Movie Review: Toy Story 4
Director: Josh Cooley
Stars: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Annie Potts
More magic. From the opening heartbreaking scene to the finale, this Toy Story is as strong as the rest of the franchise. Highlights include Christina Hendricks voicing the damaged tea-set doll Gabby Gabby, Keanu Reeves as an Evel Knievel type motor cycle stuntman doll, Duke Caboom, and Key and Peele playing a pair of plush toys with excitable imaginations. Hanks, Allen and Potts voicing Woody, Buzz and Bo effortlessly bring back the feel of the previous movies while leading the toys on a new adventure. If you have ever enjoyed a Pixar film, you can safely catch this one with or without children.

Movie Review: Men in Black: International
Director: F. Gary Gray
Stars: Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson, Kumail Nanjiani
Oh dear. Far from injecting the franchise with fresh vim, this should bury it.
Chris Hemsworth really needs to step back a bit and realise he has been overexposed of late. Watch this and you too will spend half the picture trying to suppress the idea that you are watching Thor and Valkyrie from the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Tessa Thompson is endearing as the geeky probationary agent M, but Kumail Nanjiani nails it voicing tiny alien tag-along Pawny and owns the film, highlighting how weak it all is.
Some fun visuals fooling around with various aliens, technology and explosions, but this is for young teens – in the bad way.

Movie Review: X-Men: Dark Phoenix
Director: Simon Kinberg
Stars: Sophie Turner, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence
The fourth and presumably last of the “First Class” X-Men films, this is not getting a lot of love. I much preferred this to Apocalypse, though, and found Sophie Turner much improved. Sadly, McAvoy has become a caricature, made worse with ongoing comparison to Patrick Stewart due to 2017’s Logan (which was produced by director Kinberg), though Fassbender still rocks Magneto.
More of the same, it still has its moments and if you are an X-Men fan then you should be able to get more from this than the critics suggest. If you are not an X-Men fan then there is nothing here for you, even if you loved Turner in Game of Thrones.

Movie Review: Godzilla (II): King of the Monsters
Director: Michael Dougherty
Stars: Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown
If the point and purpose of the entire 124 year history of cinema was not to bring us this two hours and twelve minutes of pure, unadulterated, glorious and vacuous schlock then I don’t know what else it could be. King of the Cineplex in my view.
Ken Watanabe, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Sally Hawkins and Charles Dance lend this some heft, and the shout-out to the Disaster Girl meme using Millie is all you could hope it to be. Stick around for the post credit scene. For those of you who groove on B-Grade dross this is brilliant.
On the other hand, if you are not into seeing tired clichés and tropes revived and reworked then even its estimated $170M budget will not be enough to save it from your disdain.

Movie Review: Rocketman
Director: Dexter Fletcher
Stars: Taron Egerton, Jamie Bell, Richard Madden
The long-awaited Elton John biopic. You might want to be clear about how this movie is billed as a musical fantasy - there are musical numbers and it is a fantasy, often of the drug induced kind. I imagine there is a meta here about Elton’s confusion about himself, who he is and who he wants to be, reflected in the variability of the film. Director Dexter Fletcher presents Elton as unreliable narrator in group therapy through a pastiche of key moments in Elton’s evolution, and the film struggles, like Elton, to decide on what it wants to be.
If you prefer conventional stories this might not be for you. The film takes risks and consequently fails in some scenes, but in others I think it is fair to say it triumphs. I will not guarantee that the emotional depths this film trawls will get to you, but I can say they hit me. It will ‘help’ if at least one of your parents was toxic.
If you were hoping for another Bohemian Rhapsody you are not getting it, this is a very different beast, even though it was Fletcher who, uncredited, finished off Rhapsody for release.

Bio: Juddy keeps busy consuming cultural media while posing as a student at a major Sydney university, thus shirking real work. He hosts pub trivia, and tutors at said university, for beer and book money.