Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse swung into theaters in December of 2018 and immediately captivated audiences with its revolutionary take on the beloved superhero genre and breathtaking animation style. Directed by the talented trio of Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, and Bob Persichetti, this animated masterpiece defied conventions and soared to unprecedented heights.

The film successfully introduces the concept of the multiverse and seamlessly weaves together the stories of various Spider-People from different dimensions. At its core, the film follows the journey of Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a teenager grappling with newfound powers in the wake of the death of his universe’s Spider-Man. His world is spun even more out of control as he meets alternate universe heroes that make him question if he is ready for his new responsibilities.

Accolades poured in for the film, with the crowning achievement being the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. This recognition affirmed not only the technical brilliance of the animation but also the emotional depth and storytelling prowess that elevated Into the Spider-Verse beyond the status of a mere superhero film.

As first time viewers delve into the intricate web of dimensions and the extraordinary journey of Miles, it becomes clear that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is more than a cinematic experience – it’s a groundbreaking achievement that redefined expectations for animated storytelling in the West and left an indelible mark on the superhero genre.

In this Movie List from The Film Magazine, we are highlighting the 10 best moments from the film that define why Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse continues to enthral audiences, and we will explore its legacy as one of the best comic book movies of all time.

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10. Welcome to the Spider-Verse

This is how you start a movie.

The rising intensity of the opening music. The glitching of the studio logos. The flashes of graffiti. Then blam: the intro fully kicks in and we are treated to the visual feast that is this movie. An explosion of colours and funky graphics inform us that Into the Spider-Verse is unlike any other comic book movie in that it is unashamed of its genre.

Following this is the opening monologue from Peter Parker (don’t get too attached), beginning the recurring “Alright, let’s do this one last time” gag. Peter, voiced by Chris Pine, gives a brief rundown of things most audiences will already know, narrating his life and the responsibilities that come with being Spider-Man. Yes, we’re technically seeing another screen Spider-Man origin story, but the writers make this one concise and fresh. This self-awareness lends itself nicely to some humorous moments, such as detailing the smaller Spider-Man duties, like having his own cereal or recording a Christmas album. 

Furthermore, there are plenty of references to Spider-Man in pop culture for fans to feast on. Did anyone expect them to reference the abominable Spider-Man popsicle? The animators even draw comparison to other Spidey iterations on screen, like the upside down kiss, the train scene in Spider-Man 2, and the legendary dance scene from Spider-Man 3.

It is the film’s thesis statement: funny, fast-paced and visually spectacular. The perfect introduction to one of the most unique comic book movies. Simultaneously, these opening 2 minutes are a celebration of all things Spider-Man, and a reminder why the iconic hero has endured for so long on page, on screen, and in wider popular culture.

Recommended for you: 10 Best Moments from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man Trilogy

9. Meet Miles

A film is arguably only as good as its characters, and a film filled with fantastical Spider-people could have a hard time making its protagonist stand out. Within seconds of meeting Miles Morales, its clear audiences have a beloved hero to root for.

The first time we see Miles, he is caught up in his passions: artwork and music. His singing is gradually drowned out by his parents calling his name. He is pulled out of his daydream and into an all too relatable scenario – a teenager late for school. 

This quickly transitions to a high-energy montage showcasing Miles’ daily life, complete with the vibrant backdrop of Brooklyn. We are immersed in the sights and sounds of Miles’ world as they see a new side to him. As he walks through his neighbourhood, he is cool and approachable. His effortless charm makes him instantly likable. The dynamic animation, coupled with a hip-hop soundtrack, creates a sense of kinetic energy that mirrors the pulse of Miles’ urban environment. As Miles parades through the streets, leaving stickers of his artwork, he trips and is caught by his dad, a police officer. We are reminded that, despite his coolness, he’s still an awkward kid. These relatable struggles form the necessary strong connections between Miles and each of us.

These first moments with Miles do more for the film’s central character than a lot of comic book movies manage to do in their entire runtime. Miles’ humour and occasional awkwardness make him endearing. He embodies the youthful enthusiasm and idealism associated with adolescence, making him a perfect vessel for audiences diving into this larger than life story.

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10. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

Starring the incredible Aubrey Plaza, and loveable goofs Mark Duplass and Jake Johnson, Safety Not Guaranteed is a heart-warming time travel jape. While it has big names attached – including director Colin Trevorrow, who went on to steer the wheel of the Jurassic World franchise, it has a real indie charm.

It begins with an intriguing want-ad in a local Washington newspaper. Jeff (Jake Johnson), a journalist at a different paper, assembles a motley crew to investigate. While everything is set up for us to believe Kenneth (Mark Duplass) is a weirdo, and delusional at the very least, he isn’t and the film’s beauty lies in how deftly it draws the viewer to his side.

It has heart, humour and Jake Johnson. I’m not sure you need much else in a film.

9. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Review

As a rule, I don’t do superheroes. DC, Marvel, I don’t really care, they’re all the same, aren’t they?

I grew up in a strange era where Val Kilmer was Batman and Lois Lane was a Desperate Housewife and the genre just never really hooked me. Then along came Miles Morales and I fell hard. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a visually stunning and standout offering in (what I and seemingly I alone feel is) a saturated market.

The Spider-verse animation is just incredible – unusual and unique. The film is brimming with detail and flashes of brilliance. I could watch it 100 times (100 more times) and notice something new with each viewing. The characters are larger than life yet somehow completely grounded and believable, and who knew the match up of Nicholas Cage and John Mulaney is what we needed in our lives? The soundtrack is perfect and the message behind it is so important.

The first time my kid saw it, she said, ‘oh so I could be spiderman’ and for that reason alone it deserves a mention in my Best Films of All Time.

Recommended for you: Spider-Man Movies Ranked

Film gets me where I live like little else and has done ever since I was a teenager. It’s almost impossible to pick just 10 films to stand in for over a century of my favourite form of artistic expression, so what follows are a combination of groundbreaking, ageless films and the most personally impactful cinematic works for me, today. 

Follow me on X (Twitter) – @SSPThinksFilm

10. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Review

This one’s a twofer. I love animation and I love superhero movies, and Spider-Verse is one of the finest examples of both to release in the last decade.

After being bitten by a radioactive spider, awkward teen Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is thrust into inter-dimensional superherodom when his universe’s Spider-Man is killed in action. Miles must overcome self-doubt and team up with the many very different spider-people from other realities to stop his, and all other worlds, from being destroyed. 

Animation is cinema, it has the potential to visualise anything you can imagine, and while I could have picked any number of films from Studio Ghibli, Laika, Disney or Pixar, nothing else was as revolutionary and influential to the medium’s aesthetic than Sony Picture Animation’s Spider-Verse in recent years. This didn’t look or feel quite like anything else, a living comic book packed with pleasing details and gags referring back to print mediums and constant movement and dynamism. 

Few adaptations of popular characters manage to sum up their very essence with a single perfect phrase, but this film distils it all with “anybody can wear the mask”. So many superhero movies get the basics fundamentally wrong, but this gets it just so right – Spider-Man has always had incredible powers but struggled to balance his superhero responsibilities with everyday ones, and the same goes if you’re a dual heritage teenager, a cartoon pig or a black-and-white detective voiced by Nicolas Cage.

Recommended for you: Spider-Man Movies Ranked

9. The Wizard of Oz (1939)

The titanic cultural influence of the MGM fantasy musical The Wizard of Oz is often criminally overlooked. Musicals speak to me as a form of extroverted expression I could never hope to take part in myself, but Oz also stands for the whole fantasy genre.

This rough adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s children’s fantasy novel follows young Dorothy Gale (instant star Judy Garland), a Kansas dreamer who is swept away to the magical land of Oz by a tornado where she is persecuted by the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton, still terrifying) as she quests to find her way home.

It wasn’t just the way film musicals were staged for decades it inspired, either. Next time you watch Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy and see the orc armies marching past the gates of Mordor, think about how similar the blocking and the aesthetic is to the patrols outside the Wicked Witch’s castle.  Speaking of the Wicked Witch, you know the classic green-skinned, warty-nosed, pointy-chinned default look for such characters at Halloween? That comes from this film as well. And Margaret Hamilton’s all-timer of a baddie performance in contrast to the uncomplicated good of Dorothy and her companions is still one to behold. 

The “it was all a dream, or was it?” story structure is clichéd now, but this helped start it all. Startling Technicolor fantasy is kept entirely separate from sepia reality (the moment one world becomes the other still takes your breath away), but there is always that playful, winking final scene for you to hope that Dorothy perhaps has further adventures on her horizon. 

Sony’s Spider-Man (2002) is unquestionably one of the forefathers of superhero cinema as we know and love it to be, and Sony’s further Spider-focused films (plus several major spin-offs) are some of the most popular and influential blockbusters of the 21st century.

In this edition of Ranked, we at The Film Magazine are counting down each Spider-Man Universe feature-length theatrical release from worst to best, judging each inclusion by its own artistic merits, critical reception, and importance to its genre and cinema as a whole.

Follow @thefilmagazine on Twitter.

13. Morbius (2022)

Morbius Review

Very little was expected of Sony’s Spider-villain-verse entry Morbius when it was revealed to be hitting our screens in 2020, but when it finally arrived after mass delays the low bar for “acceptable” superhero/villain cinema was… barely met.

Jared Leto worked hard to carve someone interesting out of a character with little by way of development, and the pacing was rapid (which is particularly impressive as a lesser Spider-Man entry), but Morbius ultimately felt like the best moments from other films thumb-tacked into a CGI mess that left said moments absent of meaning or purpose.

