Shazam! is the most consistently entertaining film Warner Bros has released as part of their DC Extended Universe tales. It’s an enjoyable lark that taps into some pretty sensational giddy juvenile wonders, it’s massive heart overflowing in themes about kindness, responsibility, friendship and family that are nothing short of timeless.

Crawl is an unpretentious creature-feature from The Hills Have Eyes and High Tension filmmaker Alexandre Aja that’s every bit of gnarly fun as its ludicrous premise makes one hope it is going to be.

Stuber is a fun little trip into the ridiculous, and while I’m not about to give this cinematic rideshare a five-star rating, it seems to me three out of four should be more than adequate.

Anchored by a superb performance from comedian, author, podcaster and essayist Maron and featuring wonderful supporting works by all three of his primary costars, especially a delightfully anarchic Watkins, Sword of Trust is a fast-paced O. Henry meets Mark Twain meets Tom Wolfe-like absurdist lark that sent me out of the theatre smiling.

There is a lot to unpack where it comes to Midsommar, and a lot of it is definitely, a defiantly, worthy of additional dissection and debate.

The fun of Spider-Man: Far from Home is watching the younger members of its cast agreeably interact with one another, and if the actual heroic parts of the tale could have generated maybe a third of that same intoxicating ebullience maybe I’d have found this latest MCU effort to be a bit more memorable.

It’s been an interesting experiment, revisiting my Top 50 Films 2000-2009. If nothing else, doing this solidifies in my mind the thesis that opinions about cinema, about any artistic endeavor, are not set in stone. That they are destined to change over time.

Langseth lays her story out with a caring specificity that kept me wanting to learn where things would go next, and for my part I found the character-driven honesty of Euphoria difficult to resist.

Wild Rose is a universally aspirational story of retaining one’s individuality in the face of societal roadblocks that prefer conformity and the status quo over anything unique, its songs of faith, family and friendship worth singling along with.