Marvel supervillains, space race animations, and Viking epics are among the month’s movie highlights.
April is kind of a cinema limbo. Too late for awards season (and the post-awards season movie dump), but too early for the summer blockbuster season. As such, it has become a place where you put the blockbusters you are slightly embarrassed about (hello, Fantastic Beasts 3), or the acclaimed foreign films that did not quite gain Oscars traction. So it is with April 2022. The first tentative blockbusters are coming out, like Morbius and Michael Bay’s Ambulance, as well as film festival favorites like Memoria, Petite Maman and Hit the Road. The month, however, is also offering some weirder options that are too weird for the summer and too popcorny for the awards season. So April is also when movies like The Northman, Richard Linklater’s Apollo 10 ½ and the Nicolas Cage-starring The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent make their way to theaters and streamers everywhere. Jared Leto’s entry into the Sony Marvel universe is finally coming out after multiple delays, nearly three years after filming wrapped. In the film, the Oscar winner plays a scientist whose attempts to cure his blood disease turn him into a vampire—a role that, hilariously, Leto said was closer to himself than most characters he has played in an interview for Variety. Richard Linklater has proven himself to be an expert in two things in his movies – perfectly evoking any given decade (as in Dazed and Confused, Everybody Wants Some!! and Boyhood) and the animation process of rotoscoping, in which the animation is drawn over live-action footage.
