You may have heard Love, Simon described as a gay Sixteen Candles – or a gay anything-by-John-Hughes – and it's kind of true, as this coming-out comedy is just as blithe, funny, well-meaning, and contrived as any of Hughes' mid-'80s classics, and certainly just as sensitive to the plight of its teenage protagonist. Yet particularly in its final half hour, director Greg Berlanti's casually revolutionary film is more like a gay Lady Bird – an unerringly truthful, supremely insightful, deeply affecting work boasting more than a half-dozen supporting characters whom you'd eagerly watch in films of their own.

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.

The relentless universe-building of the Marvel Studios output, with its seemingly endless introductions to (cinematically) new heroes and villains, can be exhausting, so I hardly want to make matters more complicated. Yet after seeing writer/director Ryan Coogler's enthralling, imaginative, fantastically enjoyable Black Panther, I'd be totally on-board with nearly a dozen spin-off series for debuting characters – even characters who expire before the end credits roll. I mean, hey, if Saw's serial killer and that Insidious medium can keep coming back for more … .

The presences of Jason Clarke and Helen Mirren, and the film's 1906 setting, may give the proceedings a veneer of class. But Winchester is otherwise standard to its core, complete with the requisite boom!s and bang!s on the soundtrack, the adorable, easily possessed moppet, and the employment of a familiar old-timey tune that attempts, and fails, to give us the heebie-jeebies.