Over the past quarter-century, there have been periods of time – runs of entire years, even – in which I couldn't have fathomed writing the sentence “I wish Ben Affleck made more movies.” Yet as I was driving home from the phenomenally enjoyable Air Jordan origin story Air, which Affleck directed from a stellar Alex Convery script, that was my primary thought, and I'm not embarrassed to admit it. Well … maybe just a little. The guy still has plenty of turkeys to live down.

Even though I couldn't define “paladin” or “druid” to save my soul, I had no difficulty following the storyline. That was kind of the problem. Though based on a role-playing game and not a comic book, this D&D felt like practically every Marvel storyline I'd been following since 2008.

It's not just that director Chad Strahelski's action thriller is great – that it is, for my money, the first legitimately great movie of 2023. But the laughs that I heard (and contributed to) during my weekday-afternoon showing were frequent and joyous, and our Keanu Reeves-inspired “Whoa!!!”s were boisterous and deserved … and there were only about 20 of us there. I can only imagine, with envy, the seismic fun of sharing this knockout experience with 100-plus others.

Everything that's wrong with the super-sequel Shazam! Fury of the Gods is effectively baked into the title. Because if there's one thing that fans of the 2019 film (myself among them) don't want, or at least shouldn't want, it's fury – not when the original's appeal was so firmly grounded in the goofy, amiable, touching, and refreshingly inconsequential.

As a rule, horror sequels aren't supposed to be good. Fifth sequels in any genre aren't supposed to be good. Sequels whose basic M.O. is “Let's do what we've always done … but in a different city!” aren't supposed to be good. And yet, almost preposterously, Scream VI proves to be very, very good – though if that praise seems suspect, I'd be willing to amend it to “very, very entertaining.”

It's still incredibly early in his career to ask this, but is there anything Jonathan Majors can't do?

While Cocaine Beat is both less stupid that it could have been and less stupid than it should have been, I had a surprisingly agreeable time – and so did a high-schooler friend of mine, and my 50-something bestie, and my octogenarian mother.

Of the three showcases to date for Paul Rudd's alternately diminutive and behemoth superhero, Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania is the one I dislike the least. As I see it, credit for that is due to precisely two elements. Compared to Ant-Man & the Wasp, this new adventure has roughly 75-percent more Michelle Pfeiffer; and compared to the 2018 sequel and 2015's original Ant-Man, it has 100-percent more Jonathan Majors.

In a recent Vulture interview, Steven Soderbergh, director of 2012's original Magic Mike, stated that until he saw and adored the movie's London-stage-revue version in 2018, he found “no compelling reason to make a third film.” So now we have the Soderbergh-helmed Magic Mike's Last Dance … and this sequel feels like it still has no compelling reason to exist.

A doc can get away with an unexciting, even bland presentation so long as the story it tells captures and holds your interest, and directors Mila Aung-Thwin's and Daniel Cross' 2014 documentary Atanasoff: Father of the Computer kept me interested, and quite invested, through the whole of its too-short 45 minutes.

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