CHI-RAQ

Last month, Spike Lee received an honorary Oscar at the 2015 Governors Awards ceremony. It was an earned and long-overdue recognition, especially given that, for many of us, the writer/director's Do the Right Thing should've made him an Academy Award winner more than a quarter-century ago. (Then and now, Driving Miss Daisy notwithstanding, Do the Right Thing remains the true Best Picture of 1989.) But while Lee's statuette may have been late in coming, I can't help but think that the timing of its arrival could hardly be better. His new film Chi-raq, after all, is nowhere to be found in this year's Oscar conversation. Yet its creator deserves trophies and more for this gut-wrenching, hilarious, deeply profound satire that's stronger than at least 95 percent of the year's more-likely awards candidates - and maybe riskier than 100 percent of them.

Amidst time spent with friends and family and copious amounts of food, I caught three double-features over three successive days during Thanksgiving week. And as the end credits rolled on my sixth screening, I realized that the area debuts collectively formed something really unusual for this particular holiday period: a six-course meal with a complete absence of turkeys.

THE HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY - PART 2

Along with a few dozen other, much younger viewers, I caught Wednesday's double-feature of concluding Hunger Games installments, even if my reasons for attending were likely far different from anyone else's. (I really just wanted to lighten my weekend workload and have an excuse to see Philip Seymour Hoffman on the big screen two more times instead of one.) But while I didn't join in my fellow patrons' applause at the close of the awkwardly titled The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2, I was happier with this entry than any since 2012's original, and was glad to have preceded it with Part 1, because it turned out I needed the refresher.

SPECTRE

Watching the opening credits to the new James Bond thriller Spectre, I leaned back in my seat, smiled, and thought, "Man, I love these things." Not Bond movies, per se, but their opening credits. The lushly rendered colors. The serenely gliding camera pans. The artful poses and undulating torsos. The charming, deferential formality of the star's name followed by " ... as Ian Fleming's James Bond 007 in ... ." The mystery of the accompanying pop song, which is as likely to be atrocious as marvelous. (Spectre's "Writing's on the Wall," sung by Sam Smith, leans more toward the former. And call it gender bias or even blatant sexism, but I do think that unless you're Paul McCartney or maybe Simon Le Bon, these duties should really be handled by women.)