INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B-
Special Effects: B

The longer you trade on nostalgia, the more you’ll get diminishing returns, because, frankly . . . people die. How many people are even still around to keep loving Indiana Jones from their introduction to him in Raiders of the Lost Ark? That movie was released 42 years ago. It spawned two sequels by the time the eighties ended, and for basically a generation afterward, we all moved about our lives thinking Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was indeed his last.

Then came Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, released 19 years later, and 15 years ago. Harrison Ford was basically regarded as an old man even then, and in 2008 he was 66 years old.

He’s 80 now. And, lest you think I am a year off in my math: he’ll be 81 on July 13. Principal photography occurred on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny from June 2021 to February 2022, during which time Ford had his 79th birthday.

So how did he do? Honestly, just as was the case in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, surprisingly well. The man still has charm to spare, keeps incredibly fit, and actually feels like he’s doing this for the love of the character as opposed to just for a paycheck (surely he got a nice paycheck, but it’s not like he really needed it). This film, the fifth installment in the franchise, is the first that is neither directed by Steven Spielberg nor written by George Lucas, although both are credited as Executive Producers; it’s directed by James Mangold (Logan; Ford v. Ferrari) and written by a team of four writers, including Mangold himself, and David Koepp, who co-wrote Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

And here’s the thing about Dial of Destiny. It actually captures the spirit of Indiana Jones in a way Crystal Skull kind of didn’t. But, at two hours and 34 minutes, it’s by a fair margin the longest film in the franchise (previously it was Last Crusade, at two hours and seven minutes), and it really didn’t need to be; it sags a bit as a result. Some tighter editing, and I might have been a lot quicker to say this is a better movie than Crystal Skull, which actually holds up better than expected upon rewatch. But then, a lot of movies do: a second run-through cannot disappoint. For all I know, I might watch Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in another fifteen years—when Harrison Ford may well be dead—and decide it’s actually better than I remember it.

There are really fun sequences in this movie, mind you—especially, a bit surprisingly, the lengthy opening sequence, a flashback set at the end of World War II, in which Harrison Ford is de-aged uncannily well. (Presumably, however, the more advanced that technology becomes, the more dated even this digital work, which is the best I have ever seen, will appear.) There is still some dissonance, just as there had been with the pointless de-aging done in The Irishman (2019): Harrison Ford’s old body may actually move a lot more limberly than Robert DeNiro’s old body did under digital alterations, but there remains the issue of his voice. Harrison Ford’s younger, handsome face is kind of amazing in this movie, but then he opens his mouth and still sounds like a grizzled old man.

There’s far more visual effects work in Dial of Destiny than in any previous Indiana Jones film, and although it’s far from the best I have ever seen, it is serviceable and generally serves the story. It is best used in the dark of night in that opening sequence, set largely on a speeding train. That said, there is a moment in a wide shot of Indy running across the tops of train cars, and when he jumps from one to the other, he just looks like a video game character.

In spite of all that, Dial of Destiny has its characters to recommend it. Fifteen years after Crystal Skull not-so-subtly suggested Shia LaBeouf might have Indy’s iconic hat passed on to him, LaBeouf has been given the boot, his character now dead after enlisting in the Vietnam War. He gets one brief, somber mention here, and is otherwise quite effectively replaced by the fantastic Phoebe Waller-Bridge as his goddaughter, her late father being played in flashback by the great Toby Jones. Waller-Bridge brings a delightfully welcome and slightly different vibe to the proceedings, and has great chemistry with Ford.

Perhaps most notable is Mads Mikkelsen, who, in spite of arguably being typecast as the villain, still makes for the most memorable and effective villain in any Indiana Jones movie since Raiders of the Lost Ark. This movie once again dips into the well-tapped well of Nazis, both in its flashback and in its “present-day” setting of 1969, with still-living Nazis making their best effort to recapture what they’ve lost. Mikkelson’s Dr. Voller is doing it by racing to find the remnants of the titular dial, believed to make time travel possible.

Every Indiana Jones movie gets wildly supernatural by the time its climactic sequence is reached, and Dial of Destiny is no exception. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say that, after five of these movies, I felt little emotional investment in it. It’s much more fun just spending time with these characters again (including the return of now-79-year-old John Rhys-Davies as Sallah), their significantly advanced age notwithstanding, and the extended, silly action sequences no less exciting for how standard they have become.

