Monthly Archives: May 2022

Emily St. John Mandels third novel Sea of Tranquility is expansive and complex, sweeping through huge swathes of time and space from the Canadian wilderness in 1912 to moon colonies in 2401 as it explores art, human morality and disease. While earlier sections of the novel excel, I was ultimately disappointed by its worldbuilding and character arcs. Nevertheless, Sea of Tranquility poses intriguing questions about human nature and the meaning of life over which I found myself ruminating long after finishing the book.

Sea of Tranquility is a novel composed of multiple overlapping storylines, marked by four distinct time periods. In 1912, Edwin St. Andrew travels from Britain to Canada, where he lives in exile. In 2020, a woman named Mirella learns of the death of her estranged friend Vincent. In 2203, a novelist named Olive Llewellyn travels from the moon colonies to Earth on a book tour to promote her newly released novel amid a devastating pandemic. In 2401, detective Gaspery Roberts investigates a mysterious anomaly in a Canadian forest that features in the previous three timelines; this anomaly, when witnessed, allows one to momentarily travel through time. Throughout the novel, Gaspery time travels to the past to interview and observe characters from the previous three time periods.

The first section of Sea of Tranquility is undeniably the highlight of the novel. Mandels quiet, understated prose excels at capturing the quiet wilderness in which Edwin finds himself. In contrast, later sections of the novel falter; Mandels description of a futuristic world of moon colonies and holograms is ungrounded and vague. The novel seems needlessly complex in its worldbuilding; it is spread too thin over its timelines and characters.

The characters of Sea of Tranquility also seem vaguely defined, perhaps due to the novels large cast size. At times, Mandel seems to gesture towards character complexity, but stops short of actually realizing it. For example, early on in the book, Edwin meets two Indigenous women while on a walk, and has the impulse to assert his opposition to colonization, perhaps out of a sense of guilt. However, he decides to say nothing, the moment passes, and this internal conflict is never explored further.

In another example, Gaspery and his sister Zoey are said to have an emotionally distant relationship; Zoey, in Gasperys mind, is elusive and mysterious. It is only at the end of the novel that Gaspery realizes the full extent of his sisters loneliness and comes to the conclusion that he is her only person. Mandel seems to use these brief scenes to methodically prove that these characters are worthy of sympathy. However, the sparsity of these moments, in conjunction with their failure to access the complexity of these characters, renders them unconvincing. Mandels characters ultimately lie somewhere between fully fleshed-out people and archetypes: they are given just enough interiority to pass as adequately sympathetic characters, but cant be considered to have any real depth.

I wondered whether the novel could have benefited from a smaller cast of characters with further exploration of each. Many of these characters, when taken together, are strangely cohesive they face similar moral dilemmas and obstacles in life almost to the point of redundancy. For instance, pandemics feature prominently across all timelines: Edwin dies from the 1918 flu pandemic, Mirella experiences the COVID-19 pandemic and Olive dies from a futuristic disease in the twenty-third century.

Mandel seems rather self-aware of the abundance of pandemics in her novel. So Im guessing Im not the first to ask you what its like to be the author of a pandemic novel during a pandemic, a journalist, at one point, asks Olive during her book tour.

The book also plays with thematic ties through art. In the twenty-first century, a musician composes a piece based on the anomaly that his sister once saw in a forest. Centuries later, Olive writes a novel that describes a character who listens to that piece in an airship terminal and finds herself transported back to a forest in Canada. In this way, the novel is incredibly recursive: it is very aware of its own form as a book.

Through these intersecting timelines, Mandel raises interesting conundrums about time travel and the value of human life. Zoey warns Gaspery not to attempt to save the lives of the people of the past, in fear that it will compromise the future; she proclaims that the job requires an almost inhuman level of detachment. Additionally, multiple characters throughout the novel grapple with the possibility that they are living in a simulation. Gaspery refers to the anomaly as a corrupted file, and he ponders the possibility that the world as he knows it is not truly real. This worry is compounded by the fact that, in the books futuristic timelines, very little of the characters lives, as they see them, are truly real. The humans who inhabit moon colonies live under an artificial sky that is meant to resemble that of the Earth. To communicate across space, characters utilize holograms that give only the appearance of a face-to-face meeting. On a more abstract level, the characters arent unfounded in their worry; they are, after all, living in a simulation called a novel.

