My Own Little World

I was going to write this review a few days earlier than I did. I saw Spider-Man: Homecoming  last Tuesday, and afterwards I left the theater feeling slightly underwhelmed. I knew what I had just seen was good, but I was most definitely not wowed by what I saw. To be honest, I am not the biggest fan of Spider-Man in the first place, and I have never thoroughly enjoyed a film starring the character. It has nothing to do with cinematic quality but entirely with tone. The Raimi trilogy often felt too campy, while the Andrew Garfield films felt like they veered too much into conventional comic book film territory. Homecoming  definitely felt more in my wheelhouse than any prior Spider-Man film, but I still didn't love it. Two days later, I was watching the trailers prior to Dunkirk , Christopher Nolan's latest film (which I'll have a review of very soon), and suddenly something clicked. Spider-Man: Homecoming  is actually really, really, really good.  This might be...

There's something to be said for the art of the twist ending. A really good plot twist towards the end of a film, no matter the genre, can make repeat viewings incredibly insightful and very rewarding which in my mind makes a film more valuable. I personally love plot twists in the course of watching a film for the first time and how they often make me look for the trail of breadcrumbs filmmakers leave throughout their work. One of the films most renowned for its twist in modern times is M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense . When this came out in 1999, everybody ate it up (at least from what the box office numbers show). It catapulted Shyamalan to the front page of filmmaking, and for good reason. This is a really well-constructed supernaturally-driven drama with some horror elements. Here's the secret to this film, though, and why the twist works so well: The Sixth Sense  has a really keen understanding of what it is as a film. It realizes that its content does ...