a) Them That Follow
Sometimes I won't even hear about a movie until it pops up one day on an OnDemand menu and I'm intrigued, which was the case for Them That Follow, which apparently premiered at Sundance last year but never got a wide release or awards season buzz. The cast, which includes Olivia Colman, Walton Goggins, Kaitlyn Dever, and Jim Gaffigan, really caught my eye, and the Pentecostal snake handling stuff is an interesting community to set a story in. However, as the movie went on, it became kind of a simple, not terribly interesting story about Alice Englert and Thomas Mann as star-crossed lovers, and the rest of the cast felt a little overqualified to play an Appalachian version of Montagues and Capulets.

b) Ma
I wasn't sure what to make of this movie when it came out or whether I wanted to see it. But I'm not gonna lie, the photoshopped posters kinda pushed me in the direction of seeing it. And I kind of dig that the director of The Help wanted "to do something really fucked up" and got a script from Blumhouse and tailored it to Octavia Spencer so she could play against type as a lead. I'm sure it would be a very different movie as it was originally written with a white lady with no backstory in the lead role, but  it took on a lot of subtext as a black woman that's been wronged and taken for granted by two generations of obnoxious white people. It gets a little over-the-top at times but overall I thought it was a pretty solid thriller with a couple of big laughs.

c) Alita: Battle Angel
I've always admired Robert Rodriguez for his dyi roots and his ability to make action movies on smaller budgets with more practical effects than his contemporaries, so it's interesting to see him helm a big $170 million budget James Cameron production, which still has kind of a bright cartoony Spy Kids aesthetic, in addition to the movie's most distinctive feature, Rosa Salazar playing the cyborg title character with giant CGI'd anime eyes. But what I really liked about the movie was the cast, Christoph Waltz and Mahershala Ali and Jennifer Connolly all grounded the movie pretty well and kept it from being just a big noisy fx showcase.

d) Creed II
This was a decent enough sequel that hit all the necessary notes well enough. But it definitely felt a little like Ryan Coogler being too busy with Black Panther to do another Creed movie doomed it a little bit to not measure up to the original, nothing wrong with Steven Caple Jr.'s direction but it just didn't pop in the same way.

e) Anna
I like Luc Besson's violent action movies way more than his space operas, and this one was pretty good. It was the right role that required a kind of icy intensity that made for an ideal model-to-actress transition project for Sasha Luss, Helen Mirren was great, and the fight choreography was just unreal.

f) Godzilla: King Of The Monsters
This had more actual Godzilla in it than the 2014 Godzilla and was better overall, but I still feel like all of America's modern 9-figure budget Godzilla movies are just tremendously missing the point by inserting these vaguely respectable human dramas with actors like Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga into them. 

g) Tolkien
Nicholas Hoult has a weird waxy look and limited acting range, I sometimes have trouble buying him playing a human being, much less a famous author, so this didn't do much for me.

h) Redcon-1
My wife and I have always watched horror movies on Valentine's Day, it's a little tradition of ours. But often we kind of just click around and arbitrarily pick the first streaming movie that seems a little interesting, so we often end up watching a pretty bad horror movie. This British zombie movie kinda felt like a more low rent 28 Days Later, was moderately well paced and watchable but I don't know if I'd recommend it.

i) A Shaun The Sheep Movie: Farmageddon
Shaun The Sheep isn't the top of the top Aardman Animations franchises for me, but it's really cute and I've always enjoyed when my kids have watched the series and the first movie, so I liked the silly flying saucer-themed sequel.

j) Woody Woodpecker
My son was watching this 2017 movie and I was very amused to look it up and learn about the enormous popularity of Woody Woodpecker cartoons in Brazil going back for decades. This movie was filmed in Canada with English dialogue, but only released on VOD in America while it got a big theatrical run in Brazil. Otherwise, though, pretty mediocre kid's movie.

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