Ultimately, I found the easy resolutions that the novel poses to these conundrums unconvincing. Gaspery, seemingly without any difficulty at all, resolves to save the people of the past from their fates. He warns Olive to cancel her book tour so that she can avoid contracting a disease that would have resulted in her death. Later on, he warns Edwin not to tell anyone about the anomaly that he experienced in Canada to prevent him from getting committed to an asylum. In the final years of his life, Gaspery comes to the conclusion that whether or not he is living in a simulation simply does not matter, as a life lived in a simulation is still a life. Such a conclusion, to me, cheapens the premise of the questions that this novel raises.

Sea of Tranquility is certainly an ambitious novel that, through futuristic worldbuilding, raises interesting questions about human nature and the significance of a single human life. However, I found Mandels attempts to address these questions to be lackluster and overly simplistic. Im left unconvinced, ultimately, of whether this novel needs or deserves a neat, easy resolution at all.

Editors Note: This article is a review and includes subjective opinions, thoughts and critiques.

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Emily St. John Mandel's 'Sea of Tranquility' is an overly simplistic exploration of Nihilism - The Stanford Daily

So, the Mariners suck right now.

Thats a shame.

Its a shame because this was supposed to be The Year, right? Thats what all the marketing said, thats what Dipoto said, thats what the players said, and so far, its just not been the year. Getting swept in four games by the Red Sox is just the latest of a long list of struggles the Mariners have endured in this young season.

For those of us aboard this rendition of the S. S. Mariner, it can feel like weve fallen overboard and are now getting keelhauled. It hasnt been easy for any of us here at Lookout Landing, both as fans and writers. It has only been a little over a month since the season started, but it has felt like decades. As we deal with the turmoil of resetting our emotions and expectations for the rest of this season, we are forced to yet again recognize a simple fact: baseball does not care.

As I am relatively new, both to this site and to this sport, I dont want to tell any lifelong fan what to think, but here, so far, is what I have discovered. Baseball, as an entity, sport, and idea, simply does not care about anyone: not the players, not the owners, and certainly not the fans.

Baseball is neither cruel or callous, nor is it benevolent and welcoming. It marches inexorably on, whether we want it to or not. Baseball gives us romantic, storybook moments. It also gives us months-long periods of misery and dread. As a sport, it operates on interminable suspense.

The long stretches of time between pitches serves only to give us time to be worried, to stress. The long season only gives us time to break down and to lash out. We hurt each other, and make our spaces feel small and unwelcoming. Baseball moves slow, with only brief, eclectic moments of chaos.

Baseball is less of a sport, and more of a force of nature. It is arbitrary. Good players can become bad, bad players can become great, and all seemingly without reason. And thats fine. Nothing in the world is under any obligation to make sense. And really, if baseball did make sense, if it was predictable, it would be worse. Isnt part of the reason we love it for its unpredictability, which allows for magical, transcendent moments? But we also yearn for normalcy, and in the face of this, we grasp for excuses, or to find a narrative.

But, instead, I think that we should embrace this inherent randomness and chaos to baseball. Blaseball, the cultural phenomenon, created something artistic and beautiful by recognizing the nature of baseball, embracing it, and then turning it over to the community. As a result, Blaseball has become one of the most welcoming and inclusive communities I have ever seen on the internet. If youd like to join the Blaseball community in preparation of the game returning later this year, I highly recommend joining the Blaseball Discord server here, and reading this recap I wrote back during Spring Training as a bit of a primer.

We should do the same thing. So the Mariners suck right now. So what? Has greatness and simple success ever really, truly, been the thing that mattered? I dont think so. If winning is what gives a team worth, then throughout most of their history, the Mariners have been worthless. Say that to someone in SoDo, however, and they will laugh in your face. Clearly the Mariners mean something, to folks in Seattle and beyond. Why have over 2.3 million people, myself included, been so captivated by a 3 hour and 40 minute documentary about their history? It cant just be triumph. The Mariners have never achieved a complete victory. The Seattle Mariners challenge us to look beyond that concept. They ask us to consider that baseball isnt really about winning and losing. Instead, it's actually about community.

