Movie review: "Annihilation"

writ. and dir. by Alex Garland

Horror and science fiction are both presently enjoying modest renaissance periods. For horror films, the likes of It Follows and The Witch provide clever twists on common horror motifs, whereas recent sci-fi marvels like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 use their imaginative worlds to tell very human stories and explore fascinating philosophical concepts. Writer-director Alex Garland was at the forefront of the latter wave with his 2015 feature Ex Machina, a nebulous yet fascinating bit of speculative fiction which placed as much weight on the personalities of its leads as on the technology of its core. That film ultimately devolved into a deranged slasher film, high-energy but bland and comically overheated, but its questions lingered in the mind.

With his new film, an adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation, Garland has mixed the thoughtful science fiction of his prior film with foreboding tension and intelligent scares, finding synthesis between these two reemerging genres. However, this new film proves even more nebulous, and despite now having popular source material to work with, his intellectual and pulp impulses continue to be at odds with each other, and while the latter is as sharp as it's ever been, the former drowns in a cliched, expository script, where an actual human core to the story has been sacrificed in favour of imaginative digital effects. Like fellow writer-turned-director Taylor Sheridan's Wind River, Annhilation is an extremely taut demonstration of Garland's astonishing formal skill, and yet it's the thing he made his name on which falters. 

As a slow, tense genre movie with strong world building, however? It's not half bad!

Movie review: "Black Panther"

THROND'S CHOICE
dir by Ryan Coolger
writ. by Ryan Coolger and Joe Robert Cole
It's widely acknowledged by now that the post-Iron Man superhero genre has been overwhelmingly dominated by stories about good super-powered white men defeating sinister villains and scary monsters. The current crop of Marvel movies so frequently rely on such traditional narratives that they've come under wide criticism for it, and while movies like Doctor Strange and Thor: Ragnarok added tweaks to the films' visual styles, they're nonetheless cut from the same template. It works, but it's been working for a full decade at this point, and understandably some people are starting to get tired of it. Black Panther could have been an unholy disaster, and it still would have stood out not only for swapping out the skin colour and cultural background of its cast, but also for making tweaks to these movies' expected plot structure.

However, what Marvel hasn't gotten quite enough credit for lately is how they've attempted to infuse many of their recent films with a greater degree of introspection. What they dub "Phase 3" started with the genuinely thoughtful Captain America: Civil War, a film in which the primary conflict didn't even have a proper villain, and which seemed surprisingly ambivalent about the fundamental tropes of its own genre. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 tied all of its characters back into a nuanced theme about finding one's family, and Spider-Man: Homecoming featured subtext about wealth and privilege in both the genre and in modern America. Black Panther, then, didn't come out of nowhere, but while it's more talky and heavy than much of Marvel's usually buoyant catalogue, it's also the studio's most dramatically compelling and thematically committed film to date, and generally its best since Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

Best Picture 2017: Oscar Nominees Ranked

The Best Picture category has a pretty solid crop this year, with even the most polarizing of the lot enjoying no shortage of popularity. Of course, there's some prime targets for backlash, but there's nothing like American Sniper this year, let alone something along the lines of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Last year, I missed several of the nominees, but this time around I've managed to see everything, at least in the running for the top award. Here is how I would personally rank them:

Capsule reviews: January 2018

Not all of my writing makes it to the blog. If you've found my Letterboxd account, you'll also know that I often write quick, relatively informal paragraphs on other films which I have seen. January was a particularly busy month, given the impending deadline of my Top 10 List, so in that month I saw a sizeable number of well-liked movies of 2017. Starting this year, I am going to publish these shorter reviews on here in monthly bursts. Here is everything I didn't give a full review in January of 2018: