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.

Not only is this a cinematic version of the first concert to ever gross over one-billion dollars, but it’s also the overdue shake-up to the entire movie theater industry. Rather than how other major studios would normally tell theaters far in advance when to book their next tentpole movie release, Taylor contacted those theaters herself, blocking out all of October so that no other major releases would conflict with her film. As a result, the cinematic version of Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour became one of the biggest hits of 2023, making huge theater crowds lining up for a theatrical event a reality once again after the COVID-19 pandemic hurt the industry.
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For what feels like the first time, fans are able to experience a live concert without the messy crowds, loud noises, or expensive tickets that may discourage them from going. Yet these fans are still encouraged to wear friendship bracelets, t-shirts, and other T-Swift related merchandise, getting the freedom to participate in the theater the same way they would at the live concert. In fact, watching the concert this way provides the extra advantage of seeing Taylor more up close and personal; it’s easier to see how openly grateful she is toward her adoring fans. Thanks to this largely influential musician’s desire to make her body of work more accessible will save movie theaters, a new chapter to what the theatrical experience is all about has begun.

PG-13 (DLS)
Documentary/Musical
2 hr. 49 min.

Watch it for FUN.
Watch it to LEARN.
Watch it to feel HAPPY.

This remake had the task of marrying together the original book by Alice Walker, the Steven Spielberg film, and the Broadway adaptation, all while keeping the soul of the story preserved. With Oprah Winfrey on board as a producer, this newest version gives an inspirational glance back to a time when Black freedom in America was still a new concept, making this an important movie for Black women to feel seen and heard. As another component behind why this version works so well, Danielle Brooks and Fantasia Barrino, two cast members from the Broadway production, reprise their respective roles. Likewise, Taraji P. Henson is here, playing the role she originally turned down on Broadway.
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With that authentic touch of theatrical pizzazz, that naturally means this film version has some phenomenal musical numbers, including one with traditional Ugandan fashions. One of the songs featured is, “She Be Mine,” which was originally written for the Broadway show but didn’t make the final cut. Ultimately, the production in the end looks great, and the cast seems to be such a closely-knit community who had their hearts in the right place. For anyone who’s been a victim of abuse, neglect, or poverty, The Color Purple is for them. It’s the sort of movie that motivates the overlooked by promoting deeply Christian themes, particularly in how God created purple flowers so that we can notice His rare sparks of beauty in nature.

Hayao Miyazaki last made a feature-length motion picture a full decade before making this one, and he ended up leaving retirement to spend seven years directing this deeply personal WWII-era epic. Since that essentially makes The Boy and the Heron an ultimatum of Miyazaki’s legacy in cinema, the animation techniques are much more advanced and up-to-date now. That includes a new installment for Studio Ghibli: Dolby Cinema, a technology that better distinguishes the highlights and lowlights of the movie’s image. Yet the skill of the animators remains tremendous, particularly when animating the heron, who appears grotesque in the most uncanny of ways.
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The entirety of the movie includes a similar contrast of beauty against darkness. The story is indeed grim, but the magical score helps keep the experience from being too overwhelming; the music complements every emotional peak of the story perfectly and even presents a wonderful new song, “Spinning Globe.” The fact that such an emotionally delicate work of animation finally got recognized by the Academy of Motion Pictures is a big deal. Not only is it the first hand-drawn animated film to win Best Animated Feature since Spirited Away twenty-one years ago, not only is it the first international film to win since then, but it’s also the first ever PG-13 movie to win in that category. Therefore, this important Oscar win is guaranteed to change the entire animation industry forever.

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.

It made history as the first foreign language film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, and director Bong Joon-ho is a big reason why it deserves that honor. He illustrates the differences between the upper and lower classes through complex yet subtle filming techniques, such as by dividing two actors with a vertical line hidden in the set. Yet there’s more symbolic imagery: Water represents capitalism pushing the already poor further down the economic ladder while those already high up get to remain above the rising floods. The poor people are always looking down at things while the rich people never look down at anything, and to enhance that detail, the poor people behave in ways that are comparable to bugs.
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Making the gears grind for the intense symbolic imagery required lots of preplanning and visual effects work, starting with the street of the poor neighborhood, which was built entirely from scratch inside a massive water tank. The house of the rich people was made up of the most expensive décor the set dressers could find while the exterior of that house was two separate sets combined digitally with the upper-level set on top of the lower-level set. The extreme expertise of how Parasite was concocted, as well as the moral grey in every single character, is evidence enough as to why this heavily entertaining art film deserves its title as the best movie of 2019.

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.

To capture the big emotional rush that a finale deserves, the designers and VFX artists behind this highly anticipated eighth film give it their all. Starting with the battle at Hogwarts, the biggest action set piece the series has ever created, stone statues come to life, giants and spiders are spotted within the chaos, and a large amount of stunt choreography with teenage extras went into these sequences. To make things a bit easier while filming these very complex shots, many of the broken stone bits on the battlefields were made of a lightweight substitute. Though it’s not just Hogwarts, Gringotts is also revisited with an updated design to fit the darker, more realistic tone of the film compared to the first movie it was seen in.
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The filmmaking style also pulls no punches in capturing exactly what moviegoers during the 3D boom of cinema at the time wanted. Elements are constantly flying through the air, thousands of objects multiply inside a vault, a stark white set depicts an empty King’s Cross Station, a giant dragon flies through the sky, and even the approaches to filming a ghost and a snake are utilized in efforts that justify seeing the movie in 3D. So despite feeling incomplete as only the second half of a book adaptation, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows- Part 2 sets the gold standard for how a series finale should be handled.

With it being the beginning of the end, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows- Part 1 was part of the production crew’s final exam about everything they learned from the past decade of making a revolutionary cinematic saga. The scene of the seven Potters alone demonstrates how far the effects in the series have come, as six of the actors transform into Harry Potter with the power of motion capture. Then Daniel Radcliffe had to match the movements and mannerisms of every one of them as he played them in separate shots that were all combined into one.
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But that’s just a couple of minutes of screentime, another major difficulty for the set designers was the Ministry of Magic set, which got destroyed two movies earlier and had to be entirely rebuilt again. Other effects had to stretch the imagination of the VFX artists, such as by putting an LED suit on a dog to create the light of a CGI Patronus, while other scenes took weeks to plan, such as one taking place in Piccadilly Square that was full of over 500 extras. However, this film overall still feels incomplete as just the first half of a story, as one could argue that the last book was split into two movies to rake in more money. Yet this penultimate film in the series did what it needed to get done to get audiences pumped for the true finale.