My favorite thing about Seattle fans is their passion. Living in Texas, I get Astros and Rangers games on network TV, and while those fans care about their teams, they cannot muster up the passion that Seattle fans can. Our own John Trupin wrote earlier this season about how Mariners fans can turn an empty, cold Wednesday night in April into a collective experience of joy and bonding.

This road trip has been miserable, I know, but we need to move beyond misery. If we attach our mental wellbeing to the success of the Mariners, we are only asking to get burned. Instead, we should embrace each other, and our collective love for a game that does not love us back.

I think nihilism gets a bad rap. People like to portray it as edgy teens saying that nothing matters as an excuse to skip their classes. But really, it is about about freedom. In a world where nothing has a natural, intrinsic meaning, we are left to assign our own, personal, more significant meanings to things. Baseball is a silly game where men in dress shirts, pants, and belts try to hit a ball with a stick. But on a very real level, thats not what it is. Baseball does have a meaning. And the beautiful thing is, that meaning is completely unique to each of us. Baseball means 100 different things to 100 different people, and that should fill you with joy. Baseball fandom has infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

Baseball gives us an opportunity. The fact that it does not care about us may seem frightening and disconcerting, but it is actually freeing. Baseball asks very little of us. We can approach it however we want. Analyze it through whatever lens we want. Baseball lets us talk about the real world through it. The fact that there is just one woman playing professional baseball in America, the fact that in 2020 the As and Giants played a game illuminated by the fires of climate change, the fact that minor leaguers struggle to be able to afford a life playing the game they love.

Baseball reflects the real world, in all its splendor and misery. Yet it does not discriminate, and does not exclude. My main issue with a nothing matters philosophy is that some things do matter: each other. We all matter. We are all unique and vibrant people, who all have come to this sport in our own way. We arrived separately, but we remain together.

So. Be kind to one another. Amplify each other. In world rife with inequity, following a sport that does not care about us, and supporting a team to whom winning seems immaterial, our community and bond with one another is all we have.

Link:

On Baseball and Nihilism - Lookout Landing

Neta Bar is a business administration sophomore and opinion columnist for Mustang News. Her views reflected in this piece dont necessarily reflect those of Mustang News.

With Everything Everywhere All at Once, the studio A24 has proven that they have their finger on the pulse of the world today and they have expanded its target audience while simultaneously zeroing in on the stories that will indulge the unique needs of these fresh eyes. In other words, this film has something for everyone, without sacrificing the storytelling integrity that A24 exhibits without fail.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is a multifaceted film, with layers ranging from existential philosophical commentary to Pixar-esque wholehearted comfort. Like a choose your own adventure, the audience is given all they could possibly ask for the viewer just has to choose which theme they will take away.

Everything Everywhere All at Once is stylistically individualistic and thematically distinct. However, it would be remiss not to acknowledge the cinematic parallels found both in the plot and in the delivery. We see an experimental take at philosophical commentary as the film grapples with existentialist themes and the teetering line between nihilism and absurdism. In this way, one could compare Everything Everywhere All at Once to a healthy fusion of the feel-good optimism of Pixars Soul and the harrowing experience that is Charlie Kaufmans Synecdoche, New York. That is to say, this movie is one of optimistic nihilism, with the simple yet poignant bottom line: nothing matters, everything matters.

And with that, the aforementioned choose your own adventure comes into play. One movie-goer could walk away from the film with a takeaway of disheartening pessimism, that happiness can only be fleeting and each of us are extraordinarily small and powerless in the face of the nature of the world. However, another could leave this cinematic experience a more hopeful person than when they entered it. Perhaps joy is hard to come by, but it is everything and it is everywhere.

The climax of the film highlights exactly that. As Evelyn deescalates the violent mob by fighting fire with a fire extinguisher connecting each individual with their respective pleasure the film visually demonstrates how no joy is too outlandish nor too mundane. The blind rage that the mob exudes evidently stems from a place of not just sadness, but confusion. A feeling of such utter lostness occurs and without a way to cope, so we turn to the suit of armor that is apathy, isolation and, most effective of all, anger.

