I’m late to this, seeing as it’s already gotten a bunch of awards including one from the Academy, but wow. Everyone involved in making this should be proud of the work they’ve done. Having said that…:

• Some action scenes (looking at you, final boss battle) are too fast-paced with too much unnecessary stuff going on in the background, just because they could.
• PP’s death was… banal. Is this how he died in the comic book? Sheesh.
• Auntie May should got over his death quickly too.
• That’s not how a linear accelerator looks like or works (not on this Earth, at least).
• But take note: I saw this on the back of an airplane seat during a red-eye flight with a sleeping offspring ramming her head into my flank every few minutes, and I still thought it was amazing. Five stars, will see again.

Directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, 2018

• H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Dunwich Horror” makes an early appearance, foreshadowing some Cthulhu-inspired creatures our hero will first fight and then command. Sadly, the (very!) big baddie in Dunwich is Yog-Sothoth, not Cthulhu, so this also foreshadows a movie that has some good ideas but doesn’t quite get them all right.
• One thing it did get right was a spectacular chase scene on the rooftops of Sicily that reminded me of the best moments of Assassin’s Creed and Uncharted. This is also one of the few places where the setting wasn’t obviously CGI (because it wasn’t).
• Seriously, if your budget is $160,000,000 you should either just film a real sunset or have an obviously fake one as a statement. It looked like most above-ground scenes were shot in the Uncanny Valley.
• William Defoe is a lifelong resident of the Uncanny Valley, no matter the movie.
• Nicole Kidman has a good fight scene. The fight scenes in general were easy to follow and nicely choreographed.
• Dolph Lundgren, huh? Good casting there, but I was hoping he’d have a nice fight as well
• Jason Momoa can’t pull off the dumb muscle look they were going for at the beginning and the smartass one-liners don’t help. So his character’s arc is in costume more than psyche: shirtless, street clothes, Aquaman.
• Speaking of which, that Aquaman costume came fresh off a corpse that had been simmering in the deep sea for millennia. But we already established that Aquaman had bad b.o. so that made it fine I guess?
• The underwater villain was entirely predictable and boring. The human baddie was delightful and I look forward to seeing more of him and his equally delightful new companion in the sequel.
• Nutshell review: Predictable but delightfully over-the-top.

Directed by James Wan, 2018

So much wasted potential in this one. It could have been a great movie for both children and adults, a Labyrinth for the age of CGI and social justice. Instead, it’s a confused, hurried mess in which lots of Stuff happens for no good reason; a Michael Bay extravaganza for your middle-schooler. My daughter (6) liked it, but even she questioned a major plot point. “But, why did X become evil, daddy?” I’ve no idea, Honey, and I’m not sure the screenwriters gave it much thought either.

Such is the faith of many book adaptations; this one even more so, having had to pass through the Disney committee wringer. I haven’t read the book(s? That’s how much I know about the potential franchise) but I’ve read and watched enough fantasy to know that 1) your made-up world needs to have rules, and 2) if you break them, it better be for a good reason. The few week rules set in the Wrinkle’s first half are promptly broken at the half-time, with no explanation and nothing to replace them. Instead you get a holodeck of a planet, where anything can happen: hurricane in a haunted forest turns into a Stepford wives cul-de-sac turns into a crowded beach, and no there is nothing connecting those dots.

Which is too bad — each one of those scenes would’ve made a good episode for the second season of the unmade Wrinkle TV show, perfect for Disney’s new streaming service. Such a waste.

Directed by Ava DuVernay, 2018

An oncologist(?), a psychologist, and a surgeon give master classes on unprofessional behavior while treating JGL and his unfortunately named tumor. Even though only one of the three was meant to look bad in the movie, they each break a fundamental rule of the doctor-patient relationship: don’t be a douchebag, don’t sleep with the patient, don’t tell them everything will be fine when you have no clue. Cut out the profanities, and you’d have a semester’s worth of medical ethics discussions.

Cut out the profanities, though, and you’ll miss half the movie. Seth Rogen — a dirty old man trapped inside Fozzy the Bear — does what he’s been doing ever since Judd Apatow found him, heart of gold included. Fortunately, 50/50 has better timing than anything to come out from the Apatow cringe factory, and even has a point.

