Watching the new Beauty & the Beast, I wouldn’t have wanted to be within spitting distance of anyone who didn’t instantly well up at the performance of the title song, with Emma Thompson’s teapot crooning that glorious, Oscar-winning tune while Emma Watson’s Beauty and Dan Stevens’ Beast swirled and spun in that majestic castle ballroom. I also wouldn’t have wanted to be within spitting distance of anyone who thought director Bill Condon’s live-action remake was in any way superior to Disney’s animated smash of 1991. I may well have spit.

Friday, March 3, 10 a.m.-ish: I've managed to avoid them for more than seven months, but it's time for yet another quadruple-feature, and this one begins with the comic-book movie Logan. I take that back. It actually begins with a comic-book mini-movie whose title I wouldn't reveal even if it had one, and whose star just might make genre fans wet themselves with happiness. (A crude image, yes, but one not nearly crude enough for this particular anti-hero.) From the employment of John Williams' Superman theme to the unexpected nudity to the climactic image of a blood-soaked alley and a carton of ice cream not going to waste, it's a true beauty of a short-film-slash-coming-attraction, to say nothing of the thus-far-funniest four minutes of the movie year. Enjoy the laughs while you can, Logan viewers – you'll be wincing and jumping and weeping soon enough.

For a brief period during the mid-aughts, Chinese director Yimou Zhang was the first international helmer in decades to find his foreign-language titles – 2004’s Hero, 2005’s House of Flying Daggers, and 2006’s Curse of the Golden Flower – receiving wide U.S. distribution. Predictably, the novelty soon wore off for mass audiences, and Zhang’s subsequent films, when we got them at all, were confined solely to specialty houses. But China has recently become such a yu-u-uge bottom-line consideration that Zhang is apparently again in-vogue – especially with action adventure The Great Wall having already earned some $200 million abroad. Since money talks, it isn’t surprising that Hollywood has re-embraced Zhang. In return, it seems that Zhang, for better and for worse, has fully embraced Hollywood. How else to explain a movie in which thousands of fierce Chinese warriors would be annihilated if not for the ass-kicking abilities of Matt Damon?

In its blatant attempt to revive a scare-flick “franchise” that couldn’t even produce a second sequel, director F. Javier Gutiérrez’s Rings probably won’t make 2002’s The Ring and its 2005 follow-up relevant again, but the results are better than I expected – by which I mean the first 10 minutes are actually pretty good.