The choose your own adventure hits another fork in the road as the film extends the opportunity for the theme of depression, if the viewer so chooses to interpret it that way. Everything Everywhere All at Once hits the closest to home at this point, particularly when Joy attempts to make her mother understand the incurable hopelessness and pain that she endures at nearly every moment of the day. She is desperate for someone to not fix or take it away, but at the very least, to understand. She wants someone to share the darkness, comically personified by the Everything Bagel, that plagues all facets of her life, no matter if theyre good or bad.

The film is earnest in this depiction of depression while successfully steering clear of being clich. Instead, there is a visceral feeling of understanding and sorrowful comfort, one that was desperately needed by countless moviegoers.

This film graciously allows the viewer freedom of choice. Not so much in the sense of cinematic interpretation, as each theme can be fairly easily deduced, but rather, one can choose to what extent they walk away with hope and to what extent they see a reflection of their own psychological afflictions. They can choose to let the silence of Joy and Evelyn as rocks in a different universe be a moment of healing peace, or one of powerful introspection. Nonetheless, one common denominator remains consistent: Everything Everywhere All at Once is a work of thought-provoking, potentially life-changing art, if the viewer so allows it.

Originally posted here:

"Everything Everywhere All at Once" is life-changing, in this universe and every other one - Mustang News

A few weeks ago, the person behind the New York Times Pitchbotnot a bot at all, but a Twitter account whose posts satirize New York Times headlines and articleswas at his home, in Rochester, New York, doing laundry with one hand while tapping out, with the other, one of his most frequent refrains on Twitter: Dems in Disarray. But the tweeta parody of what NYT Pitchbot considers one of the medias laziest constructionswouldnt send. Whoops! read an alert from Twitter. You already said that.

Thats part of the shtick; all told, NYT Pitchbot has tweeted Dems in Disarray more than four hundred times. In this case, the Twitter app had malfunctioned. NYT Pitchbot had already sent identical versions of the tweet seconds apart, and was attempting to send a third to his 150,000-plus followers. All the better, he supposed.

Though his subject matter might suggest otherwise, NYT Pitchbot does not work in media or politics. He is a fifty-two-year-old math professor and father of two who describes himself as a committed Democrat of the slightly hardcore left. He is anonymous on Twitter, and asked to remain so for this story, citing personal and professional concerns. (CJR contacted him via email and spoke with him on the phone, verifying his association with the Twitter account over direct message. He shared his real identity with CJR, which we verified with two other sources.)

NYT Pitchbot began his sideline in online political commentary in the early 2000s, posting anonymous comments on blogs, focusing much of his energy on one called Balloon Juice (i.e., hot air). Under the alias Doug J, he mounted ironic defenses of George W. Bush to let off some steam and provoke the blogs founder, John Cole, a conservative undergoing a liberal transformation.

Trolling is what you would call it, but it wasnt malicious, says Cole. It was basically pointing out that what I was saying was stupidtaking things to their logical extremes. Doug J, Cole says, was a crowd favorite. So in 2009, Cole asked him to start writing posts for Balloon Juice directly.

Early contributions included criticism of Times columnist Thomas Friedman (writes entire columns about the wonders of free tradewithout citing a single figure) and earnest admiration for Glenn Greenwald, now NYT Pitchbots bte noire. (What really gets me is this combination of nihilism and stupidity, says NYT Pitchbot, citing Chris Cillizza as another offender.) Around the same time, Pitchbot says, he was banned from the New York Times online comment section, for a disparaging remark submitted on the launch of The Conversation, a column-in-dialogues by David Brooks and Gail Collins.

Doug J still occasionally posts on Balloon Juice, where he also raises money for liberal causes and Democratic candidates. (Through the online donation platform ActBlue, hes brought in more than $2.8 million to date.) He joined Twitter in 2009, taking @dougjballoon as his handle, but didnt start tweeting regularly until four years ago, when his first child was born. With kids and full-time teaching, it was easier to tweet than blog, he said.

In 2019, @DougJBalloon changed his name on Twitter to New York Times Pitchbot, committing to a new bit. He was encouraged by a conservative journalist friend and inspired by other pitchbot accounts, particularly one, now retired, that satirized The Federalist, a conservative online publication. Its a tricky thing, because The Federalist is so insane. How do you parody it? he says. What I think is more interesting is just how much of that same kind of stupidity is embedded in ostensibly left-center establishment journalism.

