Over the course of three hours and nine minutes, there's one sensationally effective, entertaining, and even educational sequence in Damien Chazelle's Babylon even if, like everything else in this wildly indulgent and obnoxious old-Hollywood saga, it, too, eventually gets royally effed up.

As a special year-end gift for the Quad Cities theatre community in general and fans in particular, the Haus of Ruckus duo of T Green and Calvin Vo will deliver one final 2022 evening with their comedic counterparts Johnny and Fungus in A Very Ruckus Holiday Special, which will be staged at Davenport's Mockingbird on Main on December 30 in tandem with a live-streaming option. And if you thought the team responsible for the nutty adventures “Pants” Labyrinth in the spring and Random Access Morons in the summer was done for the year after their November presentation Spooky Pete, you're not alone, because as Vo admits, “We also thought we were done for the year.”

You know a movie about terminal illness is in trouble when it asks you to spend more time feeling sorry for the dying person's caregiver than it does for the person who's doing the dying. That, I'm afraid, was my chief hindrance in enjoying Spoiler Alert, director Michael Showalter's friendly, irritating dramedy about long-term life partners that keeps putting the emotional emphasis on the wrong partner.

Before discussing the very, very Bad Santa at the heart of director Tommy Wirkola's Violent Night, I want to address this grisly action comedy's other heroic perpetrator of bloody mayhem. Because despite the commitment that David Harbour lends to his portrayal of a jolly old elf by way of The Northman, seven-year-old Trudy Lightstone (endearingly enacted by Leah Brady) is easily the film's more interesting figure, largely for being the only movie character I can think of to truly call out the insidious irresponsibility in that holiday “classic” Home Alone.

As you may recall from 2019's comedic whodunit Knives Out, the soon-to-be-deceased Harlan Thrombey and his soon-to-be-accused caregiver Marta Cabrera ended every evening with a friendly round of the board game Go. I mention this because, after seeing Rian Johnson's continuation Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, I've realized that reviews of this burgeoning franchise for Daniel Craig's Southern-dandy detective Benoit Blanc have been completely superfluous. The only critical analysis these films really require is a simple directive: “Go.”

I remember co-star Seth Roben recently saying that Spielberg was in tears for nearly the entirety of his shoot with him. I'm sure he was. That doesn't mean the rest of us were crying – except, possibly, at the sadly wasted opportunity of it all.

Ingenious, unsettling, and oftentimes riotously funny, director Mark Mylod's The Menu has been prepared exactly the way I most enjoy my satire: blackened to a crisp. While its thematic and presentational inspirations are unhidden and encompass everything from Hell's Kitchen to Midsommar to Fantasy Island, what this savage comedy chiefly reminded me of was Don't Look Up, last year's end-of-days spoof that ended on the bleakest of all possible notes.

All throughout writer/director Ryan Coogler's superhero sequel, there are lovely grace notes, particularly in the actors' readings, that both suggest and demonstrate the haunting loss of original Black Panther T'Challa and, by extension, his unmatchable portrayer Chadwick Boseman. Nearly everything directly concerning the character's and the star's absence is moving. It's nearly everything else, unfortunately, that goes wrong.

For fans of family-friendly improv comedy, our long local nightmare is about to be over. Because as of November 11 and 12, after a three-year hiatus, ComedySportz Quad Cities finally returns to the area with opening-weekend shows at the organization's new home base: the newly refurbished Spotlight Studio located on the lower level of Moline venue the Spotlight Theatre.

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