In an instant, they were gone. Family, friends, lovers. You turned around for one moment, and when you turned back they were gone. Where? Why? Who knows. How to go on? Who knows. And how can you ever hold on to anyone again if you don’t know whether it might happen again?
No, I’m not talking about the Snap. (We’ve done enough of that elsewhere.) I’m not talking about the Rapture either, not quite. What I am talking about is one of the strangest, saddest, most infuriating, most hopeless, most hopeful stories I’ve seen, on TV or elsewhere: The Leftovers.
How’s that for galactic serendipity? For our 22nd episode, we’re strapping on our Infinity Gauntlets and snapping our fingers to discuss the 22nd film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Avengers: Endgame. Is it a worthy finale to the Infinity Saga or is it a titanic misstep? Were these particular fans serviced to their satisfaction or did they leave the cinema with a frown? Did we laugh, cry and cheer as the original Avengers line-up do their victory lap? Join us and find out! Beware: major spoilers for Infinity War and Endgame (and no, we don’t mean the play by Samuel Beckett)!
You could easily forget how reluctant Michael Corleone initially is to take over the family business. There are many reluctant heroes in the movies or in literature; reluctant villains are much rarer and often don’t see themselves as villains. They are set to do what seems necessary, blaming the times or the circumstances, acting for the greater good – and it’s their definition of ‘necessary’ that movies like Coppola’s The Godfather are really about. 
There is a point beyond which suspense does not increase. It’s a point that every filmmaker and editor should know, and avoid. In the words of a theatre director I once knew: “If you think your timing is just right, you are too slow.” He said this about most scenes, although maybe some scenes in horror movies are allowed to go on a little longer until the tension almost reaches tipping point, but even for horror flicks, there must be a limit to how long an audience is scared by ominous rumbling and blurry shadows moving in dark corners. It’s likely that horror movies depend more on suspenseful arcs than other genres. Obviously, writer and director Oz Perkins thought he would shoot his second feature I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House a tad too slow, because slightly slower means slightly scarier, right? 
He is up there in the air, 417 meters above ground, a mere speck to his random audience, so you could easily mistake him for a plane or a bird. He might appear semi-abstract to you. Legend has it that, as a Parisian teenager, he had to go his dentist, but found a picture of the not-yet-built World Trade Center in New York in a magazine and drew a line between the two roofs. He left, his toothache all but forgotten, and he perfected his considerable talent as a tightrope walker and waited for the towers to be built. Until then, Philippe Petit worked his way up, from juggling and unicycling in Parisian streets to walking the tightrope between the two towers of Notre Dame, to doing the same thing between two towers of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. And then the Twin Towers got built, and in 1974, Petit was ready for them. Or they were ready for him. 
Michael Pierce’s feature debut Beast is less than the sum of its parts. It has very, very strong scenes, but just because the pearls are all beautiful doesn’t mean they belong on the same necklace. Here’s a list from memory: the moment when Moll (Jessie Buckley) runs away from her own birthday party to go dancing. The moment when she meets Pascal (Johnny Flynn) for the first time and is smitten with him, because he looks as wild as she wants to be, and he might be her ticket out of the stuffy surroundings of a small town on a small island called Jersey. The moment when Moll lies into the grave of a dead girl, pretending to be her. The well-meaning cruelty of her mother (Geraldine James). Moll’s apology to the girl she hurt back in school. The whole funeral sequence. 