The Triptych of Mondongo review – one part art documentary, two parts directorial megalomania

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What begins as a portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo snowballs into Mariano Llinás’s infuriatingly brilliant farrago of colour, conflict and existential crisis About as inside-baseball for visual arts as you can get, Mariano Llinás’s three-part portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo is knackering, infuriating and, infuriatingly, often brilliant – especially in its more sincere second instalment. The film nominally tries to document Mondongo’s 2021 Baptistery of Colours project , in which the artists catalogued the chromatic spectrum with plasticine blocks inside a dodecahedron chapel. But it quickly snowballs into Llinás’s own scattershot inquiry into colour and portraiture, a tone poem that ceaselessly interrogates its own tones, a crisis of faith about representation, and – as he falls out with artists Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha – a droll depiction of a director’s nervous breakdown. As Laffitte lets fly at him at one point, Llinás can never resist the...
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Deadpool & Wolverine review – Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman’s sarky gagathon mocks the MCU back to life

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The highly-anticipated odd-couple action bromance shatters the fourth wall into a million pieces with plenty of juke-box slams to keep blood-sugar content high

Can the ailing Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise be redeemed with a metric tonne of frantically self-aware comedy? Now that fewer and fewer people care, can this summer tent pole persuade them to have a laugh at what they used to care about? Can the superhero genre get back on top with a gag riot from Ryan Reynolds’s wisecracking crime fighter Deadpool in an odd-couple action bromance with Hugh Jackman’s wizened Wolverine as his straight man, the careworn spirit of seriousness?

Kind of. Deadpool was always the satiric turn – but this is a movie which more or less orders the audience to stop taking any of the proceedings seriously, shattering the fourth wall into a million pieces with material about nerds saving their “special sock” for particular fight scenes. It cheerfully (if sheepishly) makes mock of the MCU’s cosmic timeline shenanigans which permit characters to be brought back to life and even does loads of very tiresome corporate in-jokes about Disney taking over Fox, presumably on the basis that civilians care as much about this as the Hollywood combatants. Reynolds is often funny, sometimes very funny, periodically entirely unbearable, often a weird and interesting mix of the three.

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