What a fascinating, exhilarating, invigorating rejuvenation of the franchise, and a giant fuck-you to the recent landscape of blockbusters. With The Matrix Resurrections, Lana Wachowski upends not just what one would expect from a Matrix film, but of a “legacy sequel” in general. If there’s a real misstep in Resurrections, it’s the action sequences; they’re competent, but there’s nothing that approaches the lobby shootout from the first film or the freeway chase from Reloaded (just a couple of many examples). And yet…

70

The weakest of the franchise, but there’s still plenty to appreciate here. If anything, it’s the most unique and anomalous of the Matrix films, which works as both a blessing and a curse. The ways in which this deviates from the first two are fascinating; I especially like how unconventional the structure is. It’s basically a long two-hour climax, aside from some quick setup at the beginning. Unfortunately, that also means that all the CGI battles get exhausting after a…

78

Even though the first Matrix is an all-time favorite of mine, I avoided the sequels because I’d heard mediocre-to-bad things about them. Glad that I finally gave them a chance in prep for the new one, because this movie rules and I won’t hear otherwise. It’s not nearly as flawless as the first—it suffers from pacing issues even though it has the exact same length, the exposition is clunkier, and it ends on a flat note. But when Reloaded kicks…

Still just the fucking best. I know I’m far from the first person to have had this experience, but watching this for the first time at 11 or 12 (my first R-rated movie, I think) was truly eye-opening, the feeling that this was a total game-changer and I had never seen anything like it before. Rewatching it now, it still has that power. One of the most inventive and invigorating spectacles ever created; there are few films bursting with this…

Maybe Spielberg’s best? Will have to sit with it given how foundational Jaws is to me, but this is absolutely unlike anything I’ve seen before. Always shrugged this one off because it looked like mid-tier Spielberg, only to finally get around to it and realize I’ve been missing out on one of the greatest movies ever made all this time. A gorgeous, yearning, and staggeringly imaginative masterwork about the blurred lines between reality and artifice, and striving to be human under…

85

I didn’t go in expecting this to be as great as Tarkovsky’s original, which is one of my absolute favorite movies, and so I was largely able to avoid pitting the two against each other. I think that’s the right approach to take to this, because even though it’s true that I don’t love it quite as much as Tarkovsky’s, it’s still a gorgeous filmmaking achievement when looked at on its own . Easily the most visually immaculate film…

94

Some of the greatest VFX work in cinema history. Disgusting and stomach-churning in all the best ways. Came very close to puking on multiple occasions, and yet I couldn’t look away. But as great as all the gore and viscera is, there’s more to the movie than that—a real sense of gravity and tragedy as Brundle’s situation goes to hell. The first hour is a masterful slow build that lays all the right groundwork for Goldblum and Davis’s relationship,…

As someone who has neither read Frank Herbert’s original novel nor seen David Lynch’s adaptation, I’m definitely an outsider to this story. But that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things, because this is just such an astounding experience to watch. The world that Villeneuve creates here is so immersive, so tactile, so fully realized that I was often left in awe at what I was seeing. One of the coolest things I’ve seen in a theater; the…