With his account, NYT Pitchbot imagines the Times formula for stories as a kind of wheezing algorithm, a bot churning out contrarian headlines and half-baked hot takes. I was a lifelong liberal Democrat, begins one mock pitch for the Times opinion section. Then reproductive rights activists held a vigil in front of Brett Kavanaughs house. Another: Ukrainians Have Sunk the Russian Warship Moskva. Heres why thats bad news for Joe Biden. (Like Dems in Disarray, Bad News for Biden is something of a catchphrase for the account.)

NYT Pitchbot is a lifelong Times reader and a current digital subscriber. Obviously, I think the New York Times does fantastic journalism, he says. Still: Ive always had a lot of issues with how the media handles national politics. Like, I really thought that what went on around the Iraq War was insane. He finds the Times framing of political coverage grating, and criticizes its opinion section as contrarian, focused on concern-trolling liberalsengaging in disingenuous criticism. Theres this obsession the Times has with attacking other liberals, he says. Beyond an attempt at balance, I think part of it is thats the ecosystem that they live in, and they find the people around them irritating.

NYT Pitchbots first viral tweet came in March 2020, as covid lockdowns began. (Sources close to Jared and Ivanka said that privately the couple opposes the pandemic.) The tweeta dig at the Times reporter Maggie Haberman and her coverage of the couplegained NYT Pitchbot thousands of followers overnight. To date, the accounts most popular tweet was during the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. (We wanted to understand whats happening in Afghanistan. So we talked to three unvaccinated Trump supporters at an Arbys in Harrisburg.) But the authors favorite pitches are more baroque, combining several jokes. (Times have been tough in this Ohio town ever since the woke mob shut down the old ivermectin factory.)

The account has made a particular hobby of mocking the Times obsession with man-on-the-street style interviews at Rust Belt diners. (Nearly 90 percent of people admitted to hospitals due to Covid are unvaccinated. But in this Ohio diner, nearly 90 percent of unvaccinated diners dont believe that matters.) Those jokes are intended to sting not the interview subjects, but rather the Times reporters who conduct the interviews. These are stories written with a note of condescension that presume a wealthy, urban reader. They fly in, they look for people to say stupid things, and they leave, says NYT Pitchbot. I think its kind of dehumanizing. (By frequently focusing on white people, he adds, these articles reinforce the false idea of an exclusively white working class.) The Pitchbot account currently links to an online shop where supporters can order a T-shirt, mug, or onesie printed with in this ohio diner So far, two hundred items have been sold.

Often, in replies to NYT Pitchbot tweets, others try their hand at the formula, riffing along. NYT Pitchbot sometimes retweets them. Recently, another contributor, a journalism professor who likewise asked to remain anonymous, began sending ideas over direct message. I thought, This is the best media criticism Im seeing of the New York Times, says the journalism professor, who is now responsible for roughly a quarter of the Pitchbots output. Then theres help from the Times itself: when real Times headlines verge on self-parody, NYT Pitchbot simply shares them without comment. (Opinion | Biden Could Make the World Safer, but Hes Too Afraid of the Politics.)

With Biden in office, NYT Pitchbot believes, the Times has abandoned the position it had staked outa kind of anti-anti-Trumpism, as reflected in the hiring of conservative columnists like Bari Weiss and Bret Stephensand returned to its usual form. The Dems are back in disarray. Everything is bad news for Democrats, he sayswhich is, of course, good news for his account.

In 2017, when the Times eliminated its public-editor role, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., then the papers publisher, claimed the position was no longer needed, in part because social media platforms like Twitter could perform the same functions. Does that mean, I ask NYT Pitchbot, that hes the Times public editor?

He considers the question. The one thing that I would hope is that being made fun of for their really mindless rhetoric would make them change their headlines a little bit, he says. But ultimately, he adds, a real public editor would be infinitely preferable to randos on Twitter.

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The bot that saw the Times - Columbia Journalism Review

Regarding Retired judges oppose recall of Boudin (Letters to the Editor, May 12): The opposition to recall of the criminal defense lawyer turned San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin by retired judges ignores Boudins practices, his dereliction of duty to San Franciscans and taxpayer expectations.