It may not seem like high praise to say that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny could have been a lot worse, and thus the final product as another installment of all the same fun you’re used to is somewhat of a relief. The truth is, the movie works far better than one might expect after such unprecedented and notable turnover of filmmakers. (James Mangold is actually better at capturing the Spielberg sensibility than J.J. Abrams.) If it just had some tighter editing, I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about the experience.

If nothing else, the closing scene is worth the wait. It’s very sweet and touches that nostalgic nerve in just the right way, with a subtle callback to Raiders, bringing the series full circle. It strikes the perfect note for signing off on a beloved, four-decade-old franchise, leaving us with a lasting, warm memory.

Harrison Ford is Waller-Bridging generations.

Overall: B

PAST LIVES

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-

How does Past Lives hit, I wonder, depending on the personal romantic history of the person watching it? I have to imagine it varies. A good majority of its audience, I assume, had a “first love” who was not the person they are currently with, and perhaps they contemplate how they would handle being in a similar situation, meeting a childhood sweetheart not seen in person in decades but while currently in a perfectly happy marriage.

I have no way of looking at this movie through such a lens; I had no “childhood sweetheart,” and not just because I’m gay. This story really isn’t about sexuality, nor does it even really reference sex beyond the hypothetical of having children. I am still nearly two decades into the first romantic relationship I have ever had. And, still: this movie made me think, in a way no other movie ever has, about how much I love my husband. He still qualifies as my first love, though, and that’s what this movie is about. So maybe it even worked as intended on me.

Past Lives is a unique experience, in that its emotional resonance takes some time to percolate. I nearly started crying thinking about it on my way home after the movie ended, and I still can’t really say why, except that the movie permeated my soul, and it took some time for me to focus on anything else, rather than continuing to think about this deeply affecting love story.

I desperately want to use a cliché: “an instant classic.” Does anything even qualify as a “classic” anymore? What would be the most recent film for which there is any critical consensus on such a designation? Did it even come out in the twenty-first century? The Lord of the Rings, maybe? Moulin Rouge!? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind actually gets referenced in Past Lives, and that came out in 2004. How many people even still think about that movie? In Past Lives, it is brought up in the year 2011, when it had been released seven years prior. It comes up when our two would-be lovers discuss Montauk, which I completely forgot was even a setting in that movie.

All I can say is: Past Lives is every bit as worth the time and attention as any of those movies, or arguably any “classic romance” that came before them. It’s certainly unlike any other, writer-director Celine Song establishing a dreamlike tone that evokes every romantic, wistful memory you’ve ever had.

The fact that Past Lives is Celine Song’s first feature film is astonishing. She was previously a playwright, which explains her two protagonists both being writers—I have to admit, I wondered how the hell they could afford living in New York City with such jobs. This is beside the point, as Past Lives is about the life choices we make, and whether it can ever be possible to go back to a particular feeling we loved from the past. In the case of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), they forged a quick but deeply emotional connection as twelve-year-olds in their native Korea, Nora convinced they will end up married, but having no idea her parents are about to move the family to Canada.

Twelve years later, after Nora has moved to New York, she and Hae Sung reconnect online, and this is when they make their first real connection as adults. This middle act is a peculiar experience, turning the year 2011 into a period piece, their video chats exclusively over Skype, with grainy and sometimes glitchy video. In spite of that, all of the scenes are as deeply romantic as any other in the film. I don’t think I have ever seen scenes of people video chatting so well shot—even this effectively evokes the kind of yearning these two characters are feeling, discovering they are just as desperate to be with each other as they were twelve years before. But, they have started lives and established plans that make meeting up again unfeasible.

About a year later, Greta meets Arthur (John Magaro) at an artists retreat. In spite of Arthur later fretting about possible inadequacies of his place in Greta’s life, the circumstances of their meeting are just as romantic as anything else in Past Lives, which is very much the point. Arhur jests that in a retelling of their story he’d be “the evil White guy,” but here he very pointedly isn’t. There is no villain, which is what makes the circumstances of this movie so ripe for discussion.

