WAY behind on movies; it’s been more than two months, and that adds up, even at less than one movie a week.

“Five Feet Apart” is a “young dying people in love” movie. It is a pretty solid example of a bizarre and highly questionable micro-genre.

“Wonder Park” is a strangely narrowly targeted animated thing. It’s a bit too complex and scary for really young kids, and offers NOTHING for anyone with the least pretense of adulthood.

“Shazam” is a fun and silly almost-spoof superhero movie. It benefits a great deal from the trend for stories about obscure and unloved characters to be better than expected.

“Hellboy” ties a large quantity of mangled Arthurian legend into the Hellboy universe, and the result is a train wreck that manages to be moderately amusing anyway. 

“Teen Spirit” is a triumph of the underdog story that happens to be largely based in real life. It’s a well done example of a genre that is reliably hard to mess up.

“Missing Link” is an animated thing that marginally exceeds it significantly low expectations.

“Dumbo” has some great effects, but suffers from its central conceptual flaw: the original movie STARRED Dumbo, and in this version, he is really only a McGuffin around which the human actors circle. Given that the original plot was a soap bubble, it’s not surprising that the resulting story is far less than compelling.

“The Avengers: Endgame” has a silly/ stupid plot, and an epicly lame villain, but it has MANY (probably too many) really wonderful character moments that pretty much pay the freight.

“Tolkien” is a moderately accurate, rather sleepy, and somewhat pretentious rendition of the first half of Tolkien’s life. The last line of the movie isn’t spoken, but rather calligraphed, and if you didn’t know what it was going to be before the pen hit the paper, you weren’t paying attention. It ripped my heart out anyway.

Uncle Hyena