Boudin claims a desire to prosecute those in power, but has abrogated City Hall corruption responsibility in favor of the U.S. Attorneys office. Hed rather prosecute police officers than burglars, robbers, repeat offenders and shoplifters. City Hall graft is inexcusable; so is Boudins failure, which is why voters (not retired judges) should recall him so he can return to the Public Defenders Office, his true professional love.

Quentin Kopp, retired San Mateo County judge,

San Franciso

The initiative to recall San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is obviously well-funded. A deluge of slick, printed materials and even television ads. Who is paying for those expensive materials and ads?

Remember, please, that Boudin was elected as a reaction against Mayor London Breeds attempt to appoint Suzy Loftis as district attorney. City voters dont like mayoral appointees. (Former incendiary Supervisor Chris Daly was elected as a direct reaction to Willie Browns attempts to put a lackey on the Board of Supervisors.)

As is too often the case, recalls are typically funded by wealthy interests that are displeased that they failed to buy an election. The Boudin recall appears to be yet another example of that.

Riley B. VanDyke, San Francisco

Regarding Layoff drama as firefighters refuse vaccine (Bay Area & Business, May 19): As a firefighter for 40 years, I am sure of one thing, the exact job of a firefighter is public safety. We are there to protect the citizens from all immediate dangers, including the virus that has taken 1 million American lives now.

I not only believe all firefighters should be vaccinated to protect the public, but also to protect the fellow firefighters they share a house with. If you dont care enough about the public to get your vaccination, get another job; your heart isnt into the one you have.

Robert Nice, Redwood City

Gov. Gavin Newsom is proposing using part of the state budget surplus payments to health care workers to retain them. Dumb idea! I am an registered nurse at a Bay Area hospital. Id love an extra 1,500 bucks but it wouldnt affect my decision to stay or leave. We are so short-staffed, I get asked almost daily to work extra shifts or stay extra hours. Exhausted staff are quitting. The money wont make anyone stay who doesnt want to theyll maybe stay until they cash the check. And were one of the hospitals in decent shape!

Use the surplus money for: paying nursing school instructors more theres a backlog for students trying to get into nursing school, give hospitals and skilled nursing facilities restricted funds for the of hiring additional staff, and require higher pay for non-registered nurse workers and emergency medical technicians we are short on all these people. EMTs get minimum wage or barely more to save lives.

The $1,500 is just buying votes and I already generally support Newsom but not on this.

Katherine Feallock, Richmond

Regarding Is Musk a good agent of chaos? (Open Forum, May 17): Thank you, Jackie Mansky, for spotlighting Norman Spinrads Agent of Chaos in the Open Forum. Those 70s science fiction titans: Spinrad, Brunner, Vonnegut, Farmer, Delany (and a host of others) foretold our current world with wit, erudition and humanity.

Todays Agents of Nihilism: Bannon, Farage, Jones, Carlson seek only to disrupt, destroy and profit. Embrace entropy!

Carey Stevenson, Richmond

Correction: An earlier version of What a chaotic time we live in misstated the type of 70s titans the writer was referring to.

Read more from the original source:

Letters: This retired judge supports recalling Chesa Boudin and putting him back where he belongs - San Francisco Chronicle

Mark Walsh looks at the latest releases, in an article sponsored by Cambridge Arts Picturehouse.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

Do you ever look back on your life and wonder what might have been? What if youd had cereal instead of toast this morning? What if youd followed your dream and gone to swim with dolphins? What if you had massive sausages instead of fingers?

Well, maybe you havent wondered about the last one, but Daniels have, and theyve set about exploring the infinite possibilities of the universe with a film thats equal parts thrilling and dramatic, hilarious and thought-provoking.

Daniels the collective name for writer / directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert had only one possibility in mind to star in their travel through the multiverse, Michelle Yeoh. In her multiverse of an acting career, shes been a martial arts star, a Bond girl, a Star Trek captain and even played Santa, so who better to play the only woman who can save every one of these parallel universes? She plays Evelyn, facing a tax audit of the laundromat she runs with her husband Waymond, who suddenly discovers the ability to travel between different universes. In these she has been everything from a martial arts master and a chef to a movie star, but there may not be any where she has a successful relationship with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu).

