Plane achieves liftoff, and for old-school action fanatics, even if it doesn’t stick the landing, watching it skid wildly off the runway into a ditch with such raucous aplomb is as ridiculous as it is wonderful.

The Old Way is a cold, uncompromising Western that tracks down suspense and tension by moseying down a conventional narrative trail.

Avatar: The Way of Water builds to a final hour of action and suspense that blew me through the theater’s back wall.

Christmas Bloody Christmas is a gruesome slice of holiday cruelty that knows exactly what it is and doesn’t try to be anything else, and that’s exactly as it should be.

Peking Express is a gorgeously shot oddity built on an unstable foundation.

Violent Night does exactly what it sets out to do, and does so with panache, frivolity, and style. It’s a blood-splattered act of resistance, and not since Billy Chapman went on his Silent Night, Deadly Night rampage has a Santa Claus crushed so many skulls as he removes names from his extensive “naughty” list.

Assassination is a fun Italian Cold War thriller that makes precious little sense and frequently feels as if it were edited in a blender and put together with haphazard indifference.

Coogler aims high with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and when the director hits his target, it’s right in the absolute center of the bull’s-eye. But the misses add up.

The good news is that watching Enola run around Victorian London solving crimes, getting into trouble with Tewksbury, and in general making a fiercely independent feminist nuisance of herself remains a great deal of fun.