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.

As a minimalist survival thriller showcasing humanity’s continual battle against the forces of nature The Lighthouse is a beacon of low budget indie ingenuity worth shining a positive spotlight upon.

At a certain point the increasing inanity of the situations Will and his family must find a way to overcome become too incredulous to do anything but unintentionally laugh at, all of which makes Skyscraper a towering farcical misfire built upon a foundation of misbegotten nonsense.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is a breezy, fast-paced sequel that goes out of its way to provoke buckets of laughter and massive sighs of wide-eyed awe in pretty in equal measure. It’s a fun film, and other than that I have little more to say.