Any talk of suspense regarding what Nora and Hae Sung may or may not do when he finally visits New York City for the first time, another twelve years later, misses the point. Everything that actually happens is firmly grounded in reality, and to my mind is not the element up for debate. The bigger question is about the long-term futures for all three of these people. Do Nora and Arthur stay together indefinitely? Will Nora and Hae Sung finally get together, many years from now? Would that even work? There can be a pointed difference between what you yearn for and what it turns out to be once you finally get it.

There is one specific moment that has really stayed with me, when Nora breaks down, and Arthur comforts her, even though her tears are for another relationship. What a strange position to be in, for all of them. This is the kind of thing so rarely seen in cinema, a deeply unusual circumstance that still rings with an almost unnerving truth.

Past Lives starts and ends with these three characters out at a bar, deep into the night. In the opening scene, we overhear others in the bar playing that game where you try to guess what the stories are of people at other tables, and they actually skirt the truth. When we return to this moment, the perspective has long since shifted to that of Nora, Hae Sung and Arthur. There is some debate as to whether Arthur needs to be there, but Celine Song wisely never makes clear how they came to this as a group: for all we know, Nora asked Arthur to be there, perhaps not considering the likelihood that she and Hae Sung would wind up conversing in a native language Arthur mostly doesn’t understand.

It’s so easy to empathize with all three of them in this scenario, and Teo Yoo plays Hae Sung’s awkward nervousness especially well. They all feel that way, of course, and so do we, on their behalf. How often do we get a sort of love triangle in which we deeply yearn for all three of them to be okay? The most amazing thing Past Lives pulls off is how it tells a story with such specificity, and yet it will move anyone who has ever loved.

Past Lives will raise your hopes for their futures.

Overall: A-

ASTEROID CITY

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

My feelings about Wes Anderson Films, it turns out, have been pretty consistent over the years. I have reviewed every feature film he has directed since 2004, of which there are now eight, and of those I have given five B-pluses (Fantastic Mr. Fox; Moonrise Kingdom, probably still my favorite; The Grand Budapest Hotel, his biggest commercial success; Isle of Dogs; and—spoiler alert!—Asteroid City) and three solid Bs (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; The Darjeeling Limited; The French Dispatch). I can barely remember his first three films that came before I began posting reviews (Bottle Rocket; Rushmore; perennial favorite The Royal Tenenbaums) but could probably stand to go back and revisit them.

It would seem, then, that my feelings about Wes Anderson rarely wavers, except that in my mind, a difference between a B-plus movie and a solid-B movie is a difference between one I would recommend to others and one I would not (but which I was still happy to have seen myself). One could argue, that’s a crucial difference. And by that standard, his last film, The French Dispatch, was a bit of a dip for him, for the first time since five movies (and fourteen years) earlier.

Furthermore, the ones I enjoy the most, I enjoy for different reasons—in spite of the increasingly rigid “diorama” visual style Anderson adopts. Over time, his movies have gotten more visually dazzling, somewhat at the expense of substance; I found Moonrise Kingdom to be exceptional by that measure—and I feel the same about Asteroid City, which is, thematically, very different from anything else he’s ever done. And while the visual style is absolutely recognizable, it’s a tad more self-referential, and has a visual motif unlike any other, being set in a tiny town (the namesake of the film, as well as the play being staged in the film) in the middle of the desert. You might not expect the two-dimensional backdrops of cacti and mountains to work within the duration of the story, but it really does.

More importantly, Asteroid City is like an artisan ice cream sundae, with layered delights. I have to admit, with its Russian nesting doll-like structure, a movie of a TV program presenting a stage play with occasional interludes featuring the director and the actors both in and out of character, all of it dealing with subtle thematic nuances never made straightforward, some of this movie went over my head. I didn’t seem to care, as I was utterly charmed by it. I almost always enjoy Wes Anderson films, but this may be the first one I finished by immediately thinking: I’d really like to watch this again. I’m convinced I would get even more out of it.

