It’s always a question what McKinnon is going to do next, and by the time she climbed to the top of a Cirque Du Soleil trapeze in full costumed regalia to conduct an aerial battle of wits and wiles with an angry assassin she had me giggling so boisterously I almost fell out of my theatre seat.

“Whether it’s race, whether it’s gentrification, whether it’s police brutality, we’re hoping that people are willing to listen and then talk amongst themselves. We’re not pretending to have any answers.”
– Carlos López Estrada

“I haven’t worked on a project really where the message of it mattered so much to me. It felt like the message I wanted when I was in that time period. To get to do that for other people and even for myself? I loved that. Part of working on this was realizing that it’s chill to be who you are. It felt very good to say that.”
– Elsie Fisher

While my own middle school experiences aren’t ones I’d want to relive, watching Eighth Grade is a trip back to school I’d be happy to take whenever the opportunity to do so might arise.

So when I say Mission: Impossible – Fallout isn’t just the best film of the series but one of the great action epics of our time know that I mean it, McQuarrie lighting the fuse on a piece of high-octane summertime entertainment we’re going to be excitedly talking about for a quite awhile to come.

Yet it is Phoenix, almost all on his own, who makes Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot something that borders on essential.

There is a tonal consistency to The Equalizer II its predecessor never had. Coupled with Washington’s magnetically stalwart performance, I ended up enjoying this sequel just enough to exit the theatre smiling, and as mid-afternoon matinees are concerned there’s just enough that works here to make this predictably explosive thriller easy to recommend.

Newcomer Aislinn Clarke’s confident and sinister debut feature The Devil’s Doorway is a clever twist on the “found footage” subgenre of horror films, her movie more concerned with her three principal characters and their twisting moral ambiguities than it is in unleashing a bunch of nonsensical cheap scares.

I’m as flabbergasted as anyone that I enjoyed Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again as much as I did. But this sequel got to me and did so within in the first few minutes, an opening rendition of “When I Kissed the Teacher” having a sundrenched Technicolor exuberance that’s wondrous.