A lot seemed to happen in this 2022 film, yet very little gave us a reason to care for the characters, and the feature’s almost complete absence of threat only compounded this issue. It would be a stretch to claim that Morbius was trying to say anything about anything – it certainly wasn’t allegorical of past or present human issues like most vampire films, nor presenting a particularly obvious audience fantasy like other superhero movies – and it did little-to-nothing to make it look, sound or feel unique within its franchise.

Like Venom before it, Morbius was a film that seemed to be made for audiences of the mid-2000s, and yet unlike Venom it lacked all of the charisma needed to carry its more corny or less inspired moments. Even the post-credits’ mildly exciting previews of other films to come couldn’t save this one from the title of “worst Spider-Man movie”.

12. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was bad. The sad, grim reality is that this Marc Webb-directed film was so badly received critically and at the box office that Sony finally caved in and brought Marvel Studios back to the table, in effect admitting their own inadequacies as regards their treatment of the character and thus sacrificing some of their multi-million-dollar profits to rival studio Disney in an attempt to fix their mistakes.

The major issue with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is its woeful screenplay, written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci of Transformers, Star Trek and The Mummy (2017) fame. In this fifth live-action franchise entry, focus shifts from a sub-par, by-the-books plot surrounding Peter Parker (and particularly his on-and-off-again relationship) to the life of his hard-working Aunt May, the reason apparently being to ensure Sally Field got her share of the run-time, the amount of space given to prominent comic book characters elsewhere in the film sacrificed as a result, the run-time dragging on to a tiresome 2 hours and 22 minutes.

Despite featuring a stellar cast including star Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Sally Field, Jamie Foxx, Dane DeHaan, Felicity Jones and Paul Giamatti, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 features some of the most ridiculous cases of over-acting in the entire franchise, every highly paid professional seemingly acknowledging the standard of movie they were in even ahead of it being released. This, mixed with a woeful narrative, worse dialogue and a Spider-Man 3 level problem of filling up the movie with characters for an expected “Spider-verse”, make The Amazing Spider-Man 2 one of this beloved franchise’s certifiably lesser releases.

11. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

A considerable improvement on The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is the film that preceded it, The Amazing Spider-Man, a feature that made a new-look Spider-Man franchise feel viable once again; Marc Webb’s inexperienced but grounded take on the web-slinger being refreshing enough to earn the film a number of favourable reviews and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man a number of fans.

Inevitably, the creative decision to just re-do the Peter Parker Spider-Man origin story we’d seen just 10 years prior (that’s like seeing Iron Man rebooted in 2018…) was not the smartest idea, and even though director Marc Webb and company managed to effectively avoid revisiting a lot of the tropes established in Sam Raimi’s franchise, the dye was cast for what would come to be diminishing returns for the series.

A more sarcastic, some would say millennial, take on Peter Parker was the film’s shining beacon, but the studio’s obvious hesitation to try anything entirely new was evident, this 2012 release feeling every bit as much of a part of the preceding decade as its Sam Raimi-directed brethren, only with less charm and less to offer in terms of visual awe, unique scenarios and social commentary.

The Amazing Spider-Man makes for a good, although mostly irrelevant, watch; one that does just enough to keep you engaged but never once takes a stride towards creating something special.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
Directors: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson
Screenwriters: Phil Lord, Christopher Miller, Dave Callaham
Starring: Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Oscar Isaac, Jake Johnson, Issa Rae, Bryan Tyree Henry, Luna Lauren Velez

After four long years, the sequel to the “electric, atmospheric festival of colour” that was Sony Pictures Animation’s Oscar-winning, genre-defining, form-shaping Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has arrived. The film that fought against a tried and tested formula, that rewrote the lore of a studio staple, that was so fresh and interesting it was almost as if it should have never existed, was such a critical success that perennial safety shooters Sony were willing to experiment once again. This time, Miles Morales and company, under the stewardship of original co-writers and producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, are rewriting even more of the rule book.

Shameik Moore’s cool and relatable hero is introduced to a wider spider-verse by Hailee Steinfeld’s returning Gwen Stacy, who takes on a more central and well-rounded role in this highly-anticipated sequel. The heroine uses portal devices to cross between a multi-verse of spider-people as she and Miles experience grave family struggles. The concept of the multiverse may have been overplayed in recent years, but so rarely has it seemed this original, dynamic and brimming with life, and only in Into the Spider-Verse have the personal stakes been this high.

There are spider-people and spider-creatures galore, the cameos and more influential inclusions each being illuminated by an array of animation styles, a cornucopia of unique audio-visual elements. There are eye-widening design choices and smile-inducing casting choices, and every promise Sony’s marketing department offered in Across the Spider-Verse’s trailer is spectacularly realised.

