Charles Bramesco

This week’s most high-profile release is the big Power Rangers reboot (I’m sorry, that’s Haim Saban‘s Power Rangers, please nobody sue me) and the earliest round of reviews has begun to surface over the past few day or so. They are, to put it somewhat charitably, mixed. The early consensus is that the film squanders what could have been remake-ready material — a multiethnic group of telegenic teens working together to form a gigantic robot that battles evil aliens sounds like a pretty hard concept to foul up — with a generic and often painfully unfunny take.

Pixar’s 2016 was something of a mixed bag, having landed a true-blue blockbuster with Finding Dory but then missing out on the coveted Oscar nomination. They’ll get back in the saddle in 2017 with Coco, a vibrant fantasy about the power of music, family, and remembrance of those lost to us. In the film, a lonely young boy finds a link to the past through an enchanted stringed instrument and sets off on an incredible journey with an animal companion, encountering all manner of dreamlike wonders (along with a monster or two) on the way. It bears mentioning at this point that this film is, in fact, not Kubo and the Two Strings.

Life is full of crazy coincidences. But in Life, nothing is coincidental.

When the mind thinks of the densest, most sprawling narratives realized over the past couple of decades, the kaiju-influenced action show Power Rangers usually doesn’t pop up first. But a quick scan online would reveal that the series has run for a mind-boggling 837 episodes (and counting!) over the course of 24 seasons since 1993. The series has assumed many forms since then, rebooting itself as a show about ninjas (Power Rangers Ninja Storm), samurai (Power Rangers Super Samurai) and dinosaur-themed warriors (Power Rangers Dino Thunder, Power Rangers Dino Charge, and Power Rangers Dino Super Charge — kids love their dinios). It is, by anybody’s measure, a lot of television.

Keeping the series of films featuring or tangentially related to the X-Men straight has become a task on par with reading Bleak House. The original three films from the 2000s were their own thing, at first independent of the rebooted X-Men: First Class set in the past. But they were then woven into the “present” with Days of Future Past and Apocalypse, which happen to be set in both timelines and physical dimensions. All this operates separately from Logan and Wolverine’s other solo films, and while Deadpool technically is set in the main universe, it can’t really bring in any of the major pre-existing characters due to intellectual property complications, so it might as well be an isolated entity as well. It’s a lot to keep track of, to put it mildly.

It would appear that the likes of Deadpool and Logan, what with all their foul words and visible bloodletting and brief pegging interludes, have changed the game of superhero movies. It was once basic showbiz logic that a massively-budgeted capes-and-tights flick couldn‘t afford to go for the R rating and lose the portion of the audience that’d restrict. More minor one-off projects like Watchmen, Kick-Ass, and Kingsman could take that risk and repeatedly found that it paid off, but now mainstream heroes have adopted this more daring approach and met with attractive box-office receipts. And in keeping with their tried-and-true business strategy of doing everything Marvel does, but a year later, DC Films has no stated their intention to get into more mature material.

A new Batman vehicle demands, in a more literal sense, a new Batman vehicle. As Ben Affleck prepares to don the cape and cowl once more to reprise the role of Bruce Wayne in Zack Snyder’s upcoming Justice League movie, modifications have also been made to his singular whip, the teched-out Batmobile. Snyder applied his bigger-is-better filmmaking ethic to the Batmobile in last year‘s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, diverging from Christopher Nolan’s utilitarian, industrial look towards something a little more tanklike. And today, Snyder’s taken to his favored social media channel of Vero to offer fans an advance look at what the latest edition of the Batmobile has to offer.

Zack Snyder made a lot of enemies with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but critical dressing-down and scattered fan backlash won’t stop him. To quote esteemed post-structural thinker Missy ‘Misdemeanor’ Elliott: to those of you who hated, you only made Zack Snyder more creative. The director has redoubled his efforts as he continues work on the post-production process for the Justice League movie due November 17. They wrapped shooting back in October, so all that’s left is the time-consuming and often tedious process of digitally piecing the film together in the editing suite. But ever the barker for his corner of the D.C. universe, Snyder has offered his many supporters a glimpse into the in-progress cut that he’s toying with at present.

How do you say “psych!” in Japanese? Master animator and Studio Ghibli cofounder Hayao Miyazaki dun got us again, totally convincing us that he was really retiring this time by saying things like “I am done making movies” and “This time is for real.” We believed him like a bunch of fools when he announced a “semi-retirement” following the completion of Princess Mononoke, we believed him when he said he wanted to call it quits after Spirited Away, and we believed him back in 2013, when he declared The Wind Rises to be his final feature. The Boy Who Cried Not Making Any More Movies has pulled the same trick on us all again, with the news that he’ll un-retire one more time for a new feature called Boro the Caterpillar.

What with social cliques, homework, and hormones, high school is tough enough already. Add to that a massive natural disaster, and it’s a different sort of catastrophe entirely. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea is both exactly what it sounds like and much more than that, an animated riff on the likes of San Andreas that adds an eccentric sense of humor to the genre. The newly unveiled trailer offers a sample of the thrills (jumping across shark-infested waters!) and the laughs (the bookcase-amputation joke is aces) to be had in this odd little festival favorite.