Belfast's overall tone is child's-view fanciful – a rose-tinted (albeit mostly black-and-white) love letter to the formative people and places of Kenneth Branagh's youth – but with added dollops of painful real-world experience that make for an awkward, not entirely successful blend. The movie is oftentimes touching and funny, and I was continually engaged. I just never quite bought what its writer/director was selling.

After an appealing opening half-hour, this odd, ultimately unsatisfying blend of time-travel adventure and horror yarn grows more ludicrous and lifeless as it progresses, and by the finale, you can't even recognize it as an Edgar Wright film anymore. While there's a great beat, at least initially, I'll be damned if I could dance to it.

While Ridley Scott's latest is ultimately engrossing, if for deeply complicated and largely upsetting reasons, I couldn't help but find my thoughts also drifting away from its #MeToo angle and toward a familiar fairy tale, as one third of the film is too hot, another third is too cold, and the final third is … . Well, it's not just right, but it certainly believes it's right.

They're both follow-ups to hits that also enjoyed October openings – one in 2018, and the other in 2019. They're both blessedly short, running 97 and 93 minutes, respectively. And if you're wondering what else Venom: Let There Be Carnage and The Addams Family 2 might have in common, they're both considerably better than the works they hailed from, although in only one case does the improvement result in something resembling a good movie.