Across the Spider-Verse is the longest animated feature in history at 2 hours and 20 minutes, but it leaves barely a moment to blink, the rapid and ever-original action slowing only to propel moments of inner conflict, interpersonal dynamics or existentialism to the forefront. Every central character is well taken care of, the beating heart that made the original so comforting and charismatic still intact – every development in Across the Spider-Verse feels at one with the film that came before. This is more than a good sequel that ramps up all that we enjoyed about the original, it is a reach into an unknown pool of perfection, a ginormous studio-backed swing at something special.

This version of Spider-Man has undergone one of the more trying coming-of-age tales of the feature film spider-people we’ve seen across various live-action franchises to date, and the connection this has forged between us and him ensures that each of his potentially multiverse-altering choices is felt from the off. Lord and Miller, who worked on the original Spider-Verse and fellow Sony Pictures Animation film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, have always given a lot of room for character choices in their texts. And, in a world of so many moving parts – characters, narratives, themes, animation styles – it is testament to their commitment to character choice that Across the Spider-Verse manages to capture the same connection as the original.

There is a short period in the middle of the film where the narrative sags a little, and certainly more could have been done to develop one of the film’s two central villains and the extent of their powers in the first half of the film – where we are left guessing as to just how much of a threat this character could be and what this might mean for Miles and Gwen – but these pitfalls are barely noticeable among the pantheon of extraordinary efforts made to excite and ignite our imaginations. In these moments, comedy, cameos, references and soundtrack take the lead, each expressively exploding out of the animation.

As an animated film, there are few contemporaries. Not since Toy Story rewrote animated feature history in the mid-90s had mainstream western animation been evolved and shunted forward with such force as in Into the Spider-Verse, and Across the Spider-Verse is somehow even more eccentric. Whether it be minutes of black and white sequences, pen lines and all, or watercolour constructions that change colour to match the conflict apparent in the dialogue, Across the Spider-Verse is an Oscar-winning short film’s unique and ultra-expressionistic sensibility attached to a mainstream intellectual property and presented by over 1,000 of the world’s best animators. It’s wondrous stuff, the kind of style that is worthy of the film’s dream-factory concept.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is why people go to the cinema. It is why you should go to the cinema. It is a phenomenon of style and substance that begs to be seen on the big screen. Lord and Miller, and their partners at Sony Pictures Animation, have once again captured lightning in a bottle. Across the Spider-Verse is ultra modern storytelling that captures the personality, fears and ambitions of our current era – it is eye-popping spectacle and hearty, moving passion side-by-side. As a sequel, we must consider this among the pantheon of greats that Spider-Man 2 (2004) belongs to, and as an animated film this is a certified all-timer. There’s no doubt that you’ll be left wanting more, but as things are… Spider-Man doesn’t get better than this.

Score: 22/24

Recommended for you: Spider-Man Movies Ranked

Universal’s crown jewel, which includes three Jurassic Park movies and a further three Jurassic World films, has left an indelible imprint on cinema and has become a box office and merchandising phenomenon, earning around $10billion in revenue to date. Perhaps more impressively, it has forever changed our culture, its visual representations of dinosaurs coming to define their very image for the past thirty years (whether that image is factually correct or not).

Initially released as a Steven Spielberg-directed adaptation of respected author Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name, the Jurassic franchise has mixed themes of environmentalism, the ethics of cloning, and astute commentary on conglomerated big business, with the blockbuster tropes of thrilling action, sharp comedy and wondrous special effects – the work of visual effects house Industrial Light & Magic has redefined visual effects techniques forever, ensuring the franchise’s indelible mark on the industry as a whole.

In this edition of Ranked, we at The Film Magazine are revisiting every film from the Jurassic franchise – all three Jurassic Park films and the further three Jurassic World releases – in order to decipher which of the Jurassic Park / World movies is the worst and which is the best in terms of artistic merit, enjoyability, purpose, meaning and message. These are the Jurassic Park / World Movies Ranked.

Follow @thefilmagazine on Twitter.

6. Jurassic Park III (2001)

When Joe Johnston took over from Steven Spielberg at the helm of the Jurassic Park franchise following success with his mid-90s family hit Jumanji, he seemed like the most natural fit to continue the franchise’s legacy. The director, who would go on to helm Captain America: The First Avenger among other notable films, was a long-term understudy to Spielberg throughout the 1980s (even acting as director of visual effects on Raiders of the Lost Ark) and was stepping into the franchise just as Spielberg had seemed to lose his passion for it. Unfortunately, Jurassic Park III turned out to be a cursed production, its spot at the bottom of this list due in no small part to the shoot beginning before a script was ever even finished.

