Tron: Ares and Wake up, Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Sequels that continue a franchise.

Tron: Ares

In a world where arcade game machines have enough power to create a fully immersive and digital world that you can enter by "digitizing" yourself, this latest movie of Tron actually goes the other way around where a created program (played by Jared Leto) wants to export itself to the real world. While the effects are much better than the older Tron movies (except the part that intentionally goes old school), there are some major plot holes that you'll need to jump over. Like, if Jared Leto is your best program why wouldn't you just make multiples of him instead of making different, inferior versions? Even non-techy audiences will need to leave common sense at the door.

Wake up, Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

Benoit Blanc (played by Daniel Craig) is back, this time solving an impossible crime in a small parish with a crazy priest and a small congregation of psycho almost-cultists. Like the previous movies this one has good cinematography and a pretty interesting puzzle to solve. While there's a bit of "god bashing" in it mostly done for laughs, I do like that it's tempered with the "good priest". Also, it's definitely better than the second movie (Glass Onion). Recommended! 

Knives Out and Glass Onion

In these mystery movies, world famous detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) investigates the sudden suspicious suicide of a wealthy and famous mystery writer (in Knives Out) and is invited to participate in a murder mystery game by a tech billionaire (in Glass Onion), which turns out to be more realistic than intended. Both cases have numerous motivated and well acted suspects and both are very well shot cinematography wise. While Glass Onion has a nicer setting, Knives Out has a better story.

Juris identified something that turned him off these though - where an Agatha Christie mystery you are given clues as it goes along and at the end can "compare notes" with the on screen detective, these movies give you the answers before our detective works it out. Still an entertaining watch, definitely at least give Knives Out a try.

Venom - Let there be Carnage and No Time to Die

Two poorly written films.

Venom - Let there be Carnage

Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is back to being a downtrodden journalist who must also put up with his brain hungry symbiote, the titular Venom, who is both cool and funny. An incident while interviewing death row inmate Cletus Kasady (Woody Harrelson) inadvertently creates the antagonist for the film but also creates a lot of questions that are never answered.

Why is it red? Bigger? Shoots stuff? Explain please.

With a plot that's not that great and CGI where it might as well be Spiderman vs Doc Ock, there aren't many redeeming qualities here to anyone but fans of the franchise. For me this was much worse than Venom's original outing, and I give it two chickens out of five. You won't miss anything if you skip this one.

No Time to Die

A retired James Bond (Daniel Craig) is lured back to saving the world against another crazy terrorist with another weapon of mass destruction. Hmm, other than Bond being retired now isn't that the plot in every other James Bond film? Anyway, there is some nice eye candy, mandatory chase sequences and some OK action sequences which Bond has less of a part in.

Does that sound super "Ho hum" to you? Because that's exactly what it is. There are no really memorable scenes save the very start and maybe the very end and it suffers from numerous scenes that could have been shortened or cut out but more importantly suffers from weak story telling, especially the "quest hook" segment of it. Not recommended.