His Dark Materials (2019-22)

I found His Dark Materials very difficult to follow.  I know the books were written for children but for some reason I just couldn't understand what was happening. Even after 3 seasons, I'm still not sure what the heck dust is. I'm still not sure if Mrs Coulter and Lord Asriel are evil. I don't know why Lyra is so obsessed with Roger when she's got this hunk Will. I chalk it off to the writing. And I found the child actors Dafne Keen and Amir Wilson are very ok. I honestly found them to be kind of annoying. I thought there would be more Lin Manuel Miranda, but he's a pretty minor character. Ruth Wilson is probably the highlight. The subtext of the plot though is fascinating reading about it afterwards. The critique of the Catholic Church is spot on. And I thought the final episode was a stand out. The denouement following the climax of the penultimate episode is quite beautiful. It kind of comes out of left field, but it's a great tie up. The second season was super boring. I nearly stopped watching. And I'm not sure if it was worth finishing but here we are.

Dark Phoenix (2019)

X-Men deserves a better ending than this. X-Men was probably my favorite superhero series, but they remade it to death. It should have ended with Days of Future Past and Logan. Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix were wholly unnecessary. I had forgotten that Days of Future Past erased the old timeline. Much like the recent bookend of the MCU, the time travel rules are kind of murky. But in their attempt to erase the ill received ending of the original trilogy in The Last Stand, they recreated the same plot, except worse. A redo was not necessary. They get a little into the politics that always made X-Men interesting and relevant. The othering of mutants is a message that is still poignant today, but it takes a backseat to a largely irrelevant main plot. Who are these aliens and why is Jessica Chastain their leader?

Atomic Blonde (2017)

I think overall the plot is convoluted, but there are three really good things worth pointing out. One is the use of music. There is a great use of 80s Cold War-era music. Diegetic sound is music incorporated within the scenes in a practical way, and there's lots of it.  The second thing is the movie's use of color. All the action scenes look very stylish and bloody. Some of the fight scenes are actually quite funny because they're a little more realistic in that human beings don't have unlimited stamina. And third, I really love the clever use of reflections. The mirrors are placed perfectly in the scene to reflect different angles of the action. Interesting framing. 

X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)

What I love about the X-Men series is the complex discussion of politics and the revisionist history making for an engaging story. This movie doesn't do that. Instead, like a typical superhero movie, it delves into mythology, which is less interesting. And X-Men has gotten extraordinarily confusing in terms of timeline. How could this big huge Apocalypse thing have happened in the 80s and we never heard about it in the original trilogy? There is the welcome re-insertion of Jean Grey (Sophie Turner from Game of Thrones!), Nightcrawler, Storm (who is apparently Egyptian now?) and Cyclops, but Angel is a puzzle. Is this a different Angel than the one from the original trilogy? Because his appearance in this film does not fit in with his role in the original. There is a small cameo by Wolverine, which is bizarre because Wolverine usually has a bigger part in X-Men. And if he wasn't going to have a real role, we didn't need the two minutes. The after-credits scene also alluded to something related to Wolverine, probably to connect this to his next standalone movie. The film's greatest strength is fitting Jean Grey's development back into the narrative, seeing as she is one of the most important mutants.  Usually, one of the high points is the Magneto-Professor X dynamic, but I don't think they got enough scenes together this film. And there was really nothing added to their relationship in this story line. Hopefully, the next X-Men movie returns to its roots.