Eek-cute: the rebirth of the frothy romcom sociopath

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The online era is pushing screen romantics to alarming extremes. Whether posing as a stranger’s fiancee or framing someone as an obsessive stalker, happy endings look harder than ever to find It’s a long-running romcom trope that the couples we’re supposed to root for are often hiding lies that threaten the chances of any happy relationship blossoming. From classics such as The Shop Around the Corner to modern blockbusters such as How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, the genre thrives whenever it presents the audience with the most alarming red flags it conceals from its characters, raising the stakes by seeing if sparks can still fly when an ulterior motive behind each meet-cute is hidden in plain sight. In the romantic comedies we’ve seen so far this year, this trope has not only been revived but pushed far beyond its breaking point, cementing a new romcom archetype: the unlucky-in-love sociopath. This week’s new release Finding Emily is the starkest example to date, introducing psychology...
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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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