Just like the first installment, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse flaunts a distinct comic-book style that sets a new standard for the entire animation industry. That offset printing art style is still here like from the first movie, but now it triples down on the technique by adapting it to different parts of the multiverse. Furthermore, this sequel steps things up by including nearly three hundred more uniquely designed Spider-Beings that thrive in the multiverse, each with a unique art style and animation style. The wildly fun sequence of all these Spider-Beings chasing Miles Morales was so technically advanced that it took two years to create.
​
Of these universes across the multiverse, Gwen Stacy’s home takes the watercolor style from her spinoff comics as the environment responds to her emotions. Of the characters that come in from other parts of the multiverse, the evil Vulture appears in a very old-school DaVinci art style. The attention to detail goes shockingly deep into every single frame, the colors of the Puerto Rican flag even pop up briefly when Miles’ mother snaps her fingers (to reference her cultural heritage). It’s unfathomable to think that such backbreaking work went into an animated film that’s almost two-and-a-half hours long… the longest of any American animated film in history. With a runtime that long, nearly everyone should find entertainment value in what will soon be celebrated as one of the greatest sequels of all time.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse wowed the world with its unique pop art visual style—one that captures the exact essence of a vintage comic book. Everything done to translate that atmosphere into the world of computer animation breaks the rules of filmmaking, resulting in a beautiful marriage between 2D and 3D storytelling. As a result of all their hard work and late nights, the animators developed new techniques to better manage the back-and-forth process of manually trying to solve an animation problem and letting the computer do the work for them. Here are only a few of the techniques that made this studio trend-setter so impactful:
​
Elements that would normally go out of focus throughout the film instead have their separate CMYK color channels shift slightly like offset comic book print. Shadows are made from hashed lines and Kirby dots. Two-dimensional form lines are placed on the characters’ faces. Background objects are made from moving blobs of color or static paintings in windows. The characters are frequently animated only every other frame without any motion blur, but other characters sometimes break that rule depending on which alternate reality across the Spider-Verse they’re from. Their varying animation styles range from Spider-Ham’s cartoonish quirks to Spider-Gwen’s ballet-esque movements. Yet that’s just the surface of the details contained within this game-changing animated blockbuster, one that’s outdone anything ever done by Disney or Pixar, and will continue pushing the entire animated medium forward.

PG (DLV)
Action/Sci-fi
1 hr. 57 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY.
Watch it to feel SAD.
Watch it to feel AFRAID.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a family drama disguised as a martial arts movie that utilizes its weird content to conduct a study about existentialism and generational trauma from the perspective of a broken Chinese-American family. Many alternate realities are depicted across this multiverse, and each one has a distinct color palette, set of lenses, use of grain, and aspect ratios… which sometimes change on the spot in a single shot. They’re all designed to imitate a specific cinematic genre and have their own standalone story with a beginning, middle, and end, which in turn complement the main story.

Symbolic imagery is utilized to hold everything together, such as the round mirrors to represent the fear of self, or the everything bagel to represent the black hole that the main character, Evelyn, fears her daughter is getting closer to. This movie also sets a higher bar for how all movies, big and small, should approach their practical stunts and practical effects, even using an animatronic raccoon that looks like it came from the 1980s. But best of all, this incomparable movie speaks sincerely about traditional Chinese values in a way that will help make Asian cultures more mainstream in America’s media—which it does in a fashion that guarantees tears from the audience over the wounded bond between a mother and daughter that they can relate to all too closely.

