misfire

With its focus on thoughtful character development and exploration of difficult subject matter like genocide, Nickelodeon’s Avatar: The Last Airbender series set a new high bar for children’s TV. But despite its tonal maturity, Avatar was still very much a cartoon trying to delight you by playing to the strengths of the medium, which was perfectly suited for realizing the magical world that co-creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko dreamed up. Watching Netflix’s new live-action Avatar series from executive…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeMadame Web is an $80m (£63m) film with the quality of an unlicensed superhero painted on the side of a carnival ride. It’s desperate and seems embarrassed of itself, the pained shrug of a creative team ordered by Sony executives to keep the wheels turning in their Spider-Man-adjacent universe, all while the actual Spider-Man is out on loan to Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe.Although…

In one episode of the new World War II epic Masters of the Air, a character collapses from exhaustion and sleeps through the events of D-Day, which were so memorably dramatized in Saving Private Ryan. In another, we realize that several characters are being held in the same POW camp that was the subject of the classic Sixties film The Great Escape, and that our heroes had no idea the escape was happening until well after the fact. That iconic parts of two famous WWII movies happen between scenes of Masters of the…

via Universal You have to wonder if James Gunn was aware of the Herculean task he had on his hands when he agreed to permanently swap the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the altogether more chaotic DCU, with The Flash underlining the sheer size of the job he’s got on his hands in order to stop the box office bleeding. He may not have been involved in a creative capacity, but the fact the movie hasn’t been able to exceed the opening weekend of a pre-MCU flop that was released 20 years ago has ensured things are off…

Image via Sony Pictures Animation It’s been a major week for web-slingers everywhere, with Sony’s animated sequel Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse exploding into theaters at around the same time the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s canonical Peter Parker has been updating everyone on the status of his fourth solo adventure. Unfortunately for Tom Holland, his non-Spidey endeavors haven’t been faring anywhere near as well as Sony’s multiversal spectacular, with the studio doing a stellar job of underlining why it…

Image via Warner Bros. There’s not much to be said about the farce that Black Adam ended up being; it was definitely a movie that came out late last year, it was definitely part of the soon-to-be defunct DC Extended Universe, and it definitely delivered on its promise to be a film about Black Adam, but even that last point is somewhat debatable. All this to say that, as far as major DC characters go, Black Adam is one that new DC Studios gaffer James Gunn will want to keep in the vault for a bit, at least until…

Image via Pixar Pixar could be looking to add to its string of lacklustre releases in recent years, as the first reviews for the studio’s upcoming film Elemental have begun trickling in. Ahead of the animated film’s release on June 15, Elemental has amassed a 57 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, which so far places it as the second lowest-scoring Pixar film in front of 2011’s Cars 2.  Elemental is helmed by The Good Dinosaur director Peter Sohn, and stars Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie Wade and Catherine…

Screengrab via Marvel/YouTube With Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 just days away, you would presume that all chatter would be about the intergalactic bunch of heroes embarking on their last mission. But nope. When you are in MCU land, you should be braced for debates, arguments, casting news, some tameable and some not-so-tameable misfires setting it on renewed fire out of the blue. And to this eclectic mix, also add DCU’s biggest superhero surprisingly getting side promotion thanks to Vol. 3’s only…

Lisa Donovan was juggling pings from multiple Slack channels and email windows when she inadvertently sent a sensitive company document to the wrong person.  The part-time accountant for a Virginia-based academic coaching firm toggles between 30 instant-messaging channels, four client-email accounts and at least a dozen phone or video calls a day, she says. “It’s, like, ‘Are we on Zoom? Are we on Teams? Did I respond to that? Did I say it right?’” says Ms. Donovan, who works from Richmond, Texas.…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeOne day, Hollywood will finally realise that marginalised people deserve to be at the centre of their own stories. Until then, we’ve got Champions – the latest film in which a bigot is patiently taught not to be a bigot by the very targets of his ignorance, while we’re all expected to stand up and applaud his bravery. It’s a sports comedy, directed by Bobby Farrelly, in which Woody…