It’s dumb. It’s loud. It barely makes a lick of sense. But unlike its predecessor, Venom: Let There Be Carnage is also a heck of a lot of fun.

Shang-Chi kicks butt, just not enough of it to fully satisfy.

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.

There is something new about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse that can be traced squarely to the injection of this fresh blood into the proceedings. Miles is a hero anyone and everyone can relate to, making his animated debut a family-friendly present worth heading to the closest theatre to unwrap at any point throughout this holiday season.

Venom is a bad movie.

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.

Spider-Man: Homecoming might just be the most adorable motion picture I see all summer.

Ant-Man proves to be one of the more enjoyable entries in Marvel’s so-called Cinematic Universe (MCU). Unlike Avengers: Age of Ultron, the script by Rudd, Wright, Adam McKay (The Other Guys) and Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) is beautifully self-contained, rarely utilized to set up coming events that are going to transpire inside Thor: Ragnarok or Avengers: Infinity War – Part I. It runs less than two hours, tells its own origin story and, while acknowledging the bigger comic book world it is a part of, isn’t beholden to it.

That’s what The Amazing Spider-Man 2 does best, waste inherent potential. It’s got a great actor as the main character; does almost nothing with him. Has a wonderful actress as the female lead; gives her embarrassingly little to do. Casts two great stars – one up and coming, the other a bona fide Oscar-winner – as the bad guys; gives them precious little of substance to do.