film.Antrikshy

Micro Review: "Wicked: Part I" (2024)

2026-05-19T00:00:00+00:00

This is a cleverly crafted screenplay that could have simply dropped the “Part I” in its title and the “to be continued” at the end, if Universal had decided it wasn’t good enough to greenlight a sequel. Without its sequel (which I haven’t seen yet), Wicked: Part I starts with a question - “why do some people turn out wicked?” It does a more-than-adequate job of answering that in the form of a self-contained origin story of a well-known antagonist.

This film embodies all 85 years of filmmaking advancements, changing sensibilities, and evolving the grammar of visual storytelling since The Wizard of Oz (1939). Much like watching Tron before Tron: Legacy, I recommend watching the original before this. It’s worth it.

7/10 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

Micro Review: "Mercy" (2026)

2026-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

The story and the idea behind it are so good, but the screenplay falls apart so quickly.

I couldn’t help but think how this movie should have been a game. An interactive experience with an 8+ hour timer and a bunch of explorable menus would have done this concept justice. Makes me wonder if someone could write a custom storyline as a Hacknet Extension using the “prove your innocence” idea.

5/10 ★★★★★☆☆☆☆☆

Micro Review: "Predator: Badlands" (2025)

2026-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

During the marketing and release cycle of this movie, I didn’t have high hopes. A Predator movie with a non-English-speaking alien as the protagonist? I had doubts.

It’s a small story that takes place over a short period of time. And in this little tale, every detail is perfect. There are loads of set-ups and payoffs. Multiple characters’ arcs are surprisingly poignant. One of them is of a species that have so far been portrayed as cold, not-so-relatable killing machines.

The inclusion of Wayland-Yutani was icing on the cake.

Dan Trachtenberg is leading a Renaissance era for this franchise.

9/10 ★★★★★★★★★☆

Micro Review: "Seven Samurai" (1954), "The Magnificent Seven" (1960)

2026-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

This is a first in my new series, Micro Reviews. I won’t review every film I watch; that would get tedious and make movies un-fun quick. However, the occasional movie comes along that provokes enough thought to justify jotting down a few of them. See all my micro reviews here.

I’ve been thinking of doing this for a while. Why not start with the 2,000th movie that I recently rated on IMDb? I have bonus thoughts on the American remake from 6 years later. Double-feature micro reviews will be uncommon, I think, but let’s bend the rules this one time.

It’s very, very hard to judge and rate a movie that was not only released 72 years ago, but also with the backdrop of a place, culture and sensibilities that I’m unfamiliar with. I appreciate Seven Samurai (1954) for a lot. There are memorable characters with distinct personalities (Kikuchiyo!). There is notable clarity in visual storytelling, such as tracking the number of downed enemies, even if some action moments were harder to follow. While the journey was interesting, the ending lacked a kind of punch that I was hoping for.

I would recommend this movie to people intrigued by film history, but not widely.

7/10 ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

The Magnificent Seven (1960) is a faithful adaptation that’s more palatable to my sensibilities. Props for not making it a scene-by-scene remake and for remixing characters and dynamics instead. It didn’t hold my attention fully, but I liked it as a product of its time. Ultimately, I think it will end up less memorable to me than the original.

6/10 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

Two Thousand Movies

2026-01-26T00:00:00+00:00

I started this blog over five years ago. In the introductory post, I decided to record five movies around my 1,000th movie rated on IMDb.

I’ve been rating movies since around the age of 16, which was when I first started using IMDb ratings for reference. So, this only counts movies I’ve watched and rewatched since then.

Years later, I just hit 2,000 and figured I should immortalize the five titles leading up to this for no reason.

Film 1995: Bring Her Back
Film 1996: The Surfer
Film 1997: The Rip
Film 1998: Infernal Affairs
Film 1999: Decision to Leave
Film 2000: Seven Samurai

Only feature films are included in the count, and there is always a minuscule chance I forget to rate something.

Everything Looks Good Enough (Or "The Limits of Fidelity")

2025-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Since the ~~beginning of time~~ invention of video, humanity has thirsted for realism. For recorded video, this usually means higher resolution, richer colors, broader dynamic range, and perhaps higher framerates. For video games, this meant higher polygon count in models, higher fidelity shadows, detailed reflections, realistic skin and hair.

With decades of work put into so many disciplines - various display technologies, 3D rendering, visual effects, simulation engines, game design - I believe that we’re finally nearing the limits of fidelity, or at least the end of incessant thirst for it.

Game Studios, More Story Expansions Please!

2024-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

Big budget, “eye candy” singleplayer games have hit a point in improved fidelity and quality of gameplay where, for many of them, it may be time to double down on expansions over sequels.

Off-Screen Stories

2024-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

I recently watched the first season of an extremely popular HBO show, but I didn’t enjoy it very much. It’s not the first time this has happened. This made me notice a dimension of visual storytelling that I’ve never considered before.

I think we can put stories into two buckets:

Stories that take place mostly on-screen.
Stories told mostly in dialogue, so they mainly take place in the audience’s head.

It’s probably more of a gradient if we really think about it, but hear me out.

2023 MCU Rewatch Diary - Phase Three

2023-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

Of the MCU’s first three Phases, the third one is not only the longest, but also the most ambitious by far.

Arguably, it’s more ambitious than Phases Four and Five. I say it’s arguable for a very specific reason. David Gauthier of the They’re Just Movies podcast once pointed out that the MCU doesn’t just make more movies per Phase; they push the boundaries of genre and style in their movies in each successive Phase. This forever changed how I view the MCU, because he was 100% right. Think about Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy in Phase Two. Unfortunately, I don’t remember which of their MCU episodes they discussed this in. If I come across it again, I’ll link it here with a timestamp.

Anyway, this would imply that Phases Four and Five must be more experimental and ambitious. I can see arguments on both sides.

Marvel Studios are now making more and more streaming-exclusive content that is gradually weaving in and out of their feature films. They’re expanding their genres, tone, and casting beyond anything we’ve seen thus far. They’re leaning into the style of storytelling that radiates outwards from tentpole content, in every direction. Think teamups leading to spinoffs with narrower appeal, such as Avengers: Endgame to Loki. We’ve seen this type of storytelling before - not in mainstream cinema - but in comics. They don’t seem to be worried about alienating an audience they held captive, one that cared about every single new release. In exchange, they are trying to garner a more diverse audience with relatively niche interests. Compare: She-Hulk, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Ms Marvel, Moon Knight.

On the other hand, Phase Three’s sheer ambition and scale completely eclipses Phases One and Two by a huge margin. Building up a 10 year cinematic universe to such an incredible climax, actually pulling it off with broad cultural impact, the first time, makes it particularly commendable. I still see critic reviews and Reddit comments alike compare new MCU releases with Infinity War and Endgame, so many years after they released. In a way, the ambition and sheer success of Phase Three’s climax may have set the bar way too high for Marvel Studios themselves to compete with.

2023 MCU Rewatch Diary - Phase Two

2023-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

Some of Phase Two deals with the fallout of The Avengers. Obviously due to budget reasons, there’s a focus on solo adventures once again, but with plenty of references implying the Avengers’ existence off-screen.

Popular opinion seems to be that Phases Four and Five (ongoing at the time of this writing) feel directionless. If you ask me, this isn’t new. Phase Two has solo adventures tugging at the shared story in all directions. Minor tone and character motivation inconsistencies creep in and start wearing down the verisimilitude of the universe (more on this later).

However, I’ll concede that the tight focus on a small, core set of characters makes the chaos feel much more purposeful than the broad focus on new character introductions in Phases Four and Five.

2023 MCU Rewatch Diary - Phase One

2023-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

Phase One turned out a lot more enjoyable than I expected, viewing from a post-Endgame, 2020s lens.

These are genuinely fun movies, with some solid writing, and a lot more interconnections than early-to-mid-teens-unaware-of-the-MCU-me could have possibly noticed. I guess Marvel Studios were pretty confident, pretty early on, and started sowing the seeds for an interconnected universe right from the first couple of movies.

2023 MCU Rewatch Diary - Introduction

2023-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

This is the first in a series of posts documenting my first rewatch of Marvel Cinematic Universe movies, Phases One to Three; starting at Iron Man (2008) and ending at Avengers: Endgame (2019).

I’ve been watching them since way back, but I only recognized Marvel Studios’ long-term aspirations around 2013. That’s when I started following the series in earnest. I’m usually not one to rewatch stuff, so I haven’t watched most of these titles more than once. For many of them, the initial theater experience is the only memory I have.

Analyzing A Decade's Worth Of My Movie Ratings

2022-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

As we have established, I have rated over a thousand movies on IMDb thus far. At the time of this writing, it’s a treasure trove of data over a decade in the making. I’ve had many ideas to find interesting patterns in it.

I decided to poke and prod at an exported copy. IMDb’s CSV export includes basic data about each title - the IMDb user rating, release date etc. To get the real juicy info, I had to cross-reference it with full IMDb datasets. I finally had an excuse to put my Rackfocus project to good use. It’s a little Python command line utility (install using pip install rackfocus) to pull freely available IMDb datasets and organize them into convenient SQLite tables.

Here are some interesting finds from my own ratings. If you too have a trove of ratings on IMDb and want to run these (and more) analyses yourself, skip to the end for instructions.

On Thor's Lifespan

2021-02-26T00:00:00+00:00

As the Marvel Cinematic Universe chugs along building an increasingly complex story comprising of episodic movies and dozens of seasons’ worth of TV series, I often find myself nitpicking some of the littler details in the franchise. This is a big compliment, by the way. The fact that the fandom, including myself, frequently discusses these things goes to say how air tight (though not 100%) and entertaining the continuity has been so far.

One of those nitpicks has to do with the way characters with very long lifespans are portrayed in the MCU, and generally in fiction.

Alien: Isolation - Distant Sequel Perfection

2020-12-03T00:00:00+00:00

Earlier this year, I played through Alien: Isolation, a very well regarded horror game set in the universe originally created for the Alien film franchise. Horror isn’t my favorite genre, so I had mixed feelings about the experience as I was playing through it. Looking back, I have some very good things to say about it, but in a different context.

Important context: I played this game on the second-hardest difficulty level. I get the feeling that difficulty levels in Alien: Isolation change the gameplay experience quite a bit.

This post is spoiler-free.

The Complex Nature Of Film Ratings

2020-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Movie ratings are complicated.

Is The Shawshank Redemption better than Inception? At the time of writing, that’s what their respective IMDb user ratings suggest. The former ranks #1 on IMDb’s top film charts (and has been for years), while the latter is a bit lower down, but squarely in the top 20.

How exactly does Crazy, Stupid, Love compare? Is it wrong to enjoy or appreciate the three in a different ranking?

Can movies be objectively good or bad, or better and worse than each other?

Introducing Antriksh's (Film) Blog

2020-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

In the last 8 or so years, I have watched and rated at least 1001 films* on IMDb. This covers all my movie-viewing experience to date since about the age of 16, maybe 17. In this time, the thought of writing down movie reviews, perhaps loose thoughts… something, has crossed my mind more than once. Usually, my internal counter argument was that it was too late to start now, that it would always feel somehow incomplete not having a written record of all these years.

Oh well. Hindsight is 20/20. I have grown to enjoy writing more than I ever have, over the last couple of years. And I figured 1001-movies-rated milestone was as good a time as any to embark on this journey.

My other concern was all this becoming a chore. That’s still a concern, honestly. And I’ll need to plan around it. I’ll try my best to pick and choose topics that don’t force me into a schedule, and I should be fine.

I’m getting into this without a solid plan. But at the moment, I feel confident about two things:

This will be a collection of essays.
Proper movie reviews will likely be uncommon.

At the time of this writing, I have genuinely just finished watching (and rating) 1001 movie titles on IMDb, but because I am unsure how far this will go, I am unlikely to publish this until I have at least one or two essays ready to go.

Just to etch this in stone somewhere:

Film 997: Frozen II
Film 998: Onward
Film 999: Toy Story 4
Film 1000: 2001: A Space Odyssey
Film 1001: Hamilton

* Feature films. Except any I may have genuinely forgotten to rate, but there are likely only a handful of those.