The monster contains multitudes, but no one referent exhausts it of its capacity to refer to something else, because the core of its being is outside our frames of reference. One of the thrills of Nope, as a work of weird fiction, is wondering just how much of our stories, our world, is similarly beyond our grasp.

Purity and sacrifice—the religious tenets of good motherhood—still course through representations of the maternal on-screen, just as they continue to weave their way through the dynamics of motherhood in reality, the political implications more fraught than ever.

In that moment the audience and Emerald are each abolitionists, and in that moment at the Blacktown drive-in where I witnessed Nope, everyone in that carpark, however briefly, behind their tinted car windows, desired the absence of police, for the police to fuck right off, and in the infinite violent possibilities invoked by Peele, we all wanted to see the police, the dutiful henchmen of capital that they are, gone for good.

If, as Andrew Todd has written, Sony’s recent Morbius was the triumph of intellectual property over storytelling, Disney’s Lightyear is intellectual property as storytelling. It is the story of a toy, written by people who don’t know that toys come alive. It is a movie that exists solely because of its franchise yet narrows its imaginary boundaries.

The multiverse can have deeper implications when the interests in self-conscious play and knotty conception are probed for a more consequential social commentary. While neither a flawless execution of the cinematic multiverse nor an exhaustive exploration of identity and inequality, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a productive example of this balance.

In these films Jane Campion’s creed seems to be one of love, too, but a love that—distinct from the Romantic ideal—unfurls within the mucky ecstasy of the venal and the sublime. Her characters come together like waves onto rocks; their bodies tell the story.

Sony’s pickle is that Spider-Man doesn't have the sidekick roster of a Batman or rotating teammates of the X-Men: so in order to keep producing content, the studio must dive into the rogues gallery and make movies about villains. And Michael Morbius is a character so far down the villain totem pole that the very announcement of the project garnered snickers from fans instead of excitement.

The French Dispatch is Wes Anderson’s most overtly ‘historical’ film to date. It is also his most Wes Anderson. His longstanding tendency toward narrative detours and aesthetic pastiche finds here its most fitting form in a kind of fragmented, nesting doll format, intended to resemble an issue of a magazine.

While it may be sensible in our climate-threatened world to regard cars as unrestrainable pests choking and exhausting the planet, cars are routinely celebrated in popular cinema as portals for escaping drab reality, their sleek bright surfaces offer a glistening promise of transcendence. Yet Titane conveys a passion for automobiles surging beyond mere commodity fetishism, and an acute hostility toward people.

What unites The Conversation and Leave No Trace is the shared desire of their protagonists to evade particular forms of capture. This desire to live off-the-grid is, inherently, a rejection of the terms of the world as-is, and the limited possibilities of life lived on those terms. It’s a practice of resistance, skirting systems of power by refusing to be made legible within them.

In WILLY'S WONDERLAND, we are confronted with two nightmares: being trapped in a children’s entertainment venue inhabited by haunted animatronic characters; and the torment of living as hostages, held captive by capital. The film’s strength lies in its ability to convey us from the first of these horrors to the second.

Indulging in cinematic spaces like these – loft apartments occupied by single artist types – is a salve amidst the current housing crisis in Australia. These viewing habits, the enthusiastic study of filmic trips, have become my guilty pleasure as I grit my teeth through another brutal winter.

In most countries, new film releases have played out over the past year or so within the four walls of living rooms, on the small screens of television sets, laptop screens, or tablets. But how do we respond when the conditions of crisis are reflected back to us in those films?

Ultimately, governments offering Hollywood subsidies are usually bidding for ‘place branding’, effectively a form of product placement. The economic and artistic health of the local screen industry and its workers is either an afterthought or deliberately subordinated in pursuit of national prestige and downstream tourism revenue.

It’s been 50 years since The Sorrow and the Pity first screened in a tiny cinema in Paris. Soon after its American release, film critic Roger Ebert described it as ‘one of the greatest documentaries ever made.’ When it was finally approved for broadcast on French television, in 1981, 10 years after its original ban, it was viewed by 20 million people – more than a third of the entire population of France.

Dick Johnson is Dead was always going to be reviewed well because, yeah, it's great. Death, well-handled, is a powerful subject. But the film is made more poignant by the state of the world, and more specifically by the failure of rich nations to protect their elderly. It is fitting that one of the stand-out films of 2020 was a documentary about the anticipation of grief.