It would be easy to dismiss Street Fighter as just another video game action adaptation similar in scope and style to the recent Mortal Kombat film.  And it is, approaching its material with a similar wry irony in a constant state of ‘can you believe this?’  at war with a desperate desire to please the very fans who want to take it seriously, as much as Ryu (Koji) wars with his own inner darkness or Ken (Centineo)’s conflict with Ryu over shared envy of the other’s gifts or … any of many different conflicts stuffed into a two-hour running time.  Street Fighter, like its own conceit, is trapped in a tournament of its own making pitting plot against plot against plot against, an endless array of combat with no victory for anyone.

Nathan Fielder’s You Can See Everything is both a tense investigation of one of modern business’s most infamous fraudsters and a genuine investigation into the permeability between reality and fiction and how important that ambiguity is for us to function as human beings.

A showcase for the depths Paul Bettany and especially James Spader have been able to find in their comic book alter egos, Marvel’s VisionQuest falls prey to many of the issues which have plagued the studio’s Disney+ series as a light plot is spread over too more screentime than it can handle and which all the character development in the world can’t hide or fill.  Alternately too full and too thin, VisionQuest is pulled in too many directions at once and waits as long as possible to commit to any of them while trying to preserve surprise to a point beyond any help it can do the series, leaving the final plot turns and stakes void of the power they want to have.

Alejandro Iñárritu’s Digger is almost the platonic ideal of an Alejandro Iñárritu film, at least his modern incarnation. It is staggeringly well executed, with tremendous technical acumen and exquisitely staged scenes of buffoonery, all in service of a point so painfully obvious that his insistence on its importance ultimately ruins his own movie.  Filled to the brim with some truly delightful absurdity and well-staged madness, it’s less focused on technical virtuosity the way Birdman or The Revenant was, actively using its minutely observed production design and staging in service of its story rather than the other way around.  It’s just that the story it’s in service of is kind of lame.

The successful revolt of the put-upon working class over fatuous elites trying to control their lives is obviously attractive, especially in the current moment, but the need to anchor it with studio filmmaking requirements reduces its impact and removes whatever we could learn from its history.

It’s not The Beekeeper – the new milestone for modern, absurd, tough-man action-fantasy and very specifically the Jason Statham variant of that type – but as a piece of reliable action entertainment is reminds why Statham is so good at (or at least useful for) this type of thing.  The follow up from Plane director Jean-François Richet’s action discursion about an accidental action discovery of slavery and Indonesian piracy around a plane, is Boat (which is not what Mutiny’s title is but it really should have been) also about the accidental action discovery of slavery and piracy and the fight against it.  Like his previous film, Richet and company easily recognize how much little the film needs beyond, focusing entirely on blood, knives, bullets and Statham methodically dismantling anyone unfortunate enough to get in his way.  It would be easy to describe it as run-of-the-mill, which is entirely accurate but not at all descriptive. It’s more likely cinematic comfort food; not very good for you but frequently exactly what you want.  In the face of it, it is easy to pine for the batshit insanity of Statham’s wilder endeavors (can’t a man shoot at least one helicopter down with a handgun?) but Mutiny is competent enough which is an enjoyment of its own.

Coyote vs. Acme is a far better movie than it has any right to be, even if it’s not all that it could be.  Occasionally character focused, a little angry and sharper focused than one might expect and most of all funny, it can’t quite live up to the Who Framed Roger Rabbit? standard, but maybe it doesn’t need to.  Taken on its own merits there’s enough self-awareness to give it more heft than this kind of film often manages:  a corporate oriented piece of IP-exploitation about the nihilism of IP-exploitation and the banal villainy behind it.  Self-aware lampshade hanging doesn’t by itself induce quality – see the mixed success of Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers for proof of that – but Coyote at least attempts to add something like real insight on top of the meta narrative.

There are two types of films that it is easy to write about: the very good and the very bad.  Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is both easy and difficult to write about. Easy, because the film has a clear and deliberate argument about Homer’s epic and its meaning in the modern world, and difficult because of that argument.  Rather than simply recreate the well-known episodes of Odysseus’ journey, Nolan choses to engage with them at their core, challenging the story’s assumptions, and asking what it means to a contemporary audience.  It is a complete recontextualization of one of Western literature’s foundational works and one that can only be described as modern.

The old saying is ‘you can’t go home again.’  Not just because it has changed from remembrance, if not been lost to time entirely, but because we’re not the same individuals who left it.  It exists purely as the thing we remember, a fact reality is always a poor comparison to and which we are often inevitably let down by.  That doesn’t stop us from continually wanting to, however, or continually trying.  Moana certainly wants to, both the film and its central character played by newcomer Catherine Laga’aia.

There is, we keep hearing, a dearth of adult-oriented films coming from Hollywood.  A focus on kid’s films, animation and four quadrant blockbusters has sucked up all of the resources and creativity of the studio system, leaving little behind to compete with the kinds of films we used to make. 

An unfortunate mix of some of the worst instincts of modern big budget filmmaking and some truly inspired casting offering promise for the future, Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl is an occasionally compelling entry in the latest version of DC films.  Anchored by an excellent performance from Milly Alcock, it presents a vision of Kadddra Zor-El defined by grief, cynicism and dislocation which may not necessarily be everyone’s ideal for a fun summer superhero film.  Built in intentional contrast to Superman – isolated instead of surrounded by humanity, longing for her past rather than her future, cynical instead of hopeful – it’s dour film which asks much of Alcock to retain interest, perhaps more than is possible or even fair.  And still, even at its end, in search of its own identity.