There’s another unique quality to Asteroid City that seems tailor-made for me: its quite literally otherworldly elements. I would never known to have expected this, but it turns out Wes Anderson and an extra-terrestrial make for a perfect marriage, at least in tone. There’s even a needle-drop reference to the 1996 Tim Burton classic Mars Attacks!, with Slim Whitman’s 1952 yodeling “Indian Love Song,” and I naively wondered if I was the only one who clocked it (I wasn’t). Mars Attacks! is far wilder than Asteroid City, although by some measures Asteroid City is far wilder than any other Wes Anderson film, and it occurs to me that these two movies would make a truly great double feature.

And by the way, Asteroid City skates on a fairly even path of mild comic amusement, while also moving between genuine poignancy and a good number of laugh-out-loud moments. It isn’t just charming, and it isn’t just surprisingly moving at times, as this tiny desert town, famous for its ancient asteroid in the sand of a giant crater, is locked down under quarantine after an alien visit. If you look deep enough, in its own way, Asteroid City is Wes Anderson’s answer to other directors’ late-career cinema contemplations like The Irishman or Roma or Belfast or The Fabelmans. It’s just that with Anderson, who is 54, it is maybe more of a mid-career contemplation, and also far less straightforward of one. He’s got time to expand on his existential questions, but for now, Asteroid City is the perfect fit for them.

It’s almost beside the point that, as usual, Wes Anderson’s new film is so stacked with stars it almost defies the imagination. The ones most worth mentioning are Anderson stalwart Jason Schwartzman, the protagonist as both a recently widowed father of three finally breaking the news of his wife’s death to his children and the actor who plays him; Scarlett Johansson as a movie star (and the actor who plays her) passing through town; and Tom Hanks, new to the Anderson-verse but well cast and well integrated, as Schwartzman’s emotionally distant father-in-law.

Also worth mentioning are Jake Ryan (previously seen in the phenomenal Eighth Grade and Anderson’s own Moonrise Kingdom) as Schwartzman’s eldest child, and especially real-life triplets Ella Faris, Gracie Faris, and Willan Faris who play his three little girls, their characters with fantastic names I won’t spoil here. I will tell you that in the movie they provide some welcome chaotic unpredictability, and are insistent that they are witches and vampires. These girls alone may have been my favorite part of the movie, and this is a movie with countless things to love.

I can’t mention everyone else in this movie as there are just too many to name, but I want to shout out Tilda Swinton, furthering her long line of unrecognizability in film roles; and Bryan Cranston, who serves as on-screen narrator and occasionally delightful meta-commentator on the transition between “TV show” and “play.”

As always, though, the real star of any Wes Anderson film is the production design, which nearly makes whoever plays the parts immaterial. There is an appropriately otherworldly quality to the visuals here, even as it’s all set on desert land: there are real, working cars on actual roads, but with old-school painted landscape backdrops and artificial landscape props, creating a slight dissonance with the idea that we are supposedly watching a live broadcast of a play, as it blends real-world elements with the artificial, including the most Wes Anderson rendering of a mushroom cloud that could ever be rendered.

And yet, through all of this, even with the pointedly deadpan delivery across every single one of the countless actors (except those truly delightful, energetic little witch girls), Anderson somehow makes you feel a sense of human connection, breaking through the emotional inertness. It’s the contextualization that matters, and even when Asteroid City gets bonkers, it’s all contextualization. This is the reason I expect the experience to deepen in richness with multiple viewings.

Jason Schwartzman and Tom Hanks, making the kinds of connections only Wes Anderson can make.

Overall: B+

THE FLASH

Directing: C
Acting: B-
Writing: C-
Cinematography: C+
Editing: C
Special Effects: D+

When it comes to The Flash, we have to start with Ezra Miller, less because of their relatively competent performance and more because the great life lesson we must all learn from them, apparently, is that nonbinary people can also be massive creeps. Gone are the days of arguing for “separating the art from the artist,” and rightly so: no film exists in a vacuum, nor has it ever. This is why I can no longer stomach watching any film featuring Mel Gibson or Kevin Spacey or Woody Allen. The defenses and justifications just don’t work anymore.

Where does it end, you might ask, when Hollywood is packed with creeps? Do we just avoid all movies altogether? Setting aside the fact that there are degrees of severity (as well as redemption), and the fact that such a question is arguably disingenuous, ideally it ends with people like this no longer being given chance after chance while their behavior remains unchanged.