Jurassic Park star Sam Neill returned to his role as Alan Grant from the 1993 release 8 years prior, his character a continual reminder of the better film many at the time could catch on TV or home video. Here, his respected palaeontologist is conned into heading to the island of the 2nd movie, The Lost World, to rescue a teenager stranded there as the result of a holiday mishap. Tonally, Jurassic Park III is all over the place – supporting characters as annoying as they are stereotypical, inappropriate jokes made to cover cracks in the narrative, inspired horror elements side-by-side with poop jokes – and it never really gets going like every other Jurassic film does, the pace picking up just once beyond the threshold of the narrative’s inciting incident.

Of all the Jurassic movies, Jurassic Park III is simply the most forgettable. And, while there are moments of genuine inspiration (most notably the bird cage sequence) and points of tension here and there, the film’s lack of awareness as regards its own cheesiness and silliness (both massive steps away from the more earnest Spielberg outings), made this the only franchise entry worthy of being mocked on the internet: a Velociraptor talking directly to Alan Grant is cheesy, cheap and not even played for laughs.

Jurassic Park III is likely the result of “too many chefs in the kitchen”, a situation in which the director, screenwriters, producers and studio all had distinctly different visions of what should have been another mega-hit franchise entry. The result is poor to mediocre, and certainly more boring and unpleasant than the other franchise entries. Jurassic Park III is the film that would end the franchise for some 14 years, and that should be proof enough that it is deserving of the number 6 spot on this list.

5. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997)

Thrusting Jeff Goldblum into the lead role of The Lost World: Jurassic Park after a film-stealing performance in the original film seemed about as logical as Dr Ian Malcolm himself, but tacking on familial interests and a strange romantic angle seemed to remove the mystery surrounding him, watering down his cool-factor in the process. In revisiting his role as the prophet of doom, The Lost World: Jurassic Park became eternally bonded to the character’s cynicism through focusing so much of its narrative on his journey, the movie losing touch of the awe and majesty of the 1993 original as seen through Richard Attenborough’s wide-eyed John Hammond and Sam Neill’s more pure and (reluctantly) kind-hearted Dr. Alan Grant.

Not only was The Lost World: Jurassic Park missing that cool character we’d all come to love as a part of the original’s ensemble of strong, instantly recognisable icons of the screen, but Ian Malcolm was now a father having an existential crisis about his girlfriend going missing while navigating issues of divorce; The Lost World was simply more cynical than any other Jurassic movie.

In the decades since the release of this Jurassic Park sequel, many have placed The Lost World in the lower echelons of Steven Spielberg’s filmography, this 1997 movie marking a point at the height of Spielberg’s fame in which the director seemed much less interested in money-making ventures than he was by passion projects such as Amistad (released the same year) and Saving Private Ryan (released the year following, 1998).

While Spielberg’s legendary blockbuster-leading trademarks are still present in The Lost World (elevating a relatively mediocre script), the bedrock of this Jurassic Park sequel seems to reverse the original film’s stance on armed intervention and mass governmental control by film’s end, and this weak structural base simply fails to provide enough of a springboard for a less-than fully motivated director (even one as great as Spielberg) to overcome. There are glimpses of greatness here – the cracking glass over the edge of the cliff being one particular highlight – but The Lost World is missing the intention and politics of the four films to come, its on-the-nose efforts futile in the face of the deeper realisations of the Jurassic World movies and the original Jurassic Park.

Recommended for you: Jurassic Franchise Directors Ranked

Ride the Eagle (2021)
Director: Trent O’Donnell
Screenwriters: Jake Johnson, Trent O’Donnell
Starring: Jake Johnson, Susan Sarandon, D’Arcy Carden, J.K. Simmons

Fresh out of the pandemic comes Jake Johnson and Trent O’Donnell’s newest collaboration, Ride The Eagle. The pair, who worked alongside one another on the hit comedy TV series ‘New Girl’ for several years, pieced their project together over the course of lockdown. As such, they were among the first to tackle the logistics of filmmaking following the outbreak of Covid-19. Having realised and executed their film safely during one of the biggest health crises in history, in many ways Ride The Eagle is a product of innovative thinking and adapting to circumstance. Its very existence is a reminder that cinema and the arts will continue to adapt and thrive no matter what the world has up its sleeve.

The film stars Jake Johnson as Leif, an ageing bro and struggling musician with mommy issues. Leif (conveniently) is the kind of person who enjoys isolation; he lives alone in a log cabin with only his wise and faithful dog Nora (played by Nora, Johnson’s own rescue dog) as a companion. After hearing about the death of his estranged mother, Honey (Susan Sarandon), who abandoned him at the age of twelve to run away with a zany New Age cult, Leif discovers an unusual arrangement regarding his inheritance. Honey’s large Californian home, situated in the secluded Yosemite national park, could be his, should he choose to complete the set number of tasks Honey prepared for him before her death. 

