If you're one of those people who, for personal or professional reasons, simply has to catch a new movie every weekend, your wide-release choices this time around were director Francis Lawrence's spy thriller Red Sparrow and director Eli Roth's remake of Death Wish. In other words, you could either see the one in which Jennifer Lawrence is routinely beaten, tortured, and raped, or the one in which Bruce Willis drops an elevated car directly onto a bad guy's head. Apples and apples, really. And both experiences were kind of rotten to the core.

From its first minutes, this slapstick by directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein is the complete opposite of a disappointment – a cleverly plotted, utterly riotous comic adventure with no agenda beyond delivering a great time, which it does with almost disarming confidence and skill. I don't want to review the film so much as send it a thank-you note.

Amateurishness in a movie is almost never a virtue, and certainly shouldn't be one when the movie's director is Clint Eastwood. But The 15:17 to Paris – Eastwood's dramatic reenactment of events leading to a foiled 2015 terrorist attack – is a special case.

If the news is true, and Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread does indeed mark Daniel Day-Lewis' retirement from acting, it's an occasion for remorse, if also delight that the legendary performer is at least going out on a high note. (The movie is deservedly nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director, and Actor.) But woven into the sadness of “No more Daniel!” is a very specific kind of regret, because man is it a shame the guy didn't make more comedies.