The King of Kings review – Charles Dickens retelling of the Jesus story does a serviceable job

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The famous author tells his son and their cat the story of Jesus in this mixed-bag family animation, voiced by an impressive cast This syrupy cartoon account of the life of Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac) is narrated, with consummate weirdness, by Charles Dickens (Kenneth Branagh). It’s in fact based on a story Dickens wrote for his children (and wasn’t published until 1934, decades after his death). The idea is that Dickens is telling the story of the New Testament to his young son Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) and Walter’s impish cat, explaining to the King Arthur-obsessed Walter how Jesus was the real King of Kings and all that. And so we see Walter and Charles, in their mid-19th-century garb, wandering through scenes of JC’s life nearly two thousand years earlier, from the nativity to the crucifixion – much like Scrooge and his spectral buddies in A Christmas Carol as they wander through past, present and future Christmases. It rather drags out what is already a pretty long running ...
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Madame Web review – Marvel’s junky spin-off is a tangled mess

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Dakota Johnson lazily leads an incompetent attempt to set up a new character, made almost incoherent by last-minute changes

It was an inevitable collapse after a reign of such unwarranted length and unparalleled indulgence, superhero movies totalling eight a year during the 2010s, a lucrative yet tiresome stronghold. There were brief highlights within the flurry but such lazy overreliance left little room for other blockbuster genres to flourish and led studios to scrape barrels, giving us more and more of something we’d ultimately had enough of. Last year saw an overwhelming rejection (The Flash, Shazam 2, The Marvels, Ant-Man 3, Aquaman 2 all underperforming) and now the fallout, the first of the year doubling up as a Powerpoint presentation on what went wrong and how not to fix it.

Developed back in 2019, given a green light in 2020, filmed during 2022 and then allegedly undergoing reshoots last year, Madame Web was envisioned as a way to extend Marvel and Sony’s Spider-Man universe: a business, if not creative, sense decision after the surprise success of both Venom and Into the Spider-Verse in 2018. An elderly clairvoyant known in the comics for assisting Spider-Man is now turned into a young paramedic, played by Dakota Johnson, who doesn’t even know that Spider-Man exists, in a film desperate to pretend that it’s something it isn’t. Such confusion was on display in the launch of last year’s trailer, immediately going viral for its laughably unsure tone, convoluted plot and checked-out leading lady. Grimly aware of the sea shift, it’s now being referred to as a gritty suspense thriller in press materials with Johnson insisting during press that it’s a standalone movie in its own standalone universe.

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