That's it for Rev this year and I can't help feeling I've missed something... Eight films isn't a bad effort but there were a few that I hope I can catch somewhere later. Anyway, here are the films I saw this year, in calendar order of viewing. First up was: U are the Universe ★ ★ ★ ½ Ambitious Ukrainian film by Pavel Ostrikov about the last person in the universe after an earth-destroying disaster. Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) is running nuclear waste to Callico, a moon of Jupiter, when he gets the news. His fastidious on-board robot Maxim is his only companion until he gets a message from near Saturn. There are some lovely moments - 2001 music reveals a replacement office chair floating through space, the Open Me message, the sinister link to 2001 (set up earlier by the music), the tenderness of the burgeoning audio relationship - all leading to a sweet but realistically depressing conclusion. Wonderful pared down, yet grand filmmaking. Of Caravan and the Dogs ★...
Well, it looks like I'm on the wrong side of recent film history with this one. Quite a few early signs are that this iteration of Superman isn't finding favour with the critics. I have to say, I thought it was a lot of fun. Not a world beater but certainly an improvement over the previous Snyder editions ( Man of Steel , Justice League , etc). One highlight is the editing, by Craig Halpert and William Hoy. It's snappy and witty, and some of the transitions are fantastic - Hawkgirl dropping a wrong'un cuts to a soluble tablet dropping into a glass of water, for example. The fight sequences aren't too ' Transformer -ised' either, that is, it's possible to tell what's going on. Writer/director James Gunn imbues the film with a lightness of touch and the humour, mostly from Nathan Fillion's Green Lantern, works most of the time. The casting is pretty spot on, too. In David Corenswet and Rachel Brosnahan, it's almost as though Gunn scoured the C...