owen-watts

Actually... not great. Seeing it centuries after the hype has died down allows you to see it in context. Really the airport centrepiece carries the whole film and a lot of the rest of it is perfunctory, really silly and now largely overshadowed by all that comes after. Much like the far ropier Secret Invasion, this kind of watered down MCU version of the comic event Civil War is really foolish and makes Cap (who feels like a guest in his own film) look legitimately really stupid. Bucky, as always, remains rather undercooked and a lot of the supporting cast don't get room to breathe. At the time this must have been quite a spectacle but now it feels a bit of a slog.

A huge and startling set of extremely gorgeous things concentrating within the gigantic expanse of land that is deemed to be Asia. There's an interesting narrative turn here away from broad environmental fretting to focussing on individual success stories which feels like a choice but it still has the dark tangents usually present in BBC studio nature documentaries which prevents it from feeling like a piece of careful marketing. The stirringly bizarre visages of the Tibetan fox and the purple frog is always a welcome sight, and some of the big cat footage here, especially in the singular landscape of Iraqi Kurdistan is jaw-dropping.

Not quite all there and about ten years out of date, but I'm a sucker for the workplace "building anxiety" comedies ever since the heady days of the Thick of It. The ensemble cast are tremendously good and it's great to see folk like Made for Love's Billy Magnussen butt heads with evergreen britfolk like Justin Edwards. It bristles with great one-liners and features some really strong and angry takes but perhaps is a bit too industry-focussed for some. Whether hanging the whole thing on Himesh Patel's jaded and disaffected Daniel wasn't the right angle and the strong end-credits interviews made me wonder how this would have fared in more of a classical mockumentary style. Much like Avenue 5 it's sadly landed as more of an Armando curio than a vital project in the satire canon.