Medical miscellanea: was the diagnosing physician a medical oncologist, neurologist, neurosurgeon, or an orthopedic surgeon? Likely not the first, else he wouldn’t give neoadjuvant cytarabine for a sarcoma, and probably not the latter two since another, overoptimistic MD does the actual surgery. Can a psychologist perform interviews for what she admits will be her PhD thesis without getting informed consent? How can a surgeon say with any certainty that “everything will be fine” minutes after performing what she admitted to be a difficult operation for a tumor with a relapse rate north of 50%. You know, the 50% that gave the movie its name.

Still, thumbs up.

Directed by Jonathan Levine, 2011

Extraordinary set pieces strung together by the thinnest of plots, based on an absurd, sitcom-worthy failure to communicate. A particular subplot should have been spun off as a buddy cop movie.

The Ray-Luke-Kylo triangle should have been a bigger part of the movie, but then many of the new characters, the ones that aren’t white and/or men, would have nothing to do. Such are the problems of building on an old and popular franchise: you can’t both stay true to the roots and change with the times.

It has cute animals and looks good in 3D though, so Dora (5.4) approves.

Directed by Rian Johnson, 2017

Inception for the Disney Franchise Age of American cinema. Trying to be deliberately inoffensive to a particular class of consumer, it dodges Mickeydom’s most glorious moments of cultural sensitivity only to fall on the sword of blandness. But credit where it is due — it takes talent to make a trippy 60s comic book that’s oddly relevant in today’s world of magic mystery turmoil into a boring, predictable, dull, uninspired, yawn-inducing, delta wave-producing, paint-by-numbers origin story.

And if you thought only the Strange-ness was fumbled you must not be a doctor, because his day job features the most laughable medicine this side of the Human Centipede. Though I shouldn’t complain too much — I imagine aerospace engineers cringe an order of magnitude more when watching any other Marvel miracle.

Thumbs down.

Directed by Scott Derrickson, 2016

Every ballet metaphor told and/or written by dancers, visualized: you don’t feel like a swan, you become one; competitiveness means murdering the competition; and liberating yourself from constraints is suicide. It is on the nose and at times painful to watch, but I would not expect anything else from the master of the afterschool special.

Portman is a pro: she gets you to swallow the banal white swan/black swan analogy whole, and ask for more, goes through every exercise in Aronofsky’s mental torture playbook like it’s nothing, and looks believably cool and composed until she believably isn’t. Watching her in this movie makes a certain trilogy an even bigger crime against directing.

Thumbs up.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky, 2010

Derivative drivel.

Directed by Chan-wook Park, 2013

A solid attempt in recreating musical films of old that succeeds in all the technical details — the cuts are smoother, the camera livelier, the sets more real — but fails in a thing that matters more: talent. Literally anyone (yes, anyone) from the cast of Hamilton would have been a better choice for Bigeye’s partner. Heck, Justin Timberlake would have made more sense, being a human being of actual musical ability, and if you are forcing me to recommend Curly for a role in your movie, your have miscalculated horribly.

The only way Gosling would possibly have made sense was if you were making a point that anyone could sing, but then don’t make the character a musician, and better don’t do that movie at all since it had already been done much better on TV 15 years ago by a man who knows his musicals. And this is clearly not what Chazelle was trying to do, what with him incorporating high-level bizarre dance numbers and movie-making subplots reminiscent of the greatest American movie ever made.

Emma Stone is a real jewel, though.

Directed by Damien Chazelle, 2016

A faux-continuos shot of a washed-up superhero movie star trying to stage a Broadway comeback. The way it plays with space and time is admirable, and the law company of Keaton, Norton & Stone does their job with perfection, but the subject matter is so far up Hollywood’s large intestine that Birdman should best be compared to another well-known continuous shot.

It is on-your-nose pretentious, and artsy by design, yet too loaded with contemporary references to become timeless. Its one deep message — the one about criticism — was much better stated, and with a more positive attitude, a decade ago in an animated film about a rat. Iñárritu must have made it on a dare.

Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, 2014