Over the past quarter-century, there have been periods of time – runs of entire years, even – in which I couldn't have fathomed writing the sentence “I wish Ben Affleck made more movies.” Yet as I was driving home from the phenomenally enjoyable Air Jordan origin story Air, which Affleck directed from a stellar Alex Convery script, that was my primary thought, and I'm not embarrassed to admit it. Well … maybe just a little. The guy still has plenty of turkeys to live down.

It's not just that director Chad Strahelski's action thriller is great – that it is, for my money, the first legitimately great movie of 2023. But the laughs that I heard (and contributed to) during my weekday-afternoon showing were frequent and joyous, and our Keanu Reeves-inspired “Whoa!!!”s were boisterous and deserved … and there were only about 20 of us there. I can only imagine, with envy, the seismic fun of sharing this knockout experience with 100-plus others.

Everything that's wrong with the super-sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods is effectively baked into the title. Because if there's one thing that fans of the 2019 film (myself among them) don't want, or at least shouldn't want, it's fury – not when the original's appeal was so firmly grounded in the goofy, amiable, touching, and refreshingly inconsequential.

As a rule, horror sequels aren't supposed to be good. Fifth sequels in any genre aren't supposed to be good. Sequels whose basic M.O. is “Let's do what we've always done … but in a different city!” aren't supposed to be good. And yet, almost preposterously, Scream VI proves to be very, very good – though if that praise seems suspect, I'd be willing to amend it to “very, very entertaining.”