In his role as Steve, the miner (as opposed to minor) character at the heart of A Minecraft Movie, Jack Black is almost ferally over the top.

Yes, a horned, magical creature does perish – at least twice. But forget its demise(s): Nothing that happens to the apparently not-mythical beast is quite as grisly as what happens to most of the movie's humans, our collection of potential victims including a Big Pharma titan and a grown man who seemingly doesn't own a pair of long pants. So, you know … it's okay to laugh if they die.

Garsh … so many thoughts on a live-action Disney reboot that, in all honesty, is barely worth a single thought. In honor of the support staff whose collective moniker has been dumped from the original Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs title, here are a septet of paragraphs on director Marc Webb's and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson's Snow White, accordingly themed to each individual Dwarf.

For roughly two-thirds of its length, director David Yarovesky's largely stationary thriller Locked is like 127 Hours if the boulder were played by Anthony Hopkins.

“You know which reviews of yours I really like?” asked a friend not long ago. “The short ones.” Taking that as a compliment for my more succinct pieces and not as the insult it almost certainly was, here are 300-word takes on the half-dozen movies I saw between Thursday and Sunday. They're presented in order of viewing, and preceded by five-word synopses that might, in effect, provide greater impetus to see or ignore said films than the subsequent wordage ever could.

An iconic title from Hong Kong's legendary writer/director Wong Kar-wai enjoys a special screening in the Figge Art Museum's springtime Free Film at the Figge series, with In the Mood for Love, on March 27, treating audiences to a work the New York Times called "breathtakingly gorgeous," and one that was included on Sight & Sound's esteemed list of the greatest motion pictures of all time.

Bong's latest may not be Parasite, but the writer/director's adaptation of Edward Ashton's 2022 novel Mickey7 is still an almost overwhelming amount of fun.

So. Who won Best Actress?

I'm kidding … although the answer to that question did come later than I would've preferred.

I may not have understood all the machinations involved in bringing our aquatic hero back safely, but I believed that Last Breath's helmer and cast knew what they were doing, and in the end, that was far more important.

This is an insane year for the Oscars.

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