceptional hyphenate debut, Pollyanna McIntosh's Darlin' continues the saga of Jack Ketchum's feral, cannibalistic Family with this sequel to Lucky McKee's inexplicably controversial The Woman. A few years after her escape from a family of Evangelicals, The Woman (McIntosh) drops off feral child Darlin' (Lauryn Canny) at a Catholic hospital, where Darlin' falls under the kind ministrations of Nurse Tony (Cooper Andrews). It's an interesting conceit that this wild thing, having seen the dangers of living without health care, should leave her charge at an institution peopled by the same society that had previously tried to "civilize" her through imprisonment and rape. Viewers familiar with The Woman will place that Darlin' is the child abducted/freed by The Woman at the end of that film–raised now to be a knowing, hilarious miniature doppelgänger of her guardian. At one point, McIntosh frames the two of them as they stand together surveying the wilderness, their enormous hair making them look like two pine trees in silhouette. It's one of several moments in the film where McIntosh's sense of humour gets free reign. A later scene set in a car as Nurse Tony tries to drive The Woman a few miles is the hardest I've laughed in any movie this year. (See, she's never been in a car.)

Bumblebee (2019) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital

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***½/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras C
starring Hailee Steinfeld, John Cena, Jorge Lendeborg Jr., John Ortiz
written by Christina Hodson
directed by Travis Knight

by Walter Chaw Travis Knight’s Bumblebee is a tone-perfect amalgamation of The Love Bug and The Iron Giant. It is, in other words, both a throwback summer programmer (perhaps mistakenly released during the Christmas season) and a sophisticated parable about coming of age in a divided America. It casts Hailee Steinfeld as Charlie, a gearhead who loves her car more than she’s interested in fielding the advances of the awkward neighbour kid pining after her. And then it has her dealing with the loss of a parent as she finds her way through an already-difficult period in a young person’s development. It wisely hires Knight, who at Laika Studios produced the unexpectedly sensitive and introspective ParaNorman and Kubo and the Two Strings (the latter of which he directed), and screenwriter Christina Hodson (the woman entrusted with upcoming films about Harley Quinn and Batgirl), with uncredited contributions from Kelly Fremon Craig, writer-director of the sensitive The Edge of Seventeen, which also starred Steinfeld. In placing gifted, effortlessly diverse people before and behind the camera and then watching as the lingering hostility around the misogynistic, racist, xenophobic Michael Bay cock operas that have made the Transformers franchise to this point disgusting and toxic just melt away, Bumblebee becomes a prototype for the modern reboot. It’s amazing how the right choices among topline talent make all the work of not only avoiding offense, but also providing uplift, seem a magical side-effect rather than some laborious and arcane undertaking. (It’s the difference, for instance, between Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel.) Knight’s Bumblebee is the Transformers franchise as it should have been from the start: on the one hand a nostalgic, sometimes exciting, often hilarious story about the coming to earth of sentient machines engaged in perpetual war who can camouflage themselves as terrestrial vehicles and appliances–and on the other, a clever parable about how the toys (and cars) we grow up with sometimes provide the guardrails for how we view accountability as we get older. By the end of Bumblebee, the girl and her ‘bot arrive at the mature–and, more importantly, healthy–decision to move on from each other. Another franchise after The Last Jedi making the daring suggestion that living in the past is death.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

Spideyverse3Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
screeplay by Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman
directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, hereafter Spider-Verse, is a game-changer. It’s American anime, essentially, an Akira moment for our film art that will sooner or later be identified as the definitive event where everything tilted forward. I hope sooner. More than beautiful, it’s breathtaking. More than kinetic, it’s alive. And more than just alive, it’s seething with possibilities, self-awareness, a real vision of a future in which every decision in Hugh Everett’s quantum tree produces an infinite series of branches. It’s a manifestation of optimism. There’s hope in Spider-Verse, along with a reminder that more people in these United States believe in progressive values than don’t, no matter who the President is. Empathy and compassion hold the majority; there’s a recognition we are essentially the same–the same desires, the same disappointments. When a father tells his son he’s proud of him, it makes us cry because we identify with the entire spectrum of complexity such a conversation entails. When it happens in Spider-Verse, the son is unable to respond and the father is unable to see why, and the visual representation of the distance that can grow between fathers and sons is astonishingly pure. Turgenev never conceived a more graceful image on the subject. It’s perfect.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Spidermanintothespiderverse

****/****
screeplay by Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman
directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, hereafter Spider-Verse, is a game-changer. It's American anime, essentially, an Akira moment for our film art that will sooner or later be identified as the definitive event where everything tilted forward. I hope sooner. More than beautiful, it's breathtaking. More than kinetic, it's alive. And more than just alive, it's seething with possibilities, self-awareness, a real vision of a future in which every decision in Hugh Everett's quantum tree produces an infinite series of branches. It's a manifestation of optimism. There's hope in Spider-Verse, along with a reminder that more people in these United States believe in progressive values than don't, no matter who the President is. Empathy and compassion hold the majority; there's a recognition we are essentially the same–the same desires, the same disappointments. When a father tells his son he's proud of him, it makes us cry because we identify with the entire spectrum of complexity such a conversation entails. When it happens in Spider-Verse, the son is unable to respond and the father is unable to see why, and the visual representation of the distance that can grow between fathers and sons is astonishingly pure. Turgenev never conceived a more graceful image on the subject. It's perfect.