After reigning at the box office for nearly three months thanks to Spider-Man: No Way Home and Uncharted, Tom Holland encountered a foe that even he couldn’t beat on March 4: Batman. Warner Bros. unleashed the latest iteration of one of its most valuable characters with Matt Reeves’ The Batman. In a rare move, no rival studio launched a wide-release movie that weekend or the next, with all of Hollywood anticipating (and hoping) the Dark Knight can pump as much cash into the industry as his Marvel counterpart did in December. So far, The Batman has made over a half-billion at the box office, so the industry once again appears to be on the road to recovery.
This weekend, there are other movies being released in theaters that target different audiences. Sandra Bullock teams with Channing Tatum in a 21st-century update of Romancing the Stone, and Michelle Yeoh kicks butt in multiple realities. It’s all part of an ongoing process that Hollywood hopes will get the box office back to where it was before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Lost City
Most positive review: “This isn’t a perfect film, but hopefully those involved with making The Lost City … have nothing to be embarrassed about. This movie will make an awful lot of people happy.” — Liz Shannon Miller, Consequence
Average review: “The Lost City is breezy, silly, possibly quickly forgettable — but if you need to lose yourself for an hour or two, it could be just the thing.” — Stephanie Zacharek, Time
Most negative review: “The Lost City is a big mess — a big enough mess that it doesn’t even get credit for knowing it’s a mess — but it stars Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, so that helps. It doesn’t make it worth seeing, but it keeps the experience outside the realm of pain.” — Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle
Consensus: Formulaic and a tad derivative, The Lost City is nonetheless a well-executed piece of escapism buoyed by the charm of its two leads and an amusing cameo by Brad Pitt.
Everything Everywhere All At Once
Most positive review: “Is it perfect? Maybe it goes on too long. Maybe it drags in places, or spins too frantically in others. But I like my multiverses messy, and if I say that Everything Everywhere All at Once is too much, it’s a way of acknowledging the Daniels’ generosity. — A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Average review: “Is Everything Everywhere All At Once a marvel? Or is it, as Joy says at a less-than-critical point, “a statical inevitability, it’s nothing special?” It’s a film that gleefully, hilariously subverts expectations at every corner, borrowing à la music videos from pop culture, experimental film, and any corner of the universe it finds inspiration in.” — John Fink, The Film Stage
Most negative review: “With its bland and faux-universal life lessons that cheaply ethicalize expensive sensationalism, the film comes off as a sickly cynical feature-length directorial pitch reel for a Marvel movie.” — Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Digital Trends review: “The biggest compliment that can be paid to Everything Everywhere All at Once is that, while it is inarguably one of the grandest and most ambitious original sci-fi movies of the past decade, it never loses sight of the characters at the center of it.” — Alex Welch
Consensus: Everything Everywhere All at Once is a rarity: A truly original film that experiments with conventional narrative and provides a rare English-language leading role to one of the world most famous stars, Michelle Yeoh.
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