Of course these movies mean something to me. Back when I was still rating them with stars, I tossed 'em out like candy, and I've talked at great length about which ones helped me along my healing process. I have to finish this decade-plus of narrative, and my entire body of film criticism, with the assertion that I'm not made of freakin' stone--but all I can take from my reaction is the knowledge that Evans' Captain America means a lot…

I didn't mean for the last few months to feel like a farewell tour--it's just nice to recognize the symmetry, you know? The silly, number-23 notion that everything circles back around to this film; and its sequel/second half, the too-perfect title upon which to cap off a career. Heck, I didn't even tell you about the circumstances that led me to politely mention my problems with Infinity War to Mark Ruffalo. (He asked, and was very indulgent.) Back then, I…

An Iranian filmmaker, long ago displaced by war, somehow gets his hands on a flag-jerking slimeball of a Hollywood movie; his sequel begins with an American drone blowing the hell out of a Pakistani wedding. Olympus has been reconstructed, and the lesson was to take the moniker as literally as possible, to chuck thunderbolts from on high. It's a curious, and nauseating, and natural extension of Olympus Has Fallen and its weird genericisms. Benjamin Asher is no longer an anonymous…