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.

Hailed by the New York Times as an “engrossing” entertainment with “evocative Southern charm,” the Oscar-nominated dramatic comedy Fried Green Tomatoes enjoys a quartet of 30th-anniversary screenings as the fifth presentation in Fathom Events' seventh-annual TCM Big Screen Classics series, its May 9 through 13 run at Rave Cinemas Davenport 53rd 18 + IMAX treating audiences to a beloved favorite that Rotten Tomatoes describes as “powerfully effective.”

In the latest presentation in the Kinogarten series of German works screened on the first Friday of every month, Rock Island's Rozz-Tox and Davenport's German American Heritage Center co-host an outdoor May 7 showing of The Tin Drum, the dark dramatic comedy from 1979 that became the first movie from Germany, or in German, to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.