Spike Lee's latest is woke but also thunderously awake – so alive with ideas and homages and both presentational and emotional grandeur that it's nearly overwhelming.

It's been a few days since I saw it, and I still can't decide whether I consider the brutal, sometimes brutally funny Blumhouse thriller The Hunt a strangely great terrible movie or a strangely terrible great movie. Either way, I generally had a ball.

Pixar's new adventure comedy Onward is about fathers and sons, about big and little brothers, about facing fears and taking risks and finding gratitude in the face of loss. It's also about as much fun as I've had at the movies in months.

You may not know precisely where the woman's tormentor is at any given time, but damned if you're not convinced that you can see him anyway, and in a movie suffused with genre pleasures, Leigh Whannell's and Elisabeth Moss' combined ability to make invisible terrors visible has to stand as its biggest one.

Once you adjust to Buck's initially off-putting quality, and the similar anthropomorphism of the film's other animals, and the intentional broadness of everything from the compositions to the choreography to the humans, Chris Sanders' outing emerges as an unexpectedly winning and effective family flick. The wide-screen vistas and gripping action sequences make seeing it at the cineplex preferable, but don't fret if you miss the movie now – once it lands, it'll be a go-to choice on Disney+ forever.

Friday, February 14, 10:30 a.m.-ish: As I deeply love movies, and have been known to occasionally fall in love with movies, it feels appropriate that I'd spend a large chunk of this year's Valentine's Day at my first quadruple feature in 10 months. Yet while previous four-fers have started better, I'm not sure any of them have started weirder than this one, given that it begins with a reboot of television's Fantasy Island, that deliciously cheesy Aaron Spelling soap that demanded “Smiles, everyone, smiles!” from the start and almost couldn't help but deliver them.

Wrapping up my pan of DC Films' Suicide Squad in the summer of 2016, I wrote, “The inevitable sequel to this franchise-starter can only be better. I say that all the time, and one of these days, damn it, I'm gonna be right.” Hey, whattaya know! I was finally right!

It's estimated that the Brothers Grimm composed roughly 200 fairy tales and folk stories between 1812 and 1857. And I know it would be asking a lot, but based on their delectably macabre new fright film, I'd be happy to start a petition demanding that Gretel & Hansel director Oz Perkins and screenwriter Rob Hayes be given a crack at each and every one of them.

This past weekend, The Turning became only the 21st wide-release movie – though the second in three weeks (after The Grudge) – to ever receive an “F” grade from audiences as reported by CinemaScore, the market-research firm that has been polling crowd reactions for more than two decades. Why was the grade for this timeless haunted-house tale so abysmal? And why, despite the film's considerable strengths, was it kind of deserved?

Overstated though most of them seemed to be, I enjoyed the mean-spirited take-downs of Cats as much as the next guy. But I think I've figured out why director Stephen Gaghan's new family adventure Dolittle – a far worse movie – hasn't suffered nearly the critical indignities of Tom Hooper's musical train wreck: It's so tediously by-the-numbers, and so predictably awful in all the expected ways, that it simply saps your will to mock.

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