Despite having appeared in six Marvel Cinematic Universe features and having ascended to the leader of the Avengers by its Endgame audiences never really got to know Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow. Whereas other core team members like Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, and even multiple Hulks were the subject of multiple standalone stories to flesh out their backstories, the history and motivations of reformed Russian spy Natasha Romanoff was always left to a series of offhand allusions to a vaguely dark, cryptically complicated past. Alas, it took a tragic sacrifice (and then a pandemic delay) to give her the spotlight she deserved, albeit in flashback form to fill in the long-missing pieces.

The latest entry in the globe-spanning multi-billion dollar Fast and Furious Saga is the most hilariously stupid thing I’ve seen by a hundred dozen carlengths. Whether you see this as awesome or awful will almost certainly depend on the expectations that you bring to the racetrack.

A common dictum of storytelling is “show, don’t tell.” With his new documentary about brothers Ron and Russell Mael, self-professed superfan Edgar Wright can’t resist doing a whole lot of both when it comes to Sparks, his favorite band. It is an indication of their relentless productivity that two and a half hours is barely enough time to scratch all the surfaces of a lifelong musical collaboration with roots in another band they formed back in 1967 as undergrads at UCLA all the way to a present day re-discovery and revival.

As theaters re-open, I wondered how long “the magic of cinema” would add its shine to new releases. I was on the edge of my seat for A Quiet Place: Part 2 and was thoroughly dazzled by the choreography that filled the screen with magic realism throughout In the Heights. I am sure that more than a small part of my exuberance for those films was seeing them projected in a dark room with a good sound system and a receptive audience. Could that spell extend to an unnecessary sequel to a pretty bad action comedy? Alas, it’s a no from me, dawg.

Set to have been released in March of 2020, just as the country was going into lockdowns, A Quiet Place II was among the would-be blockbuster releases that decided to wait out the virus rather than partake in the premium video-on-demand experiment that became the primary release format of the year. Now, just in time for revised CDC guidance around masks, falling Covid-19 case counts, and increasing vaccination rates, the sequel is poised to be among the first huge cinema-only releases of this cautiously-optimistic new year. Picking up right where the first installment left off, with a family emerging from a long, cautious stretch spent huddled alone and self-sufficient in their surprisingly creaky farmhouse after a terrifying skirmish with deadly alien invaders, it’s timing couldn’t have been better.

Perhaps buoyed by the success of Wicked as villain image rehab or the fact that kids who watch the Star Wars films in numerical order grow up liking Darth Vader, Disney has dipped into its intellectual property vaults to explore the long-burning question of whether that mean fashion designer lady who wanted to skin a bunch of Dalmatians for the purposes of making a coat was ever, at some point, not the embodiment of pure puppy-killing evil.

Late in Roy Andresson’s About Endlessness a man in a cafe watches in awe as snow falls gently outside a cafe window. A soft choral rendition of “Silent Night” accompanies the snowflakes, but no one seems to notice. He interrupts his fellow patrons’ quiet indifference to ask “Isn’t it fantastic?” To their quizzical responses he clarifies, “Everything”. Its as close a thesis statement as you’re going to get from this poetic contemplation of the mundane and profound that unfolds in dozens of short vignettes over seventy-four minutes.

A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window was a literary hit in 2018, one of those page-turners in the mold of the Girl on the Train and Gone Girl with unreliable narration and suspenseful twists. I never read it, but got the sense that a decent share of its sales were hate-readers who threw their copies of the book at the wall in frustration when certain plot points were revealed. After a long time in pandemic release purgatory, Joe Wright’s film adaptation finally drops this weekend. The main selling point is that you can find out what the love/hate for the novel was all about in the span of less than two hours instead of 448 pages.

Having previously transformed Jim from The Office into a globe-trotting action hero, Amazon Studios has now turned their attention to a much easier lift: expanding their Clancyverse to include Michael B. Jordan as a score-settling former Navy SEAL John Clark.