With a supporting cast including Ke Huy Kwan (returning to acting after an early career most famous for Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom and The Goonies), James Hong and Jamie Lee Curtis, Danielss exploration of lifes unlimited possibilities explores everything from love to nihilism and truly feels as if no possible outcome is left unexplored.

The film has a boundless energy, and is likely to leave some audiences crying with tears of laughter while others are caught up in the emotional crisis between Evelyn and Joy.

Its an epic, magnificent film thats completely unexpected from directors whose only previous work of significance was the Daniel-Radcliffe-corpse movie Swiss Army Man. Prepare to be moved, bewildered and supremely entertained in the first strong contender for film of the year.

Top Gun: Maverick

There are two types of people in this life: those to whom if you say, I feel the need, they will instantly affirm with you, the need for speed", and people who should probably then skip to the next film.

For those in the former group, chances are you havent lost that loving feeling for Tony Scotts Eighties cheesefest where pilots with unparalleled skill and nicknames of varying degrees of success are sent to the danger zone after being trained with the best of the best. So far, so clichd, yet this belated sequel has actually ended up being one of the years most anticipated films.

Thirty-six years after Maverick and Iceman first launched themselves off an aircraft carrier faster than the speed of sound, Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer are returning to mentor a new generation of pilots. Iceman has become an admiral, but Maverick has resolutely resisted anything approaching promotion; this might mean hes the ideal man for the job when his old rival needs someone to prepare a group of talented rookies for a specialised and dangerous mission.

In the three decades since the original, Tom Cruise has remodelled himself as one of the worlds foremost action movie stars, so its no surprise that he and the other pilot actors underwent rigorous training before filming at high speeds in real planes. Joseph Kosinski (TRON: Legacy, Oblivion) takes over the directorial reins, and a team of writers including Mission: Impossible scribe Christopher McQuarrie have upped the emotional stakes, with one of the rookies (Miles Teller) playing the son of Mavericks original co-pilot, Goose. Top Gun: Maverick looks set to deliver the perfect blend of turbocharged action and throwback sentiment in a film which looks set to take our collective breath away.

A-Ha: The Movie

Heres a piece of trivia to lodge somewhere at the back of your brain, just in case it comes up at a pub quiz next time youre there.

What was A-has only UK number one? Youd think maybe Take On Me, with its iconic animated video, or maybe their Bond theme The Living Daylights, but in fact it was their second single, The Sun Always Shines On TV.

Take On Me did top the charts around the world, including the USA, and Thomas Robsahms documentary explores the history and dynamic of Norways most famous pop trio.

His film follows guitarist Pl Waaktaar-Savoy, keyboard player Magne Furuholmen and singer Morten Harket over a four year period, exploring both the bands meteoric rise to success partly fuelled by their own self-belief and the tensions that have also existed within the group over their four decade career.

Having split up in 2010, they reformed a few years later and the film features candid interviews with the band as well as stage performances of all those chart-topping greatest hits.

Culture Shock and Gaspar No Presents

One of the shock-jocks of modern French cinema, Argentine-born director Gaspar No has provoked strong reactions across his career with acclaimed films including Irreversible, Enter The Void, Love and Climax, and while his latest Vortex marks a more restrained impulse, his examination of the difficulties of approaching the end of life using a split-screen technique throughout is his most compelling film to date.

Hes curated a season of films under the Culture Shock banner which show the breadth of his cinematic influences. Michael Hanekes Amour (showing June 6) is a film from a kindred spirit whos also pushed cinematic boundaries to their limits and explores similar themes to Vortex around dementia and death. The season also includes Umberto D (May 23), Vittorio De Sicas neorealist classic about a man and his dog facing eviction from their apartment, Tokyo Story (May 30), Yasujir Ozus masterpiece about an elderly couple visiting their children, and Sunset Boulevard (June 13), Billy Wilders darkly comic noir starring Gloria Swanson as a fading silent film actress.

The Culture Shock season also features a chance to catch another masterpiece, Dutch director Paul Verhoevens English language debut Robocop (May 25), here restored to the directors original vision. Sharply satirical, comically violent and endlessly quotable, it deserves its place in this series of films showcasing directors at the peak of their powers.

