Totally bummed to find that this is the first time one of these has felt like a chore to sit through since M:I–2, but whereas that had the orgiastic release of its unchained-Woo finale, this one is barely able to take a break from its endless self-mythologising to that above all else these are just supposed to be fun. Part of the problem, for me, is that McQ’s pragmatic and mercenary approach to writing has resulted in an obsessive…

The entire spectrum of human existence in two and a half hours, beginning with formative death and ending with the next life. You can see this as many times as you like and it’s still startling and uncontainable, the eerie austerity of Kubrick’s images and the density of Clarke’s ideas on the intertwining of humanity and technology colliding in such a way that concrete meaning is always elided, true comprehension existing just on the other side of the infinite. It…

Say what you like about Crystal Skull (and I am absolutely not about to mount a defence of it as an overlooked masterpiece), but it’s indisputable that, for large swathes of its opening half in particular, it’s a pretty indelible piece of visual storytelling. For something that so ravenously feeds on past iconography, Dial of Destiny is remarkably averse to creating a single memorable image, burying its action and performers between layers of flat CGI sludge and uninterested in even…

If Reloaded was the thesis statement, Revolutions is all about putting those words to action. At its centre, the Wachowskis’ final (for now) entry is a bruising war movie. We spend much of our time on the ground with the grunts making up humanity’s final stand, giving us a vivid sense of the scale of the conflict and the hopeless desperation within. Again, the sisters’ aptitude for visual geography can’t be understated: they patiently sketch out the lay of the…