Watching romantic relationships crack and crumble can be enormous, if nerve-racking, fun – just so long as those breakdowns are viewed from the perspective of an auditorium, and not a mirror.

It's hard to think of a more ticklish recent ode to cinema than Minions & Monsters, which would've been just about perfect if its monsters were ditched entirely.

Given how bored I've been at so many cinematic superhero origin stories over the decades, I feel silly for actually feeling and writing this. But I really wish director Craig Gillespie's Supergirl had merely been a superhero origin story.

Thirty-one years after the franchise's debut, Disney/Pixar's latest animated comedy adventure is unusual in at least one regard: It's the first Toy Story that might be more fun to think about, and argue about, than actually watch.

Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day is many things:but most of all, it's an excellent self-test determining just how jaded you've become.

This past Thursday, after a full week of unseasonably hot, muggy weather, we were finally treated to an evening that was cool and breezy. I'm prone to credit the Clinton Area Showboat Theatre's Guys & Dolls for the atmospheric shift, because as season-opening presentations go, this one was as cool and breezy as they come.

There's no point in burying the lede on this: The Timber Lake Playhouse's Les Misérables is the most visually powerful, thunderously well-performed area production I've seen since my first published stage review debuted in 2005, and even since I first arrived in the Quad Cities for college in 1986.

Even in a sword-and-sorcery saga with considerable sci-fi elements, just how seriously are we supposed to take a movie whose protagonist goes by the moniker “He-Man”? Perhaps anticipating this question, the team behind the new Masters of the Universe has a locked-and-loaded reply: “Not seriously at all.” And when I say “not at all,” I mean Not. At. All.

I'm not sure what it says about the future of horror movies – if it says anything at all – that the year's strongest, scariest creep-out to date is directed by someone not quite old enough to drink.

Over the course of two-hours-plus, “cute” will only get you so far. But it's astounding how far it gets us in Star Wars: The Mandalorian & Grogu, which might've been an easy franchise low point if not for the diminutive cuddlebug of the title.

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