The last time audiences saw superpowered alien symbiote Venom (Tom Hardy) and his human “host” Eddie Brock (also Hardy) on the big screen, it wasn’t in a “Venom” movie, it was in a mid-credits sequence in 2021’s “Spider-Man: No Way Home.” The scene saw the pair briefly hop universes into the Disney-controlled Marvel Cinematic Universe, but then quickly get sucked back into the Sony-controlled Marvel universe – the one that has “Spider-Man” characters, but no Spider-Man (and is not to be confused with the animated Spider-verse). The scene is shown again at the beginning of “Venom: The Last Dance,” but it has no bearing on the story. Fans of the character should know not to expect MCU quality from this movie. This is the “Morbius”/”Madame Web” arm of the franchise.

The new film sees Eddie and Venom as fugitives in Mexico following some frowned-upon crimefighting in 2021’s “Let There Be Carnage.” They try to flee to New York, where they should be safe from human authorities, but they fail to factor in threats from non-humans. Venom’s recent activity inadvertently activated a device called a Codex, which exists as long as a symbiote and its human host are both alive. Supervillain Knull (Andy Serkis), imprisoned on a faraway planet, can use his minions called Xenophages to steal the Codex, break free and conquer the universe. I think the way it works is that if the Xenophages can swallow Venom alive, that counts as stealing the Codex for Knull. And simple evasion isn’t an option for Venom because the Xenophages are sure to cause a lot of collateral damage to Earth, and he’s the only one that can stop them. He and Eddie are going to have to fight.

If you thought I was spouting too much exposition just now, wait until you see the subplot about the secret Area 51 facility where symbiotes are studied by scientists like Dr. Teddy Payne (Juno Temple). The character comes complete with a backstory about feeling guilt over the death of her brother, who wanted to be a scientist. I get the impression that she only devotes herself to science out of guilt and not passion. If the character is supposed to be passionate about her work, it’s not coming through in Temple’s performance. She has several conversations with the facility’s enforcer Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor), one of those grunts that wants to kill any being he doesn’t understand, where all they do is explain the facility’s purpose to one another. Almost all of their dialogue could be preceded with the dreaded words “as you know…” because there’s no way these characters wouldn’t know all of this information already, but the audience has to be filled in.

Literally thrown off their flight, Eddie and Venom hitch a ride with the hippie Moon family, led by Martin (Rhys Ifans), on their way to Area 51 to try to see aliens. I guess the family’s scenes are supposed to be comic relief, but they aren’t funny. What is funny is a brief stop in Las Vegas where Eddie and Venom share a dance with franchise mainstay Mrs. Chen (Peggy Lu). Could the scene be cut without doing a disservice to the story? Yes. Should the scene stay in because it’s a welcome distraction from the story? Also yes.

That scene aside, “Venom: The Last Dance” is a slog. The script is a mess, the new characters unlikeable, the action murky and hard to follow, and the mindless Xenophages are terrible antagonists, with Knull not exactly helping by sitting on the sidelines the whole time. I’d say that Hardy comes off relatively unscathed because he has pretty good chemistry with… himself (I can’t decide if that makes the repartee easier or harder), but then I found out he has a story credit on this slop, so I can’t let him off the hook. I hope this really is the “Last Dance” for these “Spider-Man”-adjacent movies outside the MCU and Spider-verse.

Grade: D

“Venom: The Last Dance” is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, bloody images and strong language. Its running time is 110 minutes.

Robert R. Garver is a graduate of the Cinema Studies program at New York University. His weekly movie reviews have been published since 2006.

Anyone who’s watched a romance film knows the most vital ingredient in such a film is chemistry between the two characters in love. This chemistry is bountiful in the new release, We Live in Time starring Andrew Garfield (tick, tick… BOOM! 2021) and Florence Pugh (Dune: Part Two, 2024) as two young people living in England whose paths intersect violently and then turn into romance. Over multiple years, their relationship endures through self-doubt, fertility challenges, secrets of the past, and a frightening health diagnosis.

We Live in Time is not a romantic comedy, because it has a slightly melancholic tone throughout with lots of quiet dialogue and heartfelt montages of lovers doing fun activities together. Both Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh give believably vulnerable performances. He is shy and socially clumsy while she is ambitious and open-hearted. They find comfort in each other during life’s hardships, portraying a love that is resolute and demurely steadfast.

Nick Payne is the screenwriter for this film, and he wrote another romance tinged with tragedy from 2021 called The Last Letter from Your Lover. He also wrote on a few episodes for the popular Netflix series, The Crown, and that’s where you can spot the similarities in his writing style. Nobody in We Live in Time talks too much, so none of the dialogue feels forced or superfluous. Everything feels tender and natural, because this film clearly wants everyone to like it. So why did I walk out of the theater with only a shrug as my emotional response?

Irish Director John Crowley keeps this film consistent with genuine bittersweet milestones in the lives of these ordinary people, much like he did with his Oscar-nominated film, Brooklyn (2015). But I couldn’t ignore my feelings that I had seen films like this already. I’m talking about Love Story (1970), Dying Young (1991), One Day (2011), The Vow (2012), and there’s plenty more to include here. Telling the story of We Live in Time in a non-linear way is a nice surprise and adds some interest jumping around to different periods in the lovers’ lives without any hints or foreshadowing. But I still left the theater with dry cheeks wondering why I wasn’t more touched.