Your next logical question might be why the hell I went to see this movie, especially if I tell you I already went in with my expectations in the basement, and the answer is simple: I couldn’t help myself. That’s a lame answer, sure. Sometimes people are lame.

I never would have bothered with this movie were it not for the knowledge that Michael Keaton was returning to reprise his role as Batman, for the first time in thirty-one years. Like many people, I feel that Keaton has always been the best of all live-action Batmen, and my all-time favorite movie since my teens has been Batman Returns (1992), which I have seen more times than any other film. By extension, I have a similar, if less passionate, fondness for its predecessor, Batman (1989), which was helmed by the same director (Tim Burton). It is from that earlier Batman that The Flash takes all of its visual references, which is a delight if you’re An Old like me, and maybe pointless for anyone half my age or younger, brought up on endless iterations of the same superhero dreck that, unfortunately, this film also is.

If you were to split The Flash into three acts, both the first and the third are mind-numbingly busy with CGI chaos. (Not to mention witless: in the opening sequence we see a bunch of babies slide out the window of a collapsing building, just so we can hear it called a “baby shower.” Don’t worry about the babies, though: not only do they—spoiler alert—get saved, but they aren’t real!) I have to admit, however, that I found a whole lot of the second act genuinely delightful, as it successfully traded on nostalgia for a time when high-profile, blockbuster superhero movies were still a novelty, only came out every few years, and were elevated by deeply creative, practical production design. Oh, right: and they also had good scripts.

The second act is when we meet Bruce Wayne as played by Michael Keaton, now 71 years old (Jesus, this means he was younger than I am now in Batman Returns), an alternate-timeline version of The Flash’s mentor after Barry discovers his powers allows him to travel through time and attempt to save his dead mother. For a good twenty minutes or so, I was charmed by all the visual callbacks: from Keaton’s very face, to the dusty bat cave, to the Batmobile with the exact same design as in the 1989 film. Even when Barry and his younger, alternate-timeline self (we’ll get back to that) first walk into Wayne Manor, they find themselves in the exact room from the 1989 film when Robert Wuhl as Alexander Knox says to Kim Basinger as Vicki Vale, “Check this out. He must have been King of the Wicker People.”

Later, we even get a jolt of recognition when Batman trots out the Batwing aircraft, which ultimately plays heavily in the story, which quickly becomes a huge mess. The Flash is trying to cheat its way into the long-overused “alternate universes” plot device, which has been used extremely well in Everything Everywhere All at Once and the animated “Spider-verse” films, but hardly any of the far-too-many others. This one might as well be called The Flash and the Multiverse of Numbness. (Granted, the same could have been said for that Dr. Strange sequel.)

Both the opening sequence and the needlessly endless climactic sequence in The Flash are typical examples of what I have complaining about average superhero movies now for years: incoherent action extravaganzas laden with CGI that looks either unfinished or cheap. I am also not a huge fan of packing too many different superheroes into one movie, and this one definitely has too many. If the middle act could have been the whole movie, I’d have liked it a lot more. But, instead of getting the Michael Keaton Batman treatment he deserves, we get him grafted onto a movie with not one, but two Barry Allens. What the hell happened to all these arguments that meeting yourself in an alternate timeline could be cataclysmic? Well, I guess that’s just . . . part of an alternate timeline. How convenient! Here, The Flash and The Flash practically become frat bros. If it were me, and especially if I looked like Ezra Miller, I’d be too distracted from saving the world by all the time spent fucking myself, but I suppose that’s another conversation.

I haven’t even gotten to the cameo by Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, or Michael Shannon truly phoning it in as General Zod, or Sasha Calle as Supergirl in a part that is completely devoid of any real meaning or gravitas, and ultimately just leaves her rendered in CGI flying around punching people like a cartoon. That’s what these movies are, increasingly literally: dumb animated features. They’re cartoons.

Even the Michael Keaton of it all, that being the best part of this movie by a mile, has diminishing returns. It’s like takin a hit of drugs when we hear Michael Keaton utter the famous words, “I’m Batman.” Did we also need a pointed close-up of him saying, “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts”? No, we did not. In the end, The Flash attempts to tug at our heartstrings with visual references most of the young audience won’t even get, such as a brief CGI rendering of Nicolas Cage as Superman in the movie that never got made—I almost said “famously,” but this happened back in the nineties. Who is going to remember a movie from the nineties that never even happened, let alone give a shit?

