Raya and the Last Dragon

At its best, this movie is charming, fascinating and even moving. At its worst, it is superficial, silly and sometimes downright stupid. So I guess you could call it a mixed bag. The strengths: beautiful to look at, emotionally true, and effective in its use of its Southeast Asian cultural milieu (at least as far as a total outsider can tell). The weaknesses: the story, though overall fine, has some real holes in it, not the least of which being, why isn’t everyone immediately on the same page once the dragon shows up, given she is otherwise treated like a god? A lot of the conflict should just melt away once everyone knows who they’re dealing with. Also, the secondary characters, though eventually integral to the climax and resolution, are at first really annoying (and kind of stay that way, to be honest). Given the foregoing, one might expect this to be a mid-range movie—but that would be grading on too steep a curve. After all, I did enjoy much of the film, and what I didn’t appreciate—besides the plainly-selling-to-toddlers silliness—may have been just me missing something culturally. So let’s let this one squeak in just at the barest lower echelon of the PURR range, and declare it a qualified success.

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness

Cameos, assemble! The eyeroll quotient is extremely high here, and a lot of the interest-generation in this outing comes from seeing who shows up where. For all the wizard flash in the title and feature scenes, this flick is at least as much Elizabeth Olsen's movie, which is a good thing, especially as her appearances in the Scarlet Witch outfit (both the official uniform and the Halloween costume) were the best parts of WandaVision. As for the overall story here? The whole thing ultimately plays out like a grandiose extra, final episode of the aforementioned TV series, and barely anything more than that. More and more, I see the superhero genre approaching its end-of-shelf-life--especially if all of the upcoming works are going to hit us again and again with the same characters, struggling for the same stakes, and leaving the viewer with the same sense that we’ve been here before. At least, if you’re a subscriber, you can say you didn’t directly pay for this one. Certainly, only a fool would buy a ticket for this franchise at this point. Let’s see the Mouse wizard its way out of that scenario.