Spider-verse meets Gravity falls, resulting in a completely unexpected delight that really is fun for the whole family. The animation is beautiful, the pace is fast, the humor earnest and often physical, and the story intentionally misses every opportunity for cynicism. The photogenic family next door with the perfect vacation photos really is that high-functioning, fit and smart.¹ Friends are there to support you, not tease you. The world doesn’t make fun of weirdness, it embraces it.

So, even though it premiered on Netflix, this is not your ordinary Netflix feature-length animation; it is actually good. It is also a triumph of believable character motivation and well-executed action sequences over a coherent plot. Thankfully, humans put much more weight on the former.

Interstellar is many things: a mediocre sci-fi story, a timely study of sociopathy, a schmaltzy meandering about love conquering space and time, an excellent showcase of near-future space engineering, and, sadly, a big budget Hollywood movie that grossly underestimates its audience. Foreshadowing is one thing, having one astronaut do the punch-a-hole-though-a-folded-piece-of-paper schtick to another while they are in space on their way to a wormhole as part of a billion dollar secret mission… Well, that’s a whole new level of cringe.¹

Hollywood rears its head in many other places, most of all the needless addition of superficial suspense to things that don’t need added suspense. Because a father communicating with his estranged daughter through spacetime is not emotional enough, let’s also add a hick brother who doesn’t want her at the only place where communication is possible, and may kick her out at any moment. Decades are spent on trying to get humans off Earth, yet the big scientific breakthrough comes at the very last moments, as people are suffocating on the ground. While we are there: if the human civilization is capable of building a county-sized space habitat and the only problem is getting the thing off the ground, why not build it on Earth or under the sea, instead of using a few hundred frozen embryos as humanity’s only backup plan? But let’s not get into plot holes because, um, there are a few.

Which is to say that Interstellar is not an overwhelmingly good movie. The good, however, still outweighs the bad, especially for those willing to forgive all the pandering. The best of humanity is also the worst of it, and the best of American sci-fi in matters of technology also turns out to be some of the worst story-wise. So it goes…

There are too many things here that just don’t work: the acrobatics (cartoonish in a bad way), the believability (live action is less forgiving to cross-dressing, just ask Mrs. Doubtfire), and worst of all, the message, which comes straight from the Big State handbook of propaganda: a woman’s worth is in marriage and — maybe, under extraordinary circumstances — in her service to the country. Self-actualization is allowed, after much hemming and hawing, as long as you are actualizing yourself towards protecting the Empire.

Which is too bad, because the setup provided excellent opportunity for two badass female characters to unite against the common oppressor. Of course, uniting against anything would not have been received with open arms in Mulan’s intended market, said market working diligently towards exterminating threats foreign and domestic even as the movie was made.

One thing that did work was the matchmaker who really should get a show of her own. A Disney+ series of shorts with a match per episode, perhaps, culminating in helping Xianniang the witch find the man/woman/hawk of her life? Disney, you are welcome.

Comparisons with Joker started the moment Cruella was announced, so let’s get that out of the way: Cruella was so much more fun to watch. Granted, it was a low bar to clear, Joker being about as much fun as watching a botched execution, but Cruella also has better acting, music, editing, and any technical category you can think of.¹

What it doesn’t have is much of a message, at least not one that hasn’t been covered already and in more detail by some other Disney or Disney-adjacent product. Killing your firstborn daughter is a bad idea? (Snow White) Villains are people too? (Maleficent) You know you’re in trouble message-wise when you have your titular character saying out loud the movie poster tagline. “Brilliant. Bad. A little bit mad.” looks great on a wall, sounds awkward coming out of a speaker.

Emerald Fennell, who wrote, directed, and co-produced A promising young woman, made many good choices when writing the screenplay. Let’s start with things not shown, like what Carrie Mulligan’s character¹, Cassie, does with all the men picking her up (or does she pick them?) under false pretenses. What is that red streak dripping down her arm walking home the morning after? Are the red, black, and blue notches she jots down with her gunner pen for each man a matter of convenience or a code for their fate? How much of a psycho is she?

Another good choice: the (never-shown!) sexual assault that underpins much of the plot is set in a medical school. Medical education selects for conformity, which is on one hand understandable (why fight windmills and ruin your chance for a secure and often lucrative income?) but on the other leads to willful blindness to many misdeeds.² Some may be surprised by the bad turns some seemingly good characters take by the end of the movie, but to anyone who’s gone to medical school it would have been true to personal experience. Parallels to other nice-guy professionals — lawyers, let’s say — draw themselves.

Yes, the movie is topical, drawing on current events, trending hashtags and rising fears. Thankfully, that doesn’t stop it from being damn good, and well worth a rewatch or two.

It aged better in my mind than it did after a rewatch, the version in my mind being conflated with the book and the game. What it gains on the aesthetics it loses on the incoherent plot, which at the same time has too much exposition and leaves too much unexplained.¹ Also: Sting?!

You could say that this is a classic example of a long book being better suited to a TV show than a movie, but there was a TV show and it wasn’t much better. Maybe the new movie will be it? Or maybe HBO, Amazon, Netflix or Apple need to pour money into a serialized version, three of the four having a track record for funding good sci-fi.

Equal parts of man versus monster and man versus bureaucracy in this low-budget high-quality remake. Though googly-eyed, the monster is more alien, more menacing, and more destructive than the recent American version. So is the Japanese bureaucracy, which is, in the end, a bigger threat to the country than Godzilla will ever be.

A soaring orchestral score. Drone shots of empty squares and promenades. Surveillance camera footage of animals running amok. Stuck onto this skeleton are a few soundbites of scientists explaining humanity’s inhumanity towards wildlife; redundant, but required to elevate this from a long Youtube video into a… long Youtube video with a Message.

“Drone shots of oversaturated greenery zipping accross the screen to the rythm of athmospheric EDM” could describe almost any documentary made in the last decade, but “Our towns” has a note of localism that’s pleasing to my mind. The movie promises us stories of eight towns across the country that failed and/or bounced back. That is a tall order for a single town, life being complicated and things not falling neatly in line for a comprehensible narrative. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t even try to spin a story, giving us instead a few lessons: that local newspapers are important for the life of a community; that people want to live in neighborhoods from which they can walk to work, school, shops, and nature; that despite your best efforts, a decision from up above (to close a factory, move an interstate, etc) can ruin a town; and that small towns owe their prosperity — if they prosper at all — to the people who could have been anywhere else but chose to be there.

True, there is nothing there you wouldn’t know from reading Jane Jackobs, A Pattern Language, or even @WrathOfGnon tweets. But maybe just maybe this movie being on HBO and coming from a writer of The Atlantic means those ideas are seeping into circles that have so far preferred centralized planning.

Like Godzilla but with a better story, better scenery, better acting, and, yes, better monsters. A thoroughly fun movie that The Guardian critic hated. What’s not to love?