Not a half-hour after the end credits rolled on Wes Anderson's Asteroid City, I met friends for dinner, and immediately raved about the delightful, clever, moving entertainment I had just seen. They asked whether I was feeling antsy to write about the experience, and I didn't have to think about my answer before blurting it out: “No. Not at all.” Where, I figured, would I even begin in amassing – let alone publishing – thoughts on a work that's about nothing less than the meaning of existence, to say nothing of a film whose most gut-bustingly riotous sequence is also one that made me weep like a baby?

Charm counts for a lot, and in Pixar's Elemental, it counts for so much that it's easy to ignore the film's rather lazy stereotyping, strangely under-imagined social dynamic, and plot-goosing crisis that, I'm sorry to say, is all about plumbing issues.

Over the course of four followups, Michael Bay set the bar for Transformers sequels so staggeringly low that it's almost sky-high praise to say that the series' two more recent prequels, neither of which Bay directed, aren't all that bad.

See enough movies over enough decades – five-plus decades, in my case – and you may begin to wrongly think that cinema no longer has the ability to astonish you. But while I'm hardly going to make the case for the superhero adventure being on par with, say, Citizen Kane or the first two Godfathers, or even Richard Linklater's 2014 Boyhood, I'm not sure that any film released since that latter title has thrilled and awed me quite as profoundly as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

Frank Marshall's The Little Mermaid is sincere, reverent, safe. What it isn't, and what the original continues to be, is a joyous blast.

After you've launched your car into outer space, I suppose there's nothing to do but wait for it to crash back down to Earth, and that's basically what happens in Fast X.

An excuse, as if one were needed, to re-team Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen, Book Club: The Next Chapter, while being a fairly traditional followup, is a very strange movie. By which I mean it really isn't a movie, but rather an opportunity to merely spend a cozy period in the dark watching four Hollywood legends of a certain age hang out in Italy and engage in sightseeing, slapstick, fashion parades, and the guzzling of liquor by the quart.

Before seeing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, I wondered, as I always do with these sorts of “finales” to long-running franchises, how difficult it was going to be to review Marvel Studios' latest without diving into spoiler territory. Thankfully, though, most of writer/director James Gunn's trilogy-ender can be easily discussed without addressing significant plot twists or which of our eccentric world-savers, if any, fail to make it to the end credits. It turns out the stuff that bothered me, which was about 80 percent of GotGV3, is right there in the open.

Running just shy of three hours and boasting all of its creator's evidently favorite touchstones that include foreboding A-frame houses, headless corpses, and full-frontal nudity for characters you don't necessarily want to see naked, writer/director Ari Aster's Beau Is Afraid is one of those movies that naturally engenders a “love it or hate it” tag. Yet while I can easily imagine audiences either adoring or loathing Aster's impassioned, insanely ballsy (in more ways than one) fever dream, I would argue that it's actually incredibly easy to fall into a middle camp: acknowledging the presentational greatness while also admitting that, in the end, it's a meandering, deeply confused wreck.

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