Chris Klimek

In Michael Mann's surprisingly funny 2004 thriller Collateral, assassin Tom Cruise takes meek taxi driver Jamie Foxx hostage, forcing him to spend a terrifying night ferrying the hitman around Los Angeles as they're pursued by lawmen who think the cabbie is the killer.

In Michael Dowse's surprisingly bloody new comedy Stuber, burned-out narc Dave Bautista takes meek Uber driver Kumail Nanjiani hostage, forcing him to spend a terrifying night ferrying the cop around Los Angeles as they're pursued by drug dealers who think the driver is the detective.

For as good as it is, there's just no way to receive Spider-Man: Far From Home as anything more than a vestigial tale, as it were, on the Marvel saga. It's an earnest, well-performed, lovably shaggy radioactive specimen that can't help feeling doubly premature for arriving only half a year after the rapturous Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and a whopping two months behind Avengers: Endgame, the MCU's monumental punctuation mark.

To clear up any potential confusion, let's specify right here that the new action comedy Shaft is a sequel to, not a remake of, John Singleton's 2000 film Shaft. Which was a sequel to, not a remake of, Gordon Parks' 1971 "blaxploitation" landmark Shaft, adapted from Ernest Tidyman's novel but made immortal by Isaac Hayes' Oscar-winning title song.

Godzilla, that tall, irradiated, irritable frenemy of humankind, has starred in more films over the last 60 years than James Bond. The latest, subtitled King of the Monsters, is a sequel to 2014's punctuation-free reboot Godzilla, a city-block-buster that conjured tension and a gathering sense of dread—enough, at least, to give its dynamic correction of San Francisco real estate prices some emotional heft. It was thoughtful and somber about its high, mostly offscreen body count in ways films of this sort frequently are not.

The John Wick movies are what you might call coffee-table action films, the kind where a lot of dudes (and ladies, and gender-nonconforming individuals) get thrown through expensive-looking coffee tables.

John Wick was a genuine surprise four-and-a-half years ago, a revenge flick with just enough intrigue around the margins of stuntmen-turned-directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch's proprietary "gun fu" melees to make you lean in. Screenwriter Derek Kolstad understood that exposition is a killer as lethal as any character he'd dreamt up.

Hellboy, despite its colon-free title, is actually the fifth movie starring the good-guy demon hero (if you count the two animated films that featured the same cast as the live-action films made by monsteur auteur Guillermo del Toro in 2004 and 2008) and it's even more exhausting than this sentence.