Movie review: "Incredibles 2"

THROND'S CHOICE
dir. and written by Brad Bird
Going into the long-awaited sequel to The Incredibles, I had some idea what to expect: fun action scenes, a funny script, and quirky family dynamics with a superhero flavour. The first Incredibles, released over 10 years ago now, is one of Pixar's best films, an exciting, funny, and inventive take on the superhero genre which remains delightful and refreshing even as its graphics have aged. Incredibles 2 is many of those things, and retains the humorous family dynamics and the exciting, creative setpieces, albeit with a somewhat darker tone in places. This is still a film which takes advantage of it superheroes' abilities far better than most films in the genre, and it's still refreshing to see superheroes placed in this context.

The difference is that Incredibles 2 is weirdly overstuffed and idea-driven, juggling at least three main thematic threads which it adheres very closely to, even stating in blunt dialogue on more than one occasion. These three main threads are disparate enough that they directly compete with one another whenever they come into contact, and none is quite as fleshed out as they could have been, but what's particularly commendable about this movie is that it weaves these ideas into the story in intriguing and often hilarious ways, very rarely feeling like it stops dead to sermonize. If recent Pixar sequels like Finding Dory have felt too similar to their predecessors, Incredibles 2 stands out by doing something different.

Movie review: "Solo: A Star Wars Story"

dir. by Ron Howard
writ. by Jonathan and Lawrence Kasdan
One of the key themes of December's Star Wars: The Last Jedi was that obsessing over the past is futile, and yet, Disney has seen fit to fill the gaps in its yearly release schedule not with intriguing new stories from disparate corners of the galaxy, but with yet more prequels which tell stories we already know about. Solo: A Star Wars Story, despite having its fair share of new characters, is a worse offender than Rogue One, as it insistently strings together explanations for nearly every aspect of Han Solo's persona in the original trilogy, while including at least a minor reference to every single piece of backstory which had been mentioned in those original movies.

That doesn't leave Solo with much room to take significant risks within its own story, so thankfully it instead takes on an upbeat tone and a breezy pace, diverging from grim foreboding of Rogue One in favour of a lightweight caper, albeit at the expense of the novelty and unique style of the earlier film. But if Solo contains few of Rogue One's strengths, it also fixes its primary weakness with a far more memorable cast of characters, and the action at the very least remains imaginative and exciting even if it's far less stylish than other recent Star Wars entries. Solo is the most disposable of the recent Star Wars films, but as a fluffy summer blockbuster, it is more than satisfactory.

Movie review: "Hereditary"

THROND'S CHOICE
written and directed by Ari Aster
I'm not very well versed in the horror genre, but when I do watch horror films, I tend to prefer them to be on the artsy side. Great films like The Babadook and The Witch have been major highlights of their respective years, and the latter established distribution company A24 as a major purveyor of weird, artsy horror films, with a similarly harrowing release in last year's It Comes at Night cementing this reputation. Even more than the aforementioned films, however, Ari Aster's Sundance hit Hereditary seems tailor-made to alienate mainstream audiences, an exquisite slow burn which only explodes very late into its running time.

It's peculiar, then, that what holds Hereditary back from greatness is that it's not weird enough. While certain themes are carried through into the horror elements, others actively compete with them, resulting in the curious effect that the film becomes less moving as it gets scarier. Approximately half of Hereditary is a powerful meditation on grief and guilt, while the other half is a sharp, imaginative modern horror feature. But despite the latter half gaining much of its effectiveness from the former, the actual imagery offered here has very little to do with the psychological depth which the film is so successful in establishing. But even with that disconnect, it's hard to resist a movie which is this accomplished on a scene-to-scene basis.