Leif chooses to travel to Yosemite, where he happens upon instructions – several recorded VHS messages Honey uses to communicate with him posthumously – and a substantial amount of marijuana. Honey guides Leif through several tasks, some riskier than others, in a last-ditch attempt to parent him and pass on some enriching life lessons, hoping this will allow him to forgive her and let go of any childhood pain and resentment that might hold him back. Among other tasks, Honey has Leif learn how to catch fish with his bare hands and encourages him to call and apologise to his ex-girlfriend so that he might begin to take more responsibility over his life. With the completion of each task, we see Leif begin to evolve and apply Honey’s lessons to his own life. Eventually, he wonders if there might be more to life than existing in isolation and more to achieve in his musical career than tagging onto a hipster band unironically named Restaurant. Along the way, Leif runs into several exciting faces, including his mother’s crazed ex-boyfriend (J.K Simmons), to whom Leif delivers his mother’s departing message, and the girl who got away, otherwise known as Audrey (D’Arcy Carden), who Leif reconnects with via awkward phone calls as part of his mother’s dying demands.

Ride the Eagle is a product of lockdown and probably wouldn’t exist in the same way or even at all if it hadn’t been for the many restrictions we all faced throughout 2020. The film will seem impressive to the audiences willing to bear those many restrictions in mind; however, for those who are eager to avoid any reminder of the pandemic, this probably isn’t the film for you. Ride The Eagle cleverly dances around its limitations. Yet, although the film doesn’t ever actually mention the pandemic, it’s transparently covid friendly and, as a result, is unable to spread its legs to its fullest extent. Although funny and charming, Leif and Audrey’s split-screen phone conversations start to drag on and subsequently fail to muster up the same emotion as physical communication, and Leif’s isolation and socially distanced interactions begin to feel somewhat forced as the movie wears on. It seems as if Johnson and O’Donnell were more interested in constructing their story around finding clever ways to combat covid restrictions. With such devoted attention to logistics, the overall narrative surrounding the middle-aged dude working through his issues becomes disappointingly unoriginal and vanilla. 

This isn’t to say the film suffers as a whole. Jake Johnson’s self-deprecating, man-child humour fits in very well with this tale. Johnson manages to bring Leif into existence without leaning too heavily on his Nick Millerisms. Leif is very much his own man, willing enough to mature and lean into his emotions surrounding grief and the loss of his mother—a woman who Leif consistently reminds us he didn’t even know that well. Johnson, who, for the most part, spends the entire film in isolation, copes marvellously, holding the film together alone, drawing humour out of one-sided conversations with the memory of his dead mother and his adorable and surprisingly charismatic dog. His work here resembles his collaborations with famed mumblecore director Joe Swanberg, with the low-budget stylings, meandering pace and everyman narrative lending the film its humanistic and painfully familiar edge. 

Ride the Eagle is a charming piece of work that achieves a delicate balance between comedy and tragedy. The film is serious enough to explore the meaning of family and past traumas, reminding us that it’s never too late to reach out, make amends and begin to heal. On the other hand, the film also packs in some hearty laughs, making us squirm and chuckle as Leif awkwardly navigates his assignments alongside one wayward phone sex experiment. As the film begins to hit its stride, we also tap into the nuances of Leif’s surprising emotional journey as he begins to form a relationship with a mother he has already learned to live without. O’Donnell navigates this intricate tonal blend well, throwing in the right amount of meaningful story beats to stop his narrative from feeling mawkish while keeping a fun and uplifting atmosphere with a healthy mix of humour and lunacy.

If you were inclined to pull at this movie’s many wayward threads, the whole thing could unravel very quickly. Why Leif puts himself through the ordeal, watches the tapes and completes his mother’s requests is unclear—there isn’t anybody around to actually check he’s sticking to his end of the bargain. However, the film’s heart-warming mood and adorable, scene-stealing debut performance from Nora the dog is guaranteed to bring smiles to the faces of all who watch. 

Ride the Eagle is a step in the right direction for cinema as we navigate our way out of lockdowns and restrictions and back into normality.

14/24

For this list, we’ve analysed the contemporary era of cinema (1970 and beyond) for the very best rom-com ensemble casts that came to define eras, surprise audiences and ultimately sell their film, whether the picture could be considered good or not.

As a rule, we’ve avoided films that are firmly attached to other genres, such as musicals like Grease and La La Land or dramas like The Silver Linings Playbook and Shakespeare In Love (all of which have rom-com elements), and have judged all casts based on casts alone – beware, there may be some seriously trash movies in the list ahead!

In no particular order…

1. No Strings Attached (2011)

Starring that year’s Best Actress Oscar winner Natalie Portman and arguably the decade’s most trustworthy go-to rom-com leading man Ashton Kutcher, this early 2010s offering from Ivan Reitman, the director of Ghostbusters (1984), featured a stacked cast of future industry leaders including Oscar-nominated director Greta Gerwig and multi-time Emmy nominee Mindy Kaling.

