Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron Doesn't Trust Either Its Audience or Animation Enough

From the get-go, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron struck me as an attempt to do a Western version of Bambi. This was mainly because Spirit was also a tale of relatively non-anthropomorphized animals wandering around in the woodlands with a darker tone. Whereas Bambi committed to its darker tone (oh, did it ever), Spirit has trouble actually letting its more somber elements get executed properly. Nobody's expecting an animated kids movies from DreamWorks to achieve the bleakness of a Robert Bresson movie, but Spirit constantly struggles to achieve effective moments of poignancy because it never allows those moments to be as restrained as they should be. It constantly beats you over the head with its intent instead of letting the emotions sweep over you.

Insomnia Has A Great Robin Williams Performance And Some Overly Predictable Elements

Compared to other entries in Christopher Nolan's filmography, Insomnia can't help but feel a bit routine in execution. Now, the film overall is actually pretty entertaining, a well-done cat-and-mouse crime thriller with one particularly strong performance I'll talk about later, but compared to the narrative audaciousness of fellow Nolan movies Dunkirk or Memento and even just considered on its own merits, Insomnia feels more paint-by-numbers in concept and execution of said concept. But even paint-by-numbers can be plenty fine when the paint looks pretty and Insomnia most certainly has some super colorful elements that help stand out.

Spider-Man Review

For 50 years, the thought had crept into the minds of everyone across the planet...what would a Spider-Man movie look like? For some, it was just a passing mental diversion, a notion that would fade as quickly as it came. For others, it was a concept that persisted in their cranium, imagining what the web-crawler would look like in the realm of live-action cinema. Considering how much of a grip Spider-Man had had on pop culture, it's understandable why such a proposal would have inhabited the imaginations of billions of individuals around the world. The comic book saga of meek Peter Parker gaining superhero abilities had emerged as one of the great modern-day fictional media creations.