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.
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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:
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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.

Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, Poor Things mixes up the Frankenstein story by turning the “monster” into an attractive young woman with the brain of her unborn baby surgically placed into her cranium. This role of Bella Baxter was certainly quite difficult on paper to portray, a character unlike any ever written before, and only somebody like Emma Stone could pull the role off perfectly. The filmmaking style is also unlike anything ever done before, with the whole first act being black-and-white, and everything after that exploding in repulsive color combinations. The colorful fisheye cinematography is meant to resemble Bella’s point-of-view as she explores the steampunk world, like how a small child sees everything for the very first time.
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At the beginning of her journey, Bella prances around with stilted limbs and a limited vocabulary, always referring to herself in the third person like a robotic toddler. But as she gradually gains her independence, she walks more properly like a grown woman and stops referring to herself in the third person. So that means she starts as a woman trapped in a restrictive box designed by men’s ideals, but then teaches herself how to break out of that mold to become her own woman. It’s a weird story indeed, but it’s also a beautiful testament to how sustaining a child’s fascination with life will restore the capacity to stand up for oneself.

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.
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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.
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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.

Jordan Peele’s Frankenstein contraption of classic sci-fi, horror, and Western tropes is an unforgettable critique of humanity’s addiction to spectacle, while also being a smorgasbord of cinematic tricks that challenge the imagination of future directors. These tricks aren’t just limited to makeup prosthetic effects or recreating the look of a cheesy 1990s sitcom, they also include alien sound effects inspired by echolocation. More impressive still are the scenes set at night; they were done in a day-for-night approach, where the scenes were filmed in the day and then fixed in post-production to look like nighttime, but unlike other techniques, this movie had two cameras right next to each other being used at the same time: one infrared, one color, and then the two shots were combined to create a realistic night look.
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Besides just the new filming techniques, Nope is also a generally exceptional piece of filmmaking. Almost 40% of it was done on film IMAX cameras, which makes the beautiful desert views feel even more like the classic Westerns from the 1950s. Rather than quick cuts, the editing style actually lingers a long time on the scary moments, masterfully utilizing the art of anticipation. It all proves why Peele is the new Quentin Tarantino: an unapologetic director who turns his filmmaking style into his own genre and isn’t afraid to twist what’s familiar with the underbellies of what’s unfamiliar.

R (DLV)
Horror/Sci-fi
2 hr. 10 min.

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

Steven Spielberg’s most personal film went against the trend of other alien invasion movies by other filmmakers; unlike other popular movies of the genre like War of the Worlds or Alien, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial featured aliens who, similar to Spielberg’s other movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, don’t want to hurt humans. To create this non-threatening lovable alien adopted by a lonely boy, the designer for E.T. took inspiration from wise old people like Albert Einstein, with the alien voice provided by an elderly woman whose voice afterward was electronically modified and mixed with animal sounds. On set, many techniques were utilized to bring him to life, such as hiring a mime to control his hands, yet at other times, the E.T. puppet had to be controlled entirely by wires and computers.
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It may have been a kids’ movie, but Steven Spielberg understood what kind of film he was working on and spoke to the kid actors at their level. He did this by keeping the order of scenes filmed throughout production chronological to the story’s timeline so the kid actors wouldn’t be confused—the kids weren’t even told what would happen next in the story until the day of shooting each scene. And it all worked out: this nostalgic portrait of the 1980s suburb is one of the most influential movies of the decade and made possible many of the sci-fi movies of today.

PG (DL)
Sci-fi
1 hr. 55 min.

Watch it for FUN.
​Watch it to feel HAPPY, SAD and AFRAID.

While John Krasinski originally didn’t plan on a Quiet Place sequel, he still picked up on the success of his horror smash-hit by building on all that it had the potential for, including the possibility of this concept turning into a franchise. The expansion of this world devastated by an alien invasion is such a keen exercise in allowing the setting to dictate what the characters’ personalities and struggles are like, particularly in how others outside the movie’s main family were affected. The family by the way is now deprived of their familiar resources at the farm and is stretched beyond their limit, the deaf daughter, Regan, most of all. While this sequel isn’t nearly as focused on silent communication as the first movie, Regan takes on more of a protagonist role to inspire other girls, women, and the entire Deaf community.
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This form of entertainment is accessible to everyone, with large action set pieces that required a lot more hands-on work than the first movie. The open-endedness of the finale likewise proves that there’s still more room for this concept to grow into a third installment, or perhaps even a television series. But even if those don’t ever happen, A Quiet Place Part II shall solidify its legacy as an ideal blockbuster to set the standards for how to create effective popcorn entertainment while also crafting a narrative that delves into the psychology of loss and survival.

PG-13 (V)
Horror/Sci-fi
1 hr. 37 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to THINK.
Watch it to feel AFRAID.