Oscar winning actor Kevin Kline played Kutcher’s father, meanwhile Lake Bell, Ophelia Lovibond, Ludacris and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’s Jake Johnson offered their two cents in some of the film’s smaller roles, filling No Strings Attached to the brim with some of the decade’s most influential and recognisable names.

Cast: Natalie Portman, Ashton Kutcher, Kevin Kline, Lake Bell, Cary Elwes, Greta Gerwig, Olivia Thirlby, Ludacris, Mindy Kaling, Jake Johnson, Ophelia Lovibond

2. You’ve Got Mail (1998)

The 2nd half of the Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks rom-com double bill, You’ve Got Mail, also directed by Nora Ephron (When Harry Met Sally), peaks its older sister to this slot due to each of its stars (particularly Hanks) being even closer to the top of their game, with the supporting cast being nothing short of a who’s who of top class late 90s names.

Leading male Tom Hanks had won two Oscars between Sleepless In Seattle and You’ve Got Mail (for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump) and was about to win his 3rd for 1998’s Saving Private Ryan, while the supporting cast featured that year’s Supporting Actor Oscar nominee Greg Kinnear, award-winning comedian Dave Chappelle, Steve Zahn, Parker Posey and even Chris Messina in a small role.

Cast: Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, Greg Kinnear, Parker Posey, Dave Chappelle, Steve Zahn, Heather Burns, Jean Stapleton, Chris Messina

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Directors: Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman
Screenwriter: Phil Lord
Starring: Shameik Moore, Chris Pine, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, Brian Tyree Henry, Lily Tomlin, Luna Lauren Velez, Zoe Kravitz, John Mulaney, Kimiko Glenn, Nicolas Cage, Kathryn Hahn, Liev Schreiber

Sony Pictures Animation’s hotly anticipated Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse promised to take the idea of cross-dimensional travel and superhero team ups to the next level through a brand new animation style filled with vibrancy and life. Oh boy did they deliver.

Into the Spider-Verse is simply an unforgettable animated movie experience, a soft opening drip-feeding the less usual elements of its original visual style and potentially complicated central story arc in a way that was easy to digest, the impactful, exciting and often moving narrative beats consequently hitting you like a rush of blood to the head, the aesthetic wonderment of the film’s comic-book-inspired visuals pulsating from the screen and screaming “look at how cool this is!”

This animated feature is simply bursting with life, every frame filled with colour and an energy to its motion, its youthful exuberance right on the pulse of youth culture from the ideals and concerns of its central character to the fashions and technology used by the cast, right through to the pulsating beat of the soundtrack.

And it’s layered too…

Into the Spider-Verse relies upon some pre-existing knowledge of the Spider-Man universe, sure, and the joyful experience is bound to be increased if you’re at least somewhat familiar with the character, but it offers enough uniquely comic book style explanations to get itself through what would usually be tedious expository dialogue, and ultimately offers a cast made up of some truly fleshed out characters and one of the best central protagonists in any superhero movie ever – Miles Morales is someone you can’t help but want to see succeed. It’s a feeling emphasised by the piece’s unusual take on an origin movie – that being an inter-dimensional team-up of sorts – that (alongside the fantastic and original animation) distracts from some of the movie’s more clear-cut tropes and cliches, creating the feeling of an entirely fresh and distinct piece of work in every aspect.

It is for this reason that Into the Spider-Verse becomes transcendent of what it could have easily fallen into the trap of being: a superhero movie for comic book superhero fans. It simply screams too loudly and holds too tightly to be relegated to such a position; a truly fantastic achievement.

Visually, the team at Sony Pictures Animation have achieved something extraordinary, their new technologies taking the comic book visual form and firmly stamping it into the mainstream cinema experience. The film is awash with colour and an almost palpable electricity as a result, every single frame rendered with some of the most beautiful and striking visuals in any film this year. It’s in this respect that Into the Spider-Verse is really sent over the edge as an overall movie; the visual construction wrapping an otherwise solid picture in something so spectacular and original that it is absolutely monumental, and will guarantee that audiences (if not the industry itself) will look back upon this film as a game-changer and history maker of our time.

This electric, atmospheric festival of colour is simply fantastic; a memorable and hearty superhero film with a revolutionary take on its own medium, a treasure of this year in cinema and absolutely the very best in Sony Pictures Animation’s studio history. This may even be the best superhero film of 2018.

21/24

Kicking off Universal’s monster-filled ‘Dark Universe’, a Marvel-like collection of classic Universal monsters including Dracula, Frankenstein and the Invisible Man, is Alex Kurtzman’s The Mummy, a Tom Cruise star vehicle that plays more like a bad Mission: Impossible movie with zombies than any classic monster movie or enjoyable modern adventure film.