There was no screenplay, everything was instead laid out on detailed storyboards, which fit director George Miller’s artistic vision that depended on visual details to offer worldbuilding exposition. As Miller crafted his reimagining of his 1970s/1980s film series, production grew gradually more insane, seeing how the crew relied on practical stunts in the Namibian desert with elaborate large vehicles moving at a hundred miles an hour. Stunt actors had to leap from vehicle to vehicle in the air, and the climax utilized these long swinging poles that served as extra transportation between the cars and trucks. It got immensely difficult and dangerous to film the more than 300 stunts between the 150 uniquely designed vehicles for this motion picture, but it paid off.
​
The action is unnaturally fast yet surprisingly fluid, the sound quality is earsplittingly loud yet crystal clear, and the views of the desert are every bit as spectacular and mesmerizing as a Renaissance painting. Every element chosen to make up this ambitious blockbuster is chosen with careful intentionality—the average person will be rewarded with multiple rewatches as new details will be spotted after every viewing that further illustrates this post-apocalyptic future where everyone’s been degraded to being mere things. So along with its pioneering new techniques in editing, sound design, and cinematography, Mad Max: Fury Road will continue to inspire other filmmakers on what “show don’t tell” really looks like.

With its anamorphic lens cinematography and its use of Ave Maria in the musical score, this darker take on the world’s greatest detective is essentially an independent art-house film that happens to have an enormous budget. As it lays out the story arc of Batman over a near-three-hour runtime, the story maintains a fast pace that balances its quicker moments with doses of symbolic imagery meant to represent the stark contrasts between beauty and death coming together. All these mise-en-scène elements work hand-in-hand to create some unforgettable adrenaline-heavy fight scenes, each held together by inky shadows that make various lighting effects such as flames and strobe lights stand out further.

​Yet it’s the designs that really shine the most, and not just because of the four hours’ worth of prosthetic work behind Colin Farrell’s Penguin makeup. The batsuit was made out of 3D-printed molded rubber and then stitched by hand, while Bruce Wayne’s eye makeup stayed on his face whenever he removed his cowl. Every location is the perfect stage for a spectacular action-packed sequence, each one sustaining a cold and grim color palette to match the way Wayne views himself amidst the city’s chaos. So even while this movie suffers from weak female characters and Colin Farrell’s ultra-hammy performance, The Batman deserves some appreciation for how it further elevates the artistic potential of motion pictures based on comic books.

Everyone knows Jurassic Park as the pop culture phenomenon that shook up the entire visual effects industry, yet it’s also a spectacular showcase for Steven Spielberg’s expertise in staging suspense. The first scene establishes the danger of the newly revived dinosaurs, the illusion of danger complete with the extra strange flashlight patterns. Then just a few scenes later, Doctor Alan Grant explains how vicious a velociraptor attack can be, using a claw fossil as a visualization, and the next velociraptor seen from there is funnily enough a baby fresh out of the egg. But then a reminder comes up again about the raptors’ destructive power when they gobble up a poor bull to the point where the carrying harness is shredded to ribbons. It expertly pays off in the climax when the velociraptors go after the kids.
​
These techniques work as well to make the t-rex attack scene so iconic: the water ripples, the rain, the minimal lighting around the giant lizard, her toe on the wire to indicate the electric fence is out, the one flashlight, it’s a technical marvel in cinematography and editing. So it’s not just the revolutionary digital effects of the dinosaurs that made this so influential to how movies are made—the imagination behind these artists proved how magical a major motion picture can be, and how grand of a spectacle the theatrical experience still has potential for.

PG-13 (DLV)
Action/Sci-fi
2 hr. 7 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to THINK.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY and AFRAID.

Made to look like a single continuous shot with no edit cuts, 1917 is a unique spectacle that builds upon the techniques used in similar films, such as Birdman. As director Sam Mendes follows these two soldiers, the sound design and natural lighting work together to sell the illusion of a continuous take. To get through these treacherous locations, which were scattered all across the United Kingdom, the camera crew had to rely on many forms of transportation from trucks to cranes to Steadicams. The camera would even be unhooked from one crane and then hooked onto another while the film’s still rolling.
​
This was no easy task for the set designers either, as models for every set had to be built to plan out the blocking and figure out how to work around the filming equipment. They had to know based on the length of every scene exactly how long each set should be, which meant in total 5,200 feet of trenches were built. When it came to actually filming these ambitious scenes, there were some days when the weather would shut down production because every shot had to look consistent—even a tiny bit of sunlight could be catastrophic. While other films have utilized this gimmick, no other has done it at this scale, and it’s guaranteed that more filmmakers from here on out will pick up on Mendes’ innovative techniques.

