Directed by Everardo Gout and written, as all of them have been, by James DeMonaco, The Forever Purge is the fifth and purportedly final (sure, whatever) installment in the popular series of horror thrillers, and offhand, it's hard to think of another long-running film franchise that has gotten more mileage out of being not bad.

F9: The Fast Saga opens like Days of Thunder, middles like James Bond, and closes like a Corona commercial. In between those mile markers, the movie also manages to suggest a lost Indiana Jones sequel, a live-action Road Runner cartoon, a week-ending episode of Days of Our Lives, and a biggest-bicep competition in which the only entrants are Vin Diesel and John Cena. Needless to say, I ate it all up with a spoon.

As we discover in Edgar Wright's music documentary The Sparks Brothers, not long after the release of their 21st (!) album, the frontmen for the genre-defying rock outfit Sparks – siblings Ron and Russell Mael – embarked on a live-concert run of all 21 of those albums performed in chronological sequence, one night after another, over the course of 29 days. That's insane.

Had the musical been released last June as originally scheduled, and had there been no pandemic, director Jon M. Chu's film version of In the Heights would no doubt have felt like what it feels like today: a sweet, touching, frequently thrilling bash in which the guest list simply reads “Everybody.” Arriving now, however – and for we Illinoisans, debuting on the very same day the state's COVID-19 restrictions were lifted – Chu's big-screen opus feels like more than a party; it feels like liberation.

There are two absolutely excellent moments in the new horror film The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It. Both moments are scary as all get out and boast images that even this longtime genre fan had never seen before, and Julian Hilliard appears to be a remarkable young actor. If director Michael Chaves' fright flick were actually about that kid and his supernatural turmoil, this second sequel might've really been something.

Like me, you may have been missing the sounds of large movie-going crowds laughing together, or sniffling together, or screaming together. Yet it wasn't until my weekend screening of A Quiet Place Part II that I realized what I've really missed at the cineplex over the past 15 months is the sound – or rather, lack thereof – of a sizable audience making no noise at all.

One of the few professional perks to the pandemic hitting when it did was that I had an excellent excuse to avoid reviewing several spring-of-2020 titles I was quietly dreading, among them the computer-animated Scoob!, an update on the numerous Scooby-Doo series I didn't enjoy even as a kid. As if to punish me for my relief, however, director Tony Cervone's movie opened this past weekend at both local cineplexes and both area drive-ins, all but forcing me to finally cave and watch the damn thing. So I did. It was actually pretty good. I suppose I had that coming.

So I was watching the new horror flick Spiral, a continuation of the lucrative/ludicrous Saw franchise, and after the first 15 minutes had passed, I realized that the strangest thing was happening: I was laughing. Out loud. Frequently. And not derisively.

While there are certainly more noxious performance traits than an obvious, incessant need to be loved, Billy Crystal expends so much energy strong-arming us for adoration and sympathy in this sentimental dramedy that I occasionally found it hard to even look at him. At least Tiffany Haddish is on hand to occasionally make the guy look good – and by “good,” I really mean “less insufferable.”

It turns out that the preview goosing us with the promise of Incredibles-esque fun isn't at all necessary, because TMvtM proves so clever, so exciting, and so consistently riotous that it already feels like a computer-animated comedy classic. It's literally been years since I've laughed so hard at a movie, and I didn't even need a crowd of equally delighted cineplex patrons to keep me roaring – though I sure wouldn't have minded one.

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