According to common parlance, even in the face of continually enviable box office takings, Hollywood’s superhero boom is super over. The fatigue is real. DC lack coherency, Marvel have lost their creative spirit. While the reality of such a judgement remains up for debate in the sphere of live action super cinema, the argument holds no sway at Sony. Herein lies the revolution. A sequel to 2018’s wildly successful, entirely groundbreaking, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2023’s Across the Spider-Verse serves up the apex of blockbusting coherency and creative vigour.
Disney hasn’t half come a long way since Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson shimmied a sub-marina two step back in 1971’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Gone are the two-dimensional toons and hand-drawn backdrops. This is the post-Avatar world of CGI wizardry. Rob Marshall’s new take on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, by way of Disney’s beloved 1989 animation, follows hot on the heels of James Cameron’s Way of the Water in this respect and achieves a feat that must once have seemed impossible. Which is to say: the film technically brilliant underwater musical. Though only marginally less perfunctory than its fellow Disney remakes of recent years – only David Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon has thus far bested the original – Marshall’s Little Mermaid is terrific fun and a well timed launch pad for Summer at the cinema.
Priyanka Chopra and Sam Heughan have chemistry. It’s bubbly, believable and worth rooting for. That’s half of the battle in any rom com and a casting coup for James C. Strouse’s Love Again – which, ironically, features Chopra’s real life husband, Nick Jonas, as the world’s worst date. You can’t make this stuff up. Chopra plays Mira Ray, a children’s book illustrator beset by grief, following the tragic death of her near-fiancé John (Arinzé Kene) two years prior. Heughan is down and out music critic Rob Burns, a Scot in New York who stalks and lies to Mira, all the while colonially invading her privacy. It’s all in the name of love, of course. Hm. ‘This is a problem’ – so says Celine Dion in the film’s second half. Oh yes, she’s in it too.
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