a) The Favourite
Usually when my wife sees a movie without me it's something I was alright with missing, but when she saw The Favourite with a friend I was definitely a little jealous, so I'm glad it finally hit cable. I didn't care much for The Lobster, but Yorgos Lanthimos's directorial sensibility with someone else's script worked really well here. The use of natural light and detailed costume drama production values really immersed you in this world where a true story of a historical figure became this vulgar dark comedy, I loved it, great performances from everybody that got an Oscar or Oscar nom and everybody who didn't.

b) Venom
Tom Hardy is regarded as a major talent who made a rare misstep with Venom but honestly I just never cared for the guy and think he has a history of either giving horrible (The Dark Knight Rises) or blandly serviceable performances (weirdly a non-entity in the title role of Mad Max: Fury Road). So my low opinion of Hardy maybe freed me up a little to enjoy the goofy charm of his Redman-inspired performance as Venom. It's not a good movie, and the best part is towards the end when Michelle Williams literally looks at the camera and says "hey, I'm sorry about Venom." But I did enjoy the more playful second half of the movie, other than the double Mountain Dew dose of Eminem and Run The Jewels songs that play over the credits.

c) Robin Hood
I can't believe it's already been almost a decade since the last underperforming Robin Hood movie, and it still feels like they tried to do another one too soon. The idea of Taron Egerton as Robin Hood and Jamie Foxx as Little John looks fun on paper, like it could be a broad over-the-top thing in the style of Kingsman or Django Unchained. But it didn't really feel like they had much of a vision for it as a popcorn movie or as a more serious movie. Bono's daughter Eve Hewson was cute as Maid Marian, but even that made me think I would've rather watched an outright terrible movie where Bono plays Robin Hood.

d) Night School
Tiffany Haddish's first lead role in a movie after her breakout performance in Girls' Trip as a foil to Kevin Hart seems like a good idea, but it's mostly just the usual Kevin Hart show with a few good Haddish scenes. The one thing I found memorable about this movie was the last 15 minutes -- they kind of bring the story to what seems like it will be an inevitable resolution, and then there's a twist and a character has to put in more work for their happy ending, I really liked that.

e) Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
I don't really feel that strongly about the original Jurassic Park even though I saw it at a pretty young impressionable age, but I will say that just about every subsequent sequel has been worse than the last and has made the first movie seem better. This one seemed to at least try to amend for Jurassic World in one respect by letting Bryce Dallas Howard get to be a bit of a badass, but otherwise I would say it's of a piece with the consistent decline of the franchise throughout its lifespan.

f) The Spy Who Dumped Me
I enjoy movies like this that find humor in the contrast between action movie tropes and rom com tropes, but it's hard not to compare this unflatteringly with one of my favorite comedies of the last few years, the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy. This was fun, though, the generic spy movie stuff with Justin Theroux was well done and Kate McKinnon kind of carried the movie more than the ostensible lead, Mila Kunis.

g) Ferdinand
Another movie where Kate McKinnon is the funny but overqualified sidekick, except in this one she's an animated goat. The Story of Ferdinand was one of my favorite books when I was a little kid, so there was something distinctly depressing a couple years ago when I started seeing commercials for the movie adaptation and the gist was "John Cena is the bull and he farts." But my son likes the movie now and it's moderately charming, as much as it bums me out that the narrative of the book is basically an afterthought in the movie's plot.

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