The Reel Bits

Summary Spider-Man gets the most Spider-focused adventure of the MCU to date, stuffing the plot full of familiar faces and reveals but still staying true to the characters. Spider-Man has had a rough trot through the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Over the course of seven appearances, he’s been put through the wringer, gone to space, blipped and met his multiversal counterparts.

Summary Christopher Nolan paints The Odyssey on the biggest canvas he can find, and fills it with dark and thunderous horror. Despite regular declarations from the choir about the death of cinema, Christopher Nolan has been largely held up as the poster child for keeping the flag flying. His commitment to shooting on film, creating original dramas on epic scale, and the use of large-format celluloid is often in stark contrast with the default factory settings of franchise-forward filmgoing.

Watching every Disney film in chronological order sounded like a fun challenge. A thousand titles later, it’s become a window into film history, shifting cultural values and the remarkable evolution of an entertainment giant. Like many misguided hobbies, it started during lockdown. It was sometime during 2020, when the world went into isolation, that I started sorting through my collection. It turns out I had a lot of Disney. But did I have it all?

Summary Jane Schoenbrun turns the lens back on the viewer in this funny, unnerving and very clever film that also happens to be properly scary. Jane Schoenbrun has always explored duality in their filmmaking. From We’re All Going to the World’s Fair to the sublime I Saw the TV Glow, they use the horror genre as a kind of safer space to explore the lines between gender, queerness and genre tropes.

Summary Supergirl goes on a bender through space, and it’s an appropriately cool, chaotic and messy melee. It’s only moments into Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl that Krypto the super dog literally pisses over the image of Superman. Surrounded by a messy spaceship, and backed by pop music, it’s hard not to instantly compare it with producer James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Yet this may be folly from the start.

Summary A boldly batty and wholly original animated adventure that’s genuinely and heartwarmingly weird. So, maybe just the best animated film from Pixar in years. Any Pixar film that drops a Bikini Kill track moments in is already setting itself up for success. Yet this is also an animated movie that somehow moves at a kinetic pace while still finding time to stop and smell the roses.

Summary A confident, blood-soaked continuation, Nia DaCosta put a distinctive, reflective stamp on the franchise. Nia DaCosta’s entry in the 28 Days Later series might immediately follow the events of 28 Years Later, but often it feels content to sit inside its own little bubble. With Alex Garland’s sprawling narrative tying everything together, DaCosta takes Danny Boyle’s visual language as a blueprint to tell something curiously more reflective and measured.

A little-seen Disney television adventure shot on location in Bahrain with a largely local cast. We all know Disney for their pirate adventures, from Treasure Island and Peter Pan to the monolithic Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. But in 1971, the studio released a television film that used the Middle East as its backdrop.

Skydance merged with Paramount. Paramount and Netflix battled it out to buy Warner. AI and streaming dominance continue to be live topics. The Oscars announced they’ll stream exclusively on YouTube from 2029. The future of cinema as we’ve known it has never seemed more in flux. And yet film persists, year after year. Despite the Top 10 grossing films worldwide all being sequels, franchise films or remakes, there were still genuine surprises.

Summary A knowingly nostalgic encore that hits some big laughs but leans heavily on goodwill. It’s a verifiable fact that This Is Spinal Tap is not a mockumentary, as it’s so cruelly labelled, but an essential documentary snapshot of a moment in rock history. That Martin “Marty” Di Bergi hasn’t made another film since does nothing to diminish the importance of his landmark exploration of the sights, the sounds, and the smells of a hard-working rock band on the road.