It would be wonderful to report that Ghostbusters: Afterlife is great. Hell, it would be wonderful to report that it's nothing more, or less, than goofy dumb fun. But if you only smile four times (I counted) over the course of two hours, I'm not sure that qualifies as having fun.

Belfast's overall tone is child's-view fanciful – a rose-tinted (albeit mostly black-and-white) love letter to the formative people and places of Kenneth Branagh's youth – but with added dollops of painful real-world experience that make for an awkward, not entirely successful blend. The movie is oftentimes touching and funny, and I was continually engaged. I just never quite bought what its writer/director was selling.

Wes Anderson may be the only living American auteur whose very name gives you everything you need to know about a movie, yet almost nothing in terms of its specifics.

Had the Circa '21 Dinner Playhouse's holiday production Winter Wonderland been staged last year as originally intended, it would have marked a significant anniversary, given that it would have been 20 years since the previous version of this Christmas-themed musical revue debuted on the Rock Island stage. But with the dinner theatre closed for the holidays in 2020, Winter Wonderland, running November 10 through December 29, is now returning to Circa '21 – in altered form – for this year's yuletide season instead. And although a 21st-anniversary presentation may not have the marketing value of a 20th-, staging the revue in 2021 does provide a different number to celebrate.

After an appealing opening half-hour, this odd, ultimately unsatisfying blend of time-travel adventure and horror yarn grows more ludicrous and lifeless as it progresses, and by the finale, you can't even recognize it as an Edgar Wright film anymore. While there's a great beat, at least initially, I'll be damned if I could dance to it.

According to North American folklore, the mythical creature known as the jackalope is a jackrabbit outfitted with antelope horns. But what if one was French? And interfered with your plans to get to Burning Man? And was making his debut at a theatre near you? Then you'd have “Jacques”alope, a world-premiere one-act running November 4 through 13 at the Davenport venue the Mockingbird on Main.

While it may not be a “complete” entertainment quite yet (and as of this writing, no followup is contractually guaranteed), there's so much that's engaging and inventive and glorious about the Dune world according to Denis Villeneuve that the movie practically nullifies your complaints while they're occurring to you. That's not to say I didn't leave with a few; I just didn't mind them much.

While Ridley Scott's latest is ultimately engrossing, if for deeply complicated and largely upsetting reasons, I couldn't help but find my thoughts also drifting away from its #MeToo angle and toward a familiar fairy tale, as one third of the film is too hot, another third is too cold, and the final third is … . Well, it's not just right, but it certainly believes it's right.

Blending horror with the Bee Gees era will absolutely be intentional on October 21 and 22, when Ballet Quad Cities hosts its fall fundraising performances of Halloween Disco Party at the Clubtwo nights of groovy/spooky vignettes performed at Davenport's Outing Club by the talents of the Quad Cities' professional dance company.

No Time to Die is more of the same – and at 163 minutes, a lot more of the same – but with heightened yet human-scale threat, as well as an emotional urgency that makes the old feel close to new.

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