Is my heart made of stone, dipped in garbage, and soaked in manure? Am I emotionally handicapped against the romantic lives of straight white people? If that’s the truth, then I’ll just say We Live in Time is sweetly adequate. It’s true not every film needs to be a brilliant bolt of lightning showing something new and pushing boundaries. We Live in Time is an example of this. So it will tug some heartstrings, but it isn’t exactly an exciting choice for movie lovers out there. (But maybe for romance movie lovers, it WILL be an exciting choice.)

Blitz opens amidst a terrifying conflagration on a nighttime city street. This is the blitzkrieg, the German bombing of London in 1940 in the early days of World War II. But as writer-director Steve McQueen casts it, it’s not about an entire street or even a single building on fire. It’s about a loose fire hose whipping about wildly and the heavy industrial nozzle whacking an anonymous fireman in the head as he struggles to bring it under control.

It’s a moment of feral intensity, and of ferocious intimacy. It reminded me of nothing so much as snippets from early in the TV series Chernobyl, about the 1986 nuclear-plant disaster. Just an ordinary schmoe firefighter not even thinking twice about doing a dangerous job, because it has to be done.

Blitz is not about that firefighter. But the brutal randomness of that opening sequence sets the stage for what is to come. This is not a sentimental story about British stiff upper lips and keeping calm and carrying on. There were scenes in this movie when I gasped out loud and actually clapped a hand to my mouth in shock — I can’t recall if I’d ever done that before. McQueen (Widows, Shame) seems to be deliberately pushing back against how the British and especially the London experience of the war has been ex post facto propagandized into cheery, chipper camaraderie and complacency. Indeed, the whole “keep calm and carry on” thing was a propaganda slogan developed during the war but barely used then, and was almost entirely forgotten until it was rediscovered in 2000 and subsequently weaponized for whitewashed and commercialized nostalgia.

McQueen plays with those expectations but smashes them at every opportunity with this tale of nine-year-old George, who’s furious that his single mom, Rita, has relented and agreed to evacuate her son to the countryside, finally, after so many other London children had already left. Blitz is the picaresque misadventures of George as he decides to take himself home, Nazi bombs be damned, and to the inadvertent horror of his mother, once she is informed that the authorities who were supposed to be in charge of George’s safety have lost him.

(George is played by wonderful newcomer Elliott Heffernan, a real find on McQueen’s part. Rita is portrayed by Saoirse Ronan [Foe, Little Women], as ever a standout, and the best thing even in an all-around terrific movie, as this is.)

McQueen is pushing back against another sort of whitewashing, too, of the more literal kind: the bizarre notion that, somehow, “diversity” is a 21st-century invention and that people of color haven’t always been a part of, in particular, majority-white colonial nations like Great Britain. (This is hugely applicable to the US as well.) The filmmaker had said he was inspired in this story by an old photograph of a mixed-race Blitz evacuee, a small boy standing on a WWII-era railway platform, and wondered what his life was like. And so McQueen — who is Black British — builds a sketch of vibrant, multicultural life in century-ago London. Partly through flashbacks, of the lively jazz-club scene where Rita partied, pre-war, with George’s father, Marcus (CJ Beckford), an immigrant from Grenada who is no longer in the picture. But McQueen’s portrait of a London that some would like to pretend never existed blossoms, enormously affectingly, via the air-raid warden George encounters on his journeys: Ife (Benjamin Clémentine: Dune), a Nigerian immigrant to London. Sharply but gently — so gently: Ife is one of the loveliest characters I’ve met onscreen in a long while — McQueen’s exuberant, diverse London subtly suggests that this, very much this, is what was worth fighting the Nazis to protect.

(Relevance to today? Sky-high, no pun intended. It was WWII horrors like the Blitz, as well as the Allied firebombing of Dresden, in Germany, and the American atomic attacks on Japan that have helped shaped our ideas about what constitutes warcrimes today. Bonus points to anyone who can pinpoint multiple indiscriminate military attacks on civilians happening right now around the planet.)

Yet nothing here is romanticized, either. Racism is a real and pervasive presence — the sequence in which George has his eyes opened to just how ingrained the denigration of Black people has been by the British Empire is heartbreaking — as is the opportunism of those who would take advantage of the chaos of the Blitz: Stephen Graham (Boiling Point, Greyhound) and Kathy Burke (Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, Pan) as scavenger-thieves who descend after the bombs fall, and who rope George into their schemes, are terrifying, akin to the Thenardiers of Les Misérables but devoid of their bleak comedy.

Blitz is McQueen’s most accessible, most mainstream film yet; his previous works include 2010’s IRA hunger-strike movie Hunger, 2013’s 12 Years a Slave, and last year’s Occupied City, a four-and-a-half-hour documentary about Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t absolutely brutal. This is a movie about childhood adventure that is a lark, until it isn’t. It’s about community care and small moments of kindness from strangers in passing, and also about stomping on your neighbors in moments of panic and terror. It’s wildly human, artistically masterful, and completely magnificent.

more films like this:
• Empire of the Sun [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV]
• 12 Years a Slave [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV | Netflix UK (till Nov 15) | BFI Player UK]