It arrived a few days late, but the undisputed movie tearjerker of 2023 finally landed in '24 with Thursday's Netflix debut of Society of the Snow, writer/director J.A. Bayona's foreign-language survival thriller about the 1972 Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 disaster.

In its new musical incarnation, The Color Purple isn't a very good movie. But I'm not sure how much that matters.

I didn't “attend” the first film in my three-day sextuple feature so much as “plop my ass on the couch and watch” it. And for the first hour-or-so of director/writer/producer/star Bradley Cooper's Maestro, which started streaming on Netflix this past Wednesday, I couldn't imagine wanting to be anywhere else.

Writer/director Paul King's musical-comedy prequel Wonka isn't hard to enjoy. Yet I'd argue that it'll be even easier if you manage to divorce yourself from memories of previous Willy Wonkas – Roald Dahl's, for sure, but also Gene Wilder's and Johnny Depp's.

Its setting may be wintry New England in the early '60s, and its story may conclude on Christmas Day, but don't even think about mistaking director William Oldroyd's Eileen for feel-good seasonal fare: It's a cup of eggnog deliciously laced with strychnine.

The central figures in this thrillingly unsettling dramatic comedy are constantly projecting images of themselves as they desperately hope to be perceived, yet all three of them are deeply deluded – and only one of them will emerge unscathed with delusions blissfully intact.

Walking into our auditorium for Ridley Scott's Napoleon and not entirely looking forward to the experience, I half-jokingly told my brother and sister-in-law that we were at least catching the two-hour-40-minute version, and not the promised four-hour director's cut that will at some point stream on Apple+. But while I had more than my fill of turkey over Thanksgiving weekend, I'm happy to now eat a little crow, because Scott's historical epic is utterly sensational – bold, thrilling, unusual, and frequently very, very funny.

The rare prequel that actually makes a solid case for its existence, director Francis Lawrence's terrific dystopian thriller kept me invested for the entirety of its two-and-a-half hours – even if it was slightly odd that this big-budget, large-scale return of cinematic YA lit is wholly stolen by its grown-ups.

While experience tells me that I should already be leery of whatever Alexander Payne does for a followup act, I sure did enjoy his latest a lot.

If you know in advance that writer/director Sofia Coppola's latest film is going to cover the life of Priscilla Presley from the week of her introduction to Elvis to the day she walked out of Graceland for good, and also know that only one performer is going to play the role from ages 14 through 27, your first sight of Priscilla lead Cailee Spaeny might come as a shock.

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