Visceral, fast-moving and filled to the edges with balletic choreography, Kenji Tanigaki’s The Furious is almost everything you could want from a kung fu movie, even if it’s not quite all that you would want from a film.  Like most films in the genre, a lot of the focus and ingenuity is focused on that level without enough interest to dig deeper, which is not necessarily a problem just a reality of the genre.  The Furious has been touted as the greatest new action epic since The Raid. It is not entirely up to that level of comparison; there is considerably less going on under the hood once you get past the high-wire theatrics and stunt work, but it is the kind of action film we periodically need to remind us why we love the genre in the first place. 

Patrick Wang’s A Bread Factory remains, ten years on, my preference for the best film of the 2010s and one of the best of the 2000s so far.  Intricate, layered, full of constant surprise and humanity it was a filmed play (and that is not at all a pejorative the way it can be) taking the best of classic stage drama as the core of his filmmaking.  A. Rimbaud, Wang’s first film in almost decade, does very much the same thing while being in almost all ways a completely different experience.  A one-man play, shorn of mis en scene, ensemble or anything else to distract from its character or narrative, it nonetheless holds the attention across the entirety of a man’s life.   Thrilling, engaging, difficult, and requiring much of its viewer, A. Rimbaud unique and challenging choices are a prime example of what makes Wang’s filmmaking so interesting and intricate to begin with.

Steven Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is one of his most frustrating offerings, visually inventive but also reductive and regressive. Working with many of his favorite collaborators from 50 years of filmmaking—including writer David Koepp, composer John Williams, and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski—has produced a film very much like many of the ones he has made over that time span. Stylistically immaculate, crafted at the highest level, and filled with recognizable flourishes, Disclosure Day offers little in the way of new visual or thematic discovery. Its imagery recalls War of the Worlds and Minority Report, and frequently, deliberately, reaches further back toward the awe-struck vocabulary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, revealing similar thematic thinking that was fresh and interesting in the 1970s but has not evolved in any real way since then. The result is a film that looks effortlessly accomplished, but also strangely recycled.

After a more successful than not second bite at the apple of making a Mortal Kombat film, something that had already been done somewhat successfully once, Simon McQuoid and the Atomic Monster team are back to take a second bite at the apple of making a Mortal Kombat sequel, something that previously only been a miserable failure and quite possibly one of the worst films ever made.  So low bar.  And mostly successfully cleared!  Taking lessons learned from his first attempt at a “grounded, R-rated Mortal Kombat film” McQuoid and company have ditched most what didn’t work the first time around, along with some of what did, and ended up making something not too different from Paul W.S. Anderson’s first attempt at the franchise thirty-some odd years ago.

Star Wars animation has come a long way.  In its earliest days, well in its earliest days it was a standard Saturday morning license arrangement producing innocuous cartoon commercials in the Transformers/GI Joe era.  And it could have easily remained that way.  Instead, after the conclusion of the Prequel Trilogy, George Lucas decided to turn to animation as means of continuing his story with a focus on quality and storytelling.  The result was … strange, a near anthology of the effects of the Clone Wars (and by extrapolation, war in general) on cast of dozens, bouncing across time and space to tell everything from war stories to thrillers to lore heavy mystic dives and esoteric comedy to economic focused dialectics on banking and war profiteering.  It was a little bit of everything.

Fixing many of the issues of the first season of Daredevil: Born Again, primarily resulting from the writer replacement and re-configuration the first season went through partway into filming, Born Again season 2 benefits greatly from a more concrete vision and focused storytelling from beginning to end, even as its reach often exceeds its grasp.  Whatever the original, or even second plan had been, Daredevil has been retrofitted into a commentary on modern times, and the authoritarian measures the federal government has been increasingly using on top of the never-ending superhero battle between the Kingpin of Crime (D’Onofrio) and the masked vigilante Daredevil (Cox).  It is an ill-fit at best, hampered by its straightforward style and focus on story exposition over subtlety … Andor this is not. Which doesn’t mean it is not frequently a very good Daredevil series.

The kind of high-minded science fiction Hollywood rarely produces these days, the adaptation of the newest Andy Weir novel is very much like the adaptation of The Martian with enough now familiar ‘Weir-isms’ that the form is starting to be defined.  This includes extended, video assisted epistles to push the exposition along without dragging it down among scattered humor and can-do optimism crashing into supposedly impossible problems.  Within that filmmaking duo Lord and Miller (The Lego Movie) have pulled out a supremely human film buoyed by the friendship between a man and a rock, and a reminder what big-budget studio filmmaking can accomplish.  Project Hail Mary is a breath of fresh air even as it starts to wear out its welcome.

Don’t give up on your dreams and don’t let them fester and die in the exchange for some financial security.  Climg to them and chase them against all odds and common sense until they drive you to madness and murder in their pursuit.  That’s the American Dream in Sam Raimi’s world, or at least within the world of Send Help.  A nightmarish take on the Swept Away genre of castaway romance blended with comedy, cynicism and copious bodily fluids, Send Help is the old school Evil Dead director returned to a dazzlingly bleak and entertaining world built around the question of who is the least vile.

When your previous film concludes with the end of the world, where do you go from there?  Underground to watch the remnants of humanity slowly wither and die in Cormac McCarthy style dive into the pitilessness of nature?  Or as Ric Waugh’s follow up chooses, out into the world to admit (or pretend) it didn’t actually end, it was only mostly dead and decisions for the future must be made after all.