Read more from Mark Walsh

From golfs hilarious Phantom of the Open to The Worst Person in the World

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Why Everything Everywhere All At Once is a contender for film of the year - plus a look ahead to Top Gun: Maverick - Cambridge Independent

Swamy Rotolo in Jonas Carpignanos A ChiaraPhoto: Neon

A common experience while growing up is realizing that ones parents are not quite the monoliths one imagined them to be as a child. Adolescence is a process of acclimating ones internal perceptions to the realities of the world around them, and a time comes in almost everyones life when they discover that not all families are like their own. This is the reality that writer-director Jonas Carpignano explores in A Chiara, the third film in his informal trilogy of films set in the Calabrian region of Italy. Observing his own story from a dispassionate distance, Carpignano tracks a teenage girls evolving betrayal as her sense of reality collapses around her in a film that proves affecting, albeit inconsistently.

The titular Chiara Guerrasio (Swamy Rotolo) is a 15-year-old in a well-to-do family, patriarchally led by her father Claudio (Claudio Rotolo). Following a bombastic celebration of Chiaras sister Giulias (Grecia Rotolo) 18th birthday, Chiara witnesses the explosion of the family car, after which Claudio is nowhere to be found. Though her mother Carmela (Carmela Fumo) is determined to act as though nothing out of the ordinary is happening, Chiara quickly discovers the news is reporting that her father is a fugitive with connections to the mafia, driving Chiara to a crisis of faith in her parents and outrage that threatens her role in their domestic happiness.

B-

Swamy Rotolo, Claudio Rotolo, Grecia Rotolo, Carmela Fumo

In theaters May 27

Cinematographer Tim Curtin does an excellent job of complementing Chiaras escalating sense of betrayal through a camera that remains committed to capturing her emotional state, restrained enough to retain a strictly observational distance, but intimate enough that we are connected to her journey even when communicated with a muted expression. Carpignanos choice to cast A Chiara with non-professional actorsprimarily members of the Rotolo familyallows for a lived-in naturalism with his characters, albeit through performances that linger without compelling dramatic flourish. Consequently, the film draws upon the dynamics of a real family to examine a fundamental gap between the harmony of domestic life and the forbidden fruit of ill-gotten gains, all without feeling staged or crafted by external storytelling conceits.

Chiara is constantly treated as a child with the inability to understand exactly who her father is and the dangers she poses to him by inquiring into his business and disappearance. Her mother and sister repeatedly tell her that she is incapable of understanding, but they refuse to speak to the reality of their patriarchs criminal lifestyle because it exposes their willful ignorance or knowing complicity. This growing gulf between Chiara and her family leaves her isolated in her search for truth, as emblematized by her recurring trips to the gym to run the treadmill alone, forever in pursuit, yet trapped in an artifice from which she cant break free.

Unfortunately, the stylistic choice to follow Chiaras story at an arms length distance from the moral judgment of her family adversely impacts the films tone and pacing. Most particularly, the protracted examination of Chiaras feelings of normalcy serve as an effective juxtaposition for her emotional development in the lead-up to her revelatory quest for answers, but proves overly passive in examining the family dynamic for an extended period of time. The films commitment to the mere observation of its performers, instead of calculatingly framing them, gives A Chiara a looseness that allows the mind to wander just as much as it invites contemplation, a problem that tightens as Chiaras circumstances and dilemmas become more concrete but remains persistent throughout.

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Notably, A Chiaras plotting is at its tightest and most compelling in its climax and epilogue, where the results of Chiaras moral dilemma come to a head and Carpignano converts unspoken turmoil into explicit text, a narrative tactic that solidifies a heartbreaking narrative in danger of spinning out into nihilism. In observing that space between childhood and adulthood, A Chiara contemplates a character who is forced to grow up too fast, acknowledging the cost of family secrets and weighing the consequences of upholding a status quo that obscures reality. Though the path to its conclusions is at times more plodding than meditative, the finale is a subtle, emotional twist of the knife that makes the journey worth taking.

More here:

A Chiara explores a teenager's discovery of unexpectedand universaladult truths - The A.V. Club