June 2026 [22-28]
Good Morning, Vietnam, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Doctor Strange, Possessor, Black Panther, Thor: Ragnarok, Avengers: Infinity War, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Hot Fuzz
- Good Morning, Vietnam [1987] - 80
In Good Morning, Vietnam we follow radio host Adrian Cronauer as he butts heads with the expressly unfunny leadership of the Saigon Armed Forces Radio Service. As one can predict, Williams is enormously charismatic in his role as DJ, eliciting laughs and evoking an energy few films manage. Alongside Williams’ charm and insane ability to adlib content it would take others decades to write, however, is the story’s insistence on including a few too many characters with a few too many yarns of plot. The journey crescendos around the 94-minute mark with a scene in which Cronauer regains both his confidence and perspective while motivating a group of GI’s live in a traffic jam, knowing that they are off to the killing fields that were the Vietnam War. This scene is incredibly moving, but gets lost in the next 30-minutes of film as we wrap up all sorts of other strands that aren’t nearly as impactful or compelling. This movie is still very good but, like I’ll mention a couple more times this week, 2-hours is just too long for most comedies and, had this been cut down to my golden hour-forty, I think Good Morning, Vietnam would be something I remember for a very long time.
- Spider-Man: Homecoming [2017] - 68
Anyway, back to Marvel. Spider-Man: Homecoming marks the first solo entry for the webslinger, and does a mostly fine job of being interesting. Homecoming starts a little rough by forcing some really hard-to-swallow establishing timelines instead of clever narration and, for most [if not all] of the film, its villain, Vulture, largely outshines Spider-Man himself, sporting what I think is the best physical design in all of the MCU. Aside from these things, Homecoming’s biggest weaknesses are largely unimpressive VFX, and a final conflict that doesn’t actually make much sense. Tom Holland is excellent in the role of the eponymous boy-rachnid, though his surrogate father/son relationship with Iron Man takes away some of his agency in a similar way that John Wick playing a role in the Ballerina spin-off does: We don’t need already established characters to legitimize new ones. While the twist in Homecoming is quite good and I greatly appreciate how fast the characters involved put it all together, this is an overall incredibly average and mostly vapid outing from the franchise.
- Doctor Strange [2016] - 60
Oh prodigy films. Who doesn’t love a good “this person is the chosen one for no reason” story? Along with Black Widow, Doctor Strange is one of the only movies in this whole franchise that I remember actively disliking during my first watch… Which is weird, because I think Strange himself is a very cool character who has been excellently cast and well realized. The issue with this film is that it’s just so… Convenient. Everything about it just sort of lines up in characters’ favors in the stupidest and least justified ways possible. Strange’s cloak is sentient… When it’s convenient. Surgery rooms and broom closets go completely unused… When it’s convenient. Baddies die and goodies live… You get it. Doctor Strange has some excellent VFX that are used in incredibly neat and creative ways, and Cumberbatch is equally fun as the title character, but this movie is just very frustrating and dumb when viewed as anything but a popcorn-munching afternoon distraction.
- Possessor [2020] - 91
Coming back to check in on a film I liked a lot at the time, but remember getting mixed reviews amongst my peers: Possessor is Brandon Cronenberg’s second feature film, and a movie built specifically for me. I absolutely love the weird scifi-horror elements of this movie. I love the way its story is told through dialogue and psychedelic practical effects, instead of repeated conversations about things the characters should know but the audience needs to. I love the intensity and grotesqueness of its violence; Violence that is both hugely gratuitous… And not at all out of place. There’s just so much really excellent worldbuilding and commentary on display here that I find it difficult to even humor some of the criticisms I read online. While certainly not perfect, Possessor is a film I’ll long be referencing and recommending to people who I think are up for it… Because it is very graphic. Again though, I don’t find it graphic for the sake of being graphic and, save for one scene of brief nudity that doesn’t feel necessary, there’s a level of intentionality here that I think many films could learn to follow.