A re-imagining of the 1999 Brendan Fraser starring action-comedy of the same name, Kurtzman’s Cruise-starring efforts have simply failed to live up to the amount of fun that the original was perhaps best remembered for. This wasn’t in exchange for a darker and more adult version of the character either, despite how the 15 UK (PG-13 US) age-rating warned of “prolonged terror”, as the movie seemed intent on destroying all sources of suspense and even potential unrest before each story element even had the chance to get off the ground. What’s more in this respect is that it could be argued that the production company did in fact miss point of the title franchise altogether.

‘The Mummy’ is, has always been, and certainly should be exactly what its title seems to indicate: a story about a mummified body. And, while this certainly is the case in this incarnation of the story, the way in which said Mummy has been written with all the character traits of a classic zombie seem to indicate a lack of understanding for what makes the character/s so unique or, perhaps worse, is indicative of a studio-driven change in direction for the character/project as a whole. It’s as if the entire mythology of the ancient Egyptians was substituted for a much more western and much less interesting substitute across the board, as swarms of locusts were exchanged for flocks of ravens, the underlying respect and fear for cats was completely forgotten about and the vicious dissection of human bodies for regenerative purposes only was re-purposed as a zombie making device in which unsuspecting victims would become un-dead supporters of the Mummy herself, even in situations whereby said victims had been dead for thousands of years.

This was not left unexplained, as the Mummy was in cahoots with the ancient God of Death and thus had some degree of control over those buried in chambers seen throughout the movie, but this was about as clear as a glass of milk and skimmed over in about as much time as it takes to say “expository dialogue”, leaving the rest of ancient Egypt’s beliefs and superstitions to be lost to the wind. This wouldn’t have been such a noticeable problem, especially given the very nature of modern action films and their insistence upon very clearly describing every facet of what’s about to come or has indeed happened, were it not for the movie’s desire to play four different introductions to the story within the first act.

I counted it in at 40 minutes before there was any real progression to the story or a scene that justified any that came before it, and considering the movie was only 1 hour and 50 minutes, that was quite a remarkable achievement. Up until that point, The Mummy was an almost insufferable mess courtesy of some of the worst dialogue I’ve seen in any film this year and some of the laziest characterisation in any mainstream action movie of the past decade. Jake Johnson’s character Chris Vail, for example, was positioned as comic relief yet provided no laughs courtesy of the screenplay’s demand that he simply say everything that was already happening. “We’re being shot at”, “what is this thing?”, etc. were evidence of the short-lived tolerance many will have for the character, and the movie cruised down the same path for the rest of its run-time, presenting stereotype after stereotype starting with a tough and honest Black army officer and moving right through to a loyal northern African assassin character we’ve seen become more and more prevalent in the last 20 years (particularly following the impact of said role in the likes of The Bourne Ultimatum).

Perhaps most frustrating was the way in which the film joined countless other Tom Cruise starring productions in presenting the nearly 55 year old actor as a sex icon who could attract the very prettiest, youngest and most intelligent women of planet earth simply by being topless here and giving a smirk over there. Just like in Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Jack Reacher, two projects Cruise worked on with The Mummy screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie, Cruise seems to be playing a character twenty years younger than he is, leaving the question of: when will this end? It’s a dangerous game for these studios to play as it has become so cringe-inducing that it’s instantly removing audiences from the reality they are being asked to accept and, if nothing else, is denying said audiences of the young, attractive and charismatic actors who could have taken the role instead. In the case of The Mummy, Cruise is partnered with 33 year old Annabelle Wallis who plays the classic representation of a female counterpart so far out of our hero’s league that she inevitably becomes his love interest, though in this case she’s already slept with Cruise before we meet her and thus the whole concept is null and void.

If The Mummy did have anything going for it, which would be a stretch to imagine given the general dissatisfaction that the screenplay caused, then it would be the visuals. The movie’s CG department was hitting on all cylinders despite being faced with a number of different yet equally challenging scenarios and it was clear that cinematographer Ben Seresin brought a mood to the film’s most boring scenes and sequences that helped to encapsulate a general feeling in-keeping with the original Mummy movies and any monster-filled universe as a whole. Equally, the production design was very good, as was the make-up which, despite reinforcing the less than welcome zombie elements of the film, helped to enhance suspense and maintain the illusion of the movie’s reality that seemed challenged at every ego-driven shot of Tom Cruise’s body, or his entirely unconvincing reactions.

The Mummy is, then, far from being the spark to light the fire under Universal’s Dark Universe, owing this largely to its woeful screenplay and insistence upon being a Tom Cruise movie rather than a Dark Universe Mummy movie. This Universal outing is like Mission: Impossible without the quirks, the pseudo-intelligent plot or the over-the-top stunts and is presented by a cast who seem to have phoned in their performances. There is hope that the impressive visual work of those behind the scenes could bleed through into the Dark Universe’s upcoming instalments and that announced names of Johnny Depp and Javier Bardem do not carry with them such an ego as Tom Cruise undeniably has in this film, but hope springs eternal and this movie is very poor.

7/24