Over the course of four followups, Michael Bay set the bar for Transformers sequels so staggeringly low that it's almost sky-high praise to say that the series' two more recent prequels, neither of which Bay directed, aren't all that bad.

See enough movies over enough decades – five-plus decades, in my case – and you may begin to wrongly think that cinema no longer has the ability to astonish you. But while I'm hardly going to make the case for the superhero adventure being on par with, say, Citizen Kane or the first two Godfathers, or even Richard Linklater's 2014 Boyhood, I'm not sure that any film released since that latter title has thrilled and awed me quite as profoundly as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

After you've launched your car into outer space, I suppose there's nothing to do but wait for it to crash back down to Earth, and that's basically what happens in Fast X.

Before seeing Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, I wondered, as I always do with these sorts of “finales” to long-running franchises, how difficult it was going to be to review Marvel Studios' latest without diving into spoiler territory. Thankfully, though, most of writer/director James Gunn's trilogy-ender can be easily discussed without addressing significant plot twists or which of our eccentric world-savers, if any, fail to make it to the end credits. It turns out the stuff that bothered me, which was about 80 percent of GotGV3, is right there in the open.