The bottom line is, The Flash is a shit sandwich with a moderately tasty center, except what’s the point of a tasty center in a shit sandwich? I suppose we could call the two Ezra Millers in it the buns. There are some nice shots of their butt in that suit, for what it’s worth. And for the record I am separating the art from the buttocks.

Ezra Miller, Ezra Miller, and Saha Calle give us multiple dimensions of mediocrity.

Overall: C

SANCTUARY

Directing: C+
Acting: B+
Writing: C-
Cinematography: B-
Editing: B-

Sanctuary wants you to think it’s sexy, provocative and clever, and it is none of those things. Everything that happens in it is preposterous. All I could think about, through its entire, tedious 96-minute run time was that no person in either of these characters’ positions would ever actually do or say the same things.

Here’s what it does have going or it. The two leads—indeed literally the only two characters ever seen onscreen, with the brief exception of a couple of extra walking through a hotel hallway—have chemistry with each other, and onscreen charisma. Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott, as a hired dominatrix and an ascending multimillionaire CEO, make the most of some truly subpar material. Within that context, though, Abbott in particular is well cast: he has a face made for a character who gets off on being humiliated.

This film is an odd specimen in that it both feels like a “covid movie,” being a two-hander with only two onscreen speaking parts and is entirely set inside a hotel room (with occasional forays into the hallway and the elevator outside of it), while simultaneously feeling like it could have been made any time, with this concept as its gimmick. It was a gimmick that wore thin with me very quickly.

Hal’s about to become CEO of his late father’s company, which owns and runs the chain of hotels this one is a part of. He’s been hiring Rebecca to come and humiliate him in one of the rooms, using memorized lines from a full script he wrote for them, for an unspecified but long time. Writing out entire scripts with lines they both memorize sure seems like a lot of effort for a climax in which Hal just jerks off sitting on a bathroom floor next to a toilet. To each his own, I guess. I’m not kink shaming! It’s just the first kink I’ve run across that involves the kind of work that is indistinguishable from mounting an Off Broadway play, albeit a dirtier one.

Hal has decided that his ascension to CEO means he must end his professional relationship with Rebecca. In response Rebecca decides to up the stakes of everything that is and has been going on between them.

Is Rebecca just expanding the limits of their sexual games? Is Hal actually indistinguishable from the doormat part he’s playing? Is Rebecca telling the truth with her threats of blackmail? Is Hal really this easily manipulated? Are these two actually in love? A better writer might have been able to make me care about the answers to any of these questions.

I can tell you this much: as soon as there was any suggestion that Rebecca might have real feelings for him—is she telling the truth? is she actually just still manipulating him, as he suspects?—even in the absence of a definitive answer, I decided Sanctuary had crossed over into the realm of total bullshit. Nothing these two said to each other ever rang true, even when we were meant to believe they were playing mind games with each other.

Sanctuary wants us to think it has a novel approach to gender dynamics, and it just doesn’t. Hal is broken and weak, Rebecca is bold with hints of insecurity. How revolutionary! I suppose we are meant to wonder whether the entire movie was just part of their “session,” and actually everything we saw was supposed to be as contrived as it seemed, all of it multiple layers of ways for Hal to get off. The movie just isn’t interesting enough to maintain that premise as a compelling idea.

What a disappointment when the games e play aren’t any fun.

Overall: C+

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A-
Animation: A+
Special Effects: A-

Some movies take a while to make clear they are great. Some take a few scenes, a few minutes, for it to sink in that you are watching something special. Once every few years, sometimes even a lot longer, a movie comes along that confidently announces it stands apart as of its opening frame.

The fact that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is one of those movies is just one of many reasons why I love it. A movie this good that’s a sequel skirts the edges of astonishment. Would it be hyperbole to utter this film title in the same breath as The Empire Strikes Back? The Godfather Part II? Maybe. Time will tell. Right now, I am sorely tempted. I mean, I just did it.