R (LV​)
Action/Historic
1 hr. 59 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to THINK.
​Watch it to feel SAD and AFRAID.

Everyone knows it as the rare event when a sequel surpassed the quality of the original, but Terminator 2: Judgment Day particularly made its mark in film history as one of the absolute earliest uses of CGI—perhaps the first movie to prove the technology’s full potential. After James Cameron’s successful use of CGI in The Abyss two years earlier, this felt like the natural next step, and the VFX crew, sure enough, made the most of it. These artists took the time to study the movements of actor Robert Patrick, paint a grid on his body, and use a new laser scanning process on his face so they could replicate him entirely on a computer to animate his character, who was made of liquid metal. 

​Even without this revolutionary digital technology, every single special effects trick imaginable was used in the making of this movie. The opening war scene created the terminator endoskeletons with complex mixtures of puppetry, animatronics, and stop-motion animation. The course of a Los Angeles river was changed so they could film the canal chase. A whole four-story office building was blown up. The main cast went through military combat and weapons training. There’s so much that went into this enormous motion picture that shook up the entire filmmaking industry, and at the end of the day, it still can just be enjoyed simply as a thrill ride that gets better after every repeated visit.

R (DLV)
Sci-fi/Action
2 hr. 17 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY and AFRAID.

James Cameron’s motion picture directorial debut, The Terminator continues to define the action/sci-fi genre thanks to all that the production crew exploited using their minimal resources. Even nearly forty years after its release, it’s incredible to see the different techniques used to make the near-invincible T-800 scarier than anything from a horror movie, right down to the shark-like way he prowls around in search of Sarah Connor. These techniques included the human-lookalike mechanics that were built to resemble Arnold Schwarzenegger’s head, which even then weren’t as ambitious as this one brief shot where the Terminator’s hand punches through a windshield; that was actually the first time a mechanical arm was used for a stunt like this. Furthermore, the elaborate Terminator endoskeleton puppet took almost a year to create.

​​To make the production requirements even more stressful, there were numerous miniature sets that had to be built, and for the future scenes, those miniatures had to include smoke on the set so the cutouts in the back couldn’t be as noticeable. It’s wild to think of how much was done to really test the limits of the budget, even the night scenes were immense leaps of bravery for the production crew! Yet it all paid off, as had they not done all this under James Cameron’s direction, other creators of action/sci-fi movies today wouldn’t be as brave to attempt going all out with a minimal budget.

R (DLSNV)
Sci-fi/Action
1 hr. 47 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY and AFRAID.

In this grand finale to the iconic trilogy, more props and costumes were built than what the other two movies offered, with more CGI utilized in ways never seen before. The most beautiful setting in this movie, or any of the three movies, is Minas Tirith, with its exterior made mostly out of a miniature set piece, and scenic designs that are of the finest artistic craftsmanship. Settings like that, along with the epic musical score, help make the film feel every bit as huge as Middle Earth should be. While Gollum returns as viciously cunning as ever, more digital creatures make a proper debut to showcase all that CGI had the potential for.

​The Mûmakil set the stage for one of the most complex war battles in cinema’s entire history, while Shelob the giant spider is animated in a way like no other CGI creature up until that point. Even the Army of the Dead, which wasn’t even necessary for the plot in the first place, was present to run the extra mile in showcasing how much could be done in combining digital effects with innovative costume design. It’s so stunning how every single scene in this final movie of the trilogy is its own visual effects showcase, proving why The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, along with its two predecessors, are perhaps the most influential films of the 2000s.

PG-13 (V)
Fantasy/Action
3 hr. 21 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY and AFRAID.