Pixar’s
Coco - Moving and beautiful. I get soppy when watching family drama on airplanes, and this one really did me in. I loved it.
Justice League - fell asleep the first time I watched it, woke up at different places in the story, didn’t care that I had missed stuff. Went back after a snooze and watched the parts I missed. There’s some decent Whedonesque dialog in there, the the effects are OK except for Steppenwolf and Cavill’s missing mustachio. Ezra Miller's Flash is cute. I still like Batfleck. I will watch Gal Gadot do whatever she wants for as long as she wants. Cyborg was moody and poorly CG-animated. Boozy bro Aquamauri didn't work for me, tonally.
The Temple - I like slow burn suspense films, and I like j-horror, but this is just a lethargic mishmash of Japanese horror tropes and mid-2000s creepypasta image-editing “spoooooooky” visuals. The lack of coherence or any explanation of its goals is as complete as it is irresponsible.
The Cloverfield Paradox - Had to unplug my brain with extreme prejudice to enjoy this. It’s filled with so much “That’s not how that works. That’s not how ANY of that works!” that I was eventually able to just shut off my meager physics awareness and go with it. Chris O’Dowd was funny in it. I watched the first ⅓ without English closed-captions, and assumed they were treating Xing Ziying like Chewbacca, and that everyone’s responses were what made her Chinese utterances contextually clear to the audience. Turns out, no, they just relied on subtitles that were not automatically enabled.
Having an international crew who speak some Chinese to the one Chinese crewmember, despite having a Russian and a German who never speak their language natively seemed tone-deaf. Cloverfield license was tacked on clumsily, but the whole movie does everything so clumsily, it's part of its "charm."
edit: Should also admit to seeing
Daddy's Home 2, which was more of what the first one was, but fewer surprises, no weirdo side characters like Hannibal Buress and Thomas Hayden Church. I guess that was supposed to be Lithgow (underused) and Gibson (under-punished).
Lastly,
The Kingsman: Golden Circle was trashed by reviews, but it's a worthy sequel to the first movie. It's nonsensical, humorous, action-packed, with an oddball villain. If NOTHING ELSE, the scenes with Elton John make the movie worth seeing. There's plenty more to enjoy though. Channing Tatum's role is practically a cameo. Part of me wonders if he wasn't supposed to be Agent Whiskey, but then had a scheduling conflict.