I had been deeply impressed with this film’s predecessor, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse when it was released in 2018. It blew me away, and a film so skillfully nuanced, funny, entertaining and beautiful that was both a superhero movie and an animated feature almost defied belief. To say it exceeded expectations would be an understatement. What’s even more amazing is that there’s a strong argument to be made that Across the Spider-Verse is even better.

Its three-person writing team has only one in common with the first film (Phil Lord), and its three-person directing team is entirely new (including Soul co-director Kemp Powers). By definition, they still have to explore the endless possibilities of the wildly overused “multiverse” concept, but these animated films about it not only find almost shockingly clever angles with it, but actually improve with their own iterations. Somehow the convoluted plot mechanics actually make more sense this time around.

And they take their time with it: this movie is 140 minutes long—a record for an animated film—and it doesn’t even finish the story. I’m being careful not to spoil plot details here, but I do think it’s useful to know that the original title for this film was indeed officially Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse Part 1. Now they’ve dropped the Part 1 and the next installment will be called Beyond the Spider-Verse. It remains a part 1, though: with tons of story left to go, the film ends with a comic-book style caption: To Be Continued. It was an entertaining experience being in a theater full of people who did not already know to expect this. It was a unique combination of sounds that emitted out of the crowd.

And I cannot stress this enough: those minutes truly fly by. Like its predecessor, the animation is a sight to behold, that being the only consistency across different and distinct animation styles depending on the dimension we’re in. My favorite is the dimension the film opens in—after thrillingly rendered, animated title sequences that flip through dimension styles even through the many production company logos—which is the one home to “Spider-Gwen” (Hailey Steinfeld). The animation itself responds to characters’ emotional states, the colors of their environment flowing in waves away from them like water color paint.

Every style of animation is beautiful, though, an impressive feat given the many different, wildly differing styles, many of them clear visual references to literal comic book drawing and painting styles. This is the kind of literalization in adaptation that movies like this need, giving it a visual depth that augments the incisively written script. The spectacular action sequences are almost incidental, even as they serve the story rather than the other way around, and we become deeply emotionally invested in the relationships—particularly those between the title character, Miles Morales (Shameik Moore, reprising the role even though he’s aged five years whereas teenage Miles is only supposed to be a year older—Moore was in his twenties either way) and his parents (Luna Lauren Vélez and Brian Tyree Henry, both fantastic); also Gwen Stacey and her father (Shea Whigham, voicing a man beautifully drawn). And, of course, Miles and Gwen, whose romantic potential remains a question, whether or not they will be dimension-crossed lovers.

I even liked the villain better this time around, given the knowingly on-the-nose name of “The Spot,” and voiced by Jason Schwartzman. Due to an accident with an Alchemax collider, he’s been rendered a white body with black spots, all of which can be used as portals. The Spider-Verse films are never content with keeping things simple, though, and an alternate dimension Spider-Man from 2099 (Oscar Isaac) seem to exist in a gray area between heroism and villainy.

Across the Spider-Verse reportedly has settings in six different dimensions, but there are channel-surf-like movements through many more, most of which are delightful surprises that I won’t spoil. I simply have to mention my favorite, however, even though few others will care about it as much as I do: “Mumbattan,” which basically splices together Mumnai with Manhattan, and features an Indian Spider-Man named Pavitr Prabhakar (Karan Soni, previously featured in the Deadpool films). Once Miles, Gwen, Spider-Man 2099 and yet another dimensional badass Spider-Woman (Issa Rae) who has her own motorcycle enter the Mumbattan dimension, we are treated to an extended sequence with both fantastic action and a lot of very funny gags that should land well with South Asians. (This is some excellently integrated content for potential international audiences.)

There is an incredible number of characters in this film, apparently some 240 of them, a whole bunch of them in a spectacularly funny and entertaining action sequences featuring seemingly infinite versions of Spider-People (or in multiple cases, Spider-Animals). The humor and gags in this movie come at such an unusually fast and steady clip, I am eager to see it again just to see what I missed the first time around. And this is in the same movie that had me so deeply absorbed in its story and its characters that I actually got misty-eyed. It can be hard to trust any assertion that a movie has everything you could possibly want and more, but in this case, you can take that to the bank. The movie’s producers almost certainly will. This movie is a truly amazing specimen of cinematic craft.

There is simply nothing not to love about this movie.

Overall: A-