For the eighth Cinema at the Figge presentation, series programmers at Ford Photography will screen writer/director Chloé Zhao's Songs My Brothers Taught Me in a November 30 Figge Art Museum event, with the award-winning feature preceded by short films, live music, and complimentary beer samples from WAKE Brewing.

Last fall's Doctor Strange showed that there were vast, unexplored opportunities in terms of shaking up presentation, with its battle sequences thrilling precisely because they were so unpredictable. This summer's marvelous Spider-Man: Homecoming demonstrated the enormous benefits of going smaller, simpler, and more human. Ragnarok, by contrast, never stops feeling familiar, and even its more out-there flourishes, such as the priceless eccentricity of Jeff Goldbum, don't have long-term impact – they're distractions that momentarily amuse and vanish into the ether.

“He came back from the dead?!”

“It wouldn't be the first time.”

In two lines of dialogue, that might be all you need to know about Jigsaw, the eighth – and quite possibly least-offensive – entry in the Saw franchise, and the first since 2010's now laughably titled Saw 3D: The Final Chapter.

Reginald Hudlin's period/courtroom/race drama – the pleasant start to my latest quadruple feature – is actually inspired by a 1941 case in the career of Thurgood Marshall, who, of course, later became the first African-American appointed to the Supreme Court. In other words, it's kind of like an origin story for the hard-living, harder-fighting lawyer, and the movie's great surprise is that it's closer in spirit to an enjoyable comic-book yarn than the prototypical Oscar Bait its subject matter would seem to dictate.