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The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Mythica: Stormbound review – new chunk of swords and sorcery tale ripe for avid franchise audience
This low-budget but reasonably competent swords and sorcery yarn is the sixth instalment in a series of Mythica films that goes back to 2014. It seems they were first bankrolled partly by crowdfunding, and then presumably kept going by the production's low overheads and straight-to-retail distribution to an audience that clearly grooves to quasi-Tolkienian, Dungeons and Dragons-style quests featuring a motley band (there is usually an elf or dwarf). If you like your necromancy tales spiked with huge chunks of nattering as the characters endeavour to bulk out the running time with lots of banter and exposition, this may be just the ticket. Don't worry too much about not having seen the other five films because this is reasonably watchable, especially as so much time is devoted to filling newbies in on the backstory via dialogue and voiceover. In any case, this is a bit of reboot with the meagre plot unfolding about 15 years after events in the last film. The ensemble is made of up all-new characters who allude to such figures as Marek the slave girl-cum-magician who led the franchise earlier. This go-round, our protagonist is The Stranger (Will Kemp), known just as Stranger to his friends; he is an apothecary/bounty hunter (clearly in this medieval economy everyone has two or three jobs) travelling with a mysterious cargo in his wagon. Stranger finds Erid (Nate Morley), an injured young man, on the road and brings him to an inn run by Irish-accented dwarf Giblock (Joe Abraham). The inn just happens to be where Erid had been living as a one of Giblock's slaves along with comely Arlin (Ryann Bailey), but Erid recently got caught up in a catastrophe when the local witch, who goes by the delightful moniker Mahitable Crow (Barta Heiner), murdered everyone in the nearby village, making Erid the sole survivor. As a terrible storm is raging outside, other travellers keep fetching up at the inn, including a loudmouth local marshal and his elven sidekick, a hulking hunter, a mysterious vampy woman, and so on. It's like The Hateful Eight but with slightly less ponderous dialogue and crisper editing. The nocturnal time-frame means the darkness can disguise the shonkiness of the visual effects during the sequence when a human character turns into a CGI bear. In the final scenes – in daytime – the purple smoke and CGI lightning looks even cheaper and shonkier, which is in its way sort of endearing. But credit is due to the cast and director Jake Stormoen (who played a character in the earlier films) for serving this up with a surprisingly persuasive gravity and straight faces. You can tell it comes from a place of respect for the franchise's audience. Mythica: Stormbound is on digital platforms from 16 June
New York Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Life of Chuck' Review: Don't Worry, Be Happy
It's the end of the world as we know it, or at least that's how it seems in 'The Life of Chuck.' A strange, feel-good fantasy about the end times, the movie traces a loose network of characters going about life while facing multiple personal and planetary catastrophes. When the story opens, Earth's big clock, a.k.a. life itself, seems close to running out: Cataclysmic disasters, both natural and otherwise, are raging worldwide, species are rapidly going extinct, people are checking out and the internet is about to do the same. That's bad, though given our enduring connectivity issues, it can also seem like just another day on Planet Reality. 'The Life of Chuck' is a curious movie, starting with its relatively relaxed, almost blasé attitude toward extinction of any kind. It uneasily mixes moods and tones, softens tragedies with smiles and foregrounds a title character — Chuck, an accountant with a tragic past, played as an adult by Tom Hiddleston — who has a tenuous hold on both the story and your interest. Chuck is present from the start but only comes to something like life midway through. He has a kid and is happily married, at least according to the narrator (Nick Offerman), whose dry, lightly detached voice-over winds throughout. That the narrator proves to be a more vivid presence than Chuck is another oddity, one that's presumably unintentional. Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, the movie is based on a vaporous three-part novella by Stephen King, also titled 'The Life of Chuck,' that's included in the author's 2020 collection 'If It Bleeds.' Flanagan's adaptation is scrupulously, unwisely faithful to the source material. As in King's tale, the movie unfolds in three sections in reverse chronological order. Also as in the original, Chuck first appears on a billboard that doesn't seem to be selling anything. It just features a photo of a suited Chuck at a desk smiling out at the world, a mug in one hand, a pencil in the other. '39 Great Years!,' the billboard reads. 'Thanks Chuck!' The billboard catches the eye of the movie's most fully realized character, Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the focal point of the disaster-ridden inaugural chapter. A schoolteacher whose slight connection to Chuck emerges much later, Marty is dutifully plugging away in class despite the world's looming end. 'I contain multitudes,' one of his students unpersuasively reads from the Walt Whitman poem 'Song of Myself.' Given everyone's palpable listlessness, Marty's included, T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men' would probably have been too on the nose: 'This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.' A sensitive, appealing performer, Ejiofor is a master of melancholy, and he gets the movie off to a fine start. His soft face and large, plaintive eyes naturally draw you to him, but even when they water, as directors like them to do, it's Ejiofor's talent for emotional nuance and depth that holds your gaze. That skill is particularly useful for characters as vaguely conceived as Marty, a nice, lonely guy who's still close to his ex, Felicia (Karen Gillan). There's not much to either character or their relationship, but Ejiofor fills in Marty with dabs of personality and a sense of decency that suggests that while humanity is lost, not every individual is. It's too bad the movie doesn't stick with Marty, who warms it up appreciably. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Geek Tyrant
03-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Tyrant
Trailer For Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell Time-Bending Romance A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY — GeekTyrant
The first trailer for Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell new film A Big Bold Beautiful Journey has arrived, and it looks like a beautifully made film with the makings of a quietly devastating, visually rich, emotionally charged fantasy about love, memory, and second chances. The film follows two lonely strangers, Sarah and David, who meet at a wedding and soon find themselves swept into a surreal, time-traveling adventure. But this isn't some bombastic sci-fi spectacle. It's intimate. Personal. They're not trying to save the world—they're just trying to understand their own. The official synopsis reads: 'What if you could open a doorway and walk through it and re-live a defining moment from your past? Sarah (Robbie) and David (Farrell) are both single strangers who meet at a mutual friend's wedding and soon, through a surprising twist of fate, find themselves on A Big Bold Beautiful Journey – a funny, fantastical, sweeping adventure together where they get to re-live important moments from their respective pasts, illuminating how they got to where they are in the present… and possibly getting a chance to alter their futures.' There's definitely a magical realism vibe to all of this with dreamlike moments, gentle sci-fi elements, and a focus on emotional truth. The movie is being directed byKogonada and he's new to this territory, with Columbus and After Yang , he's shown a ability to mix aching humanity with clean, contemplative aesthetics. Colin Farrell, speaking with Collider, described the project like this: 'It's kind of a love story, but it's not a very typical one. It's definitely magical realism. It's grounded in a world that we recognize, but it also is removed enough into the world of fantastical that it goes into these kinds of whimsical places. 'It's a story about being revisited by, but also having the opportunity to revisit certain moments in your past that were very formative.' He continued: 'It's about two people at a stage in their lives — Margot [Robbie]'s character and my character — that find themselves at an emotional crossroads where they're not living terrible lives, but life hasn't really worked out for them. 'They're both terrible at relationships. Neither have been able to find a moment's joy in relationships or companionship. And they begin to find that through each other, as a result of this one night where they go on this fantastical journey and get to see from an objective perspective these moments in their lives that, as I said, were very formative, and get to take accountability for times where they hurt people.' Check out the trailer below and let us know what you think! The movie is set to hit theaters on September 19th, 2025
