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.

Lauded by the Boston Globe as “brilliant metaphorical filmmaking,” director István Szabó's 1981 drama Mephisto serves as the latest presentation in the Kinogarten series of German-themed works screened on the first Friday of every month, with Rock Island's Rozz-Tox and Davenport's German American Heritage Center, on July 2, co-hosting their presentation of the first Hungarian movie to ever win the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film.

One of the most intelligent, loving, and hysterical film comedies of the modern era will make a 25th-anniversary return to the big screen when Rave Cinemas Davenport 53rd 18 + IMAX, from June 27 to 30, houses director Mike Nichols' The Birdcage, the riotous slapstick starring Robin Williams and Gene Hackman that the Washington Post's Desson Thomson called “a spirited remake of the French drag farce [that] has everything in place, from eyeliner to one-liner.”

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.

One of the millennium's most successful and beloved film comedies enjoys a 10th-anniversary return to the big screen when Fathom Events and Rave Cinemas Davenport 53rd 18 + IMAX host June 6 through 10 screenings of Bridesmaids, the 2011 smash that earned rave reviews and Academy Award nominations for screenwriters Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo and breakout co-star Melissa McCarthy.

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.

Lauded by the New York Times as “an upsetting and believable study of the disruptive power of unleashed desire,” Free Fall serves as the latest presentation in the Kinogarten series of German works screened on the first Friday of every month, with Rock Island's Rozz-Tox and Davenport's German American Heritage Center, on June 4, co-hosting this award-winning tale that Front Row Reviews called “one of the sexiest and most enthralling gay dramas of all time.”

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.

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