- Black Panther [2018] - 79
Back to it with Ryan Coogler’s [Fruitvale Station, Sinners] MCU entry, Black Panther. This is a movie that’s difficult to talk about without getting into the very weird “USA, USA, USA” propaganda that invades its veins… But I’m going to, because those conversations don’t fit in this small space, and they aren’t wholly unique to Black Panther… They’re just sort of weirder to see here. As a face-value MCU film, Black Panther is really solid. It has an interesting [if linear] story, characters are all meaningful for their own reasons, performances are good, and the soundtrack is excellent. Like many of this franchise’s entries, the VFX look like a horse threw up on a keyboard and turned in the work to a boardroom with the lights off, but that’s kind of the biggest dig here. I wish Black Panther had delved more deeply into the social symbolism of Killmonger and how he both treats and views Wakanda… But meaningful discourse isn’t exactly the MCU’s strong suit. So, less annoying than most, more shallow than I’d like it to be, Black Panther is really good for the crowd it finds itself among.
- Thor: Ragnarok [2017] - 81
A huge departure from the rest of the flavors in this stagnanting soup, Thor: Ragnarok is the exception to my issue with 2-hour comedies. This movie is damn funny with a very clear vision and sense of self from director Taika Waititi. Now, you do have to like Waititi’s style [Our Flag Means Death, What We Do in the Shadows]… But you also should like that, because it’s very good. Leaning hard into the god of thunder’s sillier side, Ragnarok seamlessly moves from the [both literal and narrative] tragedy that was Dark World, and tosses us headlong into a pulsating space-opera of color, danger, and glory. Hemsworth, Hiddleston, Goldblum, Ruffalo, Thompson, and all of their support work off of each other brilliantly to bring this goofy blend of scifi and fantasy together into a total rock-n-roll album of shimmering spectacle.
- Avengers: Infinity War [2018] - 76
Effectively “Part 1” of our 10-year payoff for all the Marvel content up to this point: Avengers: Infinity War is the second film in the franchise that should, itself, have been split into two — the other being Avengers: Age of Ultron, which should have spent an entire film introducing the concepts of Ultron and Vision [a movie I would have called “Visions of Ultron”] before shoehorning both characters out of thin air… But we’re not here for that. Infinity War struggles to fit its vast array of established characters, genuinely interesting baddies, and rapid-fire plot sequences into a 180-minute runtime, choosing to rush through sequences that could [and should] have had more impact in order to get the story where it needed to be by the end. Cool new villains? Eh, throw them out of the airlock or hit them with space trucks. The Infinity Stones that we’ve dabbled in for 20+ movies? Meh, Thanos will just rip through all of them in this single film now, it’s fine. There’s still parts of this that are cool [anything to do with the Reality Stone is pretty top], but there’s a lot more parts that are frustrating and shallow. Oh well, at least Bucky got his Wakandan upgrade of “gun” to match everyone else’s new toys.
- Ant-Man and the Wasp [2018] - 69
Certainly better than the first film, sporting a more interesting overall plot/ conflict, and featuring a way cooler villain, Ant-Man and the Wasp still suffers from the same thing that both its predecessor and Good Morning, Vietnam do: Being too damn loonnngggg. At 1:58 in length, no amount of quips and jibes can sustain a movie like this without some seriously interesting backing to strengthen its fibers. Characters are fine and shenanigans are fun but, at a certain point, the jokes have to give way to more… And there just really isn’t anything else here beyond silly action and practiced laughs while performing phase-based hijinks. Like I said, better than the first film, but still nothing terribly special or particularly memorable.
- Hot Fuzz [2007] - 77
Closing out the week with another action/comedy, Hot Fuzz takes us all the way back to the year of our lord, 2007, and the release of the second film in the “Cornetto Trilogy”. Suffering [again] from one of the same things I just mentioned in Ant-Man and the Wasp, Hot Fuzz is a comedy with a whopping 121-minute runtime, clocking in [barely] as the longest comedy this week outside of Thor: Ragnarok… But that movie breaks this complaint entirely by somehow being truly hilarious start to finish sooooooooooooooooo… Anyway… Hot Fuzz is more of what you loved from previous film Shaun of the Dead, and what would come a few years later in The World’s End. If you like any of these movies, you’re going to like all of these movies and, though you’ll likely have a favorite, they’re as interchangeable as they are fun. While they’re largely remembered for being cattywampus romps that blend comedy with other genres — horror, action, and sci-fi [in that order] —, what I think really makes these stand out is their editing and, in its strongest moments, Hot Fuzz is a masterclass on what I think makes this style great.
