Film Review - IF (2024)

IF stands for Imaginary Friends and is written and directed by John Krasinski and he also stars in it as a young father needing heart surgery which his young daughter (Cailey Fleming) is sad about as she has already lost her mother to illness beforehand, one day while living in her grandmother’s apartment (Fiona Shaw) she meets a neighbour named Cal (Ryan Reynolds) who runs a matching service for abandoned imaginary friends.

IF is a lot of fun and I had a big smile on my face, it made me emotional in places and it made me laugh on occasion while also thinking that Krasinski has delivered another winning film as writer and director (his 2 previous films were the first 2 A Quiet Place films which I also really liked) and along with Wonka from late last year is a good example of what family entertainment can be like for children and grown ups.

And Krasinski manages to balance the pathos and the lightness very well, the lighter moments are full of joy and good humour (I particularly like Steve Carrell as Blue, a big Grimace like imaginary friend) and the more mournful moments are handled with sincerity and touches of sadness that tugged at my heartstrings effectively enough.

The film’s Imaginary Friends are also a lot of fun to watch, there’s a slime creature, a unicorn, a marshmallow man and even a superhero bear amongst others and they feel creative and imaginative in their scenes and one touching one for me was an old teddy bear named Louie voiced by the late great Louis Gossett Jr and sadly he didn’t live to see this movie as he passed away earlier this year and it is a sad loss.

As for Ryan Reynolds I thought he was okay but for a lot of the film he acted like a bit of a grump and after a while I started getting a bit sick of it as Ryan is at his best when he’s either playing the smart ass like he does in the Deadpool movies or when he’s radiating good natured comedy that makes you smile and that isn’t really here for the most part and it hurts the movie to a certain extent.

And so that was IF and I really liked this movie, Krasinski delivers another winner and I hope families will go and give it a look but with Garfield, Inside Out 2 and Despicable Me 4 coming up I suspect many will save their movie going money for either of those films, 4 out of 5.

Film Review - Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is the newest entry in the series and is directed by Wes Ball who you may remember from such films as the Maze Runner series, many generations have passed since the death of Caesar (Andy Serkis) at the end of 2017’s War for the Planet of the Apes and Apes now rule the Earth with humanity regressing to a primitive state but a young Ape named Noa (Owen Teague) must travel beyond his village home when his clan is captured in a raid and what he finds will open his eyes to the world beyond.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes was a movie that when I was watching it I was really enjoying it but the more I’ve sat with it it has faded for me a little bit, now this isn’t to say it’s a bad movie because it isn’t, it was just another film that I liked and then that was it for me.

Firstly the Visual Effects work here is remarkable, the way the performance capture work and the locations blend together is near seamless, I saw an interview with Wes Ball a while back where he talked about one of his big influences on this movie being the Avatar series from James Cameron and that influence shows here as you really believe the world of the film your in.

And the other part of this is what I call the scale framing, the way the 2.35:1 aspect ratio is used here to frame the locations is terrific as they are framed in the film in a way that makes you believe that the characters are looking at the locations the way you yourself might look at them with the human eye like how you view a great vista from on high or a sunset or how you look up at a building or a clifface or forest of trees, scale framing is very important and most movies don’t put a lot of effort into it being memorable but this movie does.

This movie also has some good performances in it as well, Owen Teague is good as Noa and he holds your attention well for the screen time he has, Peter Macon is also very good as Raka one of the few to really remember Caesar’s teachings from the 2010’s trilogy of Apes films while Kevin Durand is a good villain in Proximus the leader of the masked clan who want to be the dominant Ape tribe.

But this movie is also too long for me, the film runs for 140 minutes but it felt like a long 2 and a half hours and because of that I also felt that the storytelling felt a little stretched and had the film been around the 110 to 120 minute mark I think it would’ve been a much better film with a tighter pace to make its storytelling feel punchier and more focused.

And so that was the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes and it’s a solid entry that doesn’t match the 1968 original or even the 2010’s trilogy but it won’t